70 years of “Landschaft in Not” (“Landscape in distress”): Appeals against the destruction of our cultural heritage in the Rhenish lignite mining area

Abstract

Today, the Rhenish lignite mining area could be the historically and archaeologically best explored region in the world. One would only have had to follow the then state conservator Walter Bader and other authors, who already in 1953 laid out everything necessary for this in the memorandum “Landschaft in Not” (“Landscape in distress”). Instead, we are now looking at a landscape without history, much of whose cultural heritage has been and continues to be destroyed without documentation. Yet the initiator RWE Power AG, named Rheinbraun AG until 2000, has more than sufficient financial resources to carry out extensive excavations and gapless documentation in the run-up to the opencast mine. Nevertheless, in 1995 the company received a carte blanche to destroy the cultural heritage largely without documentation. It is based solely on a contract that was concluded with the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). Wolfgang Clement, one of the two signing SPD ministers, sat on the supervisory board of Rheinbraun AG until 1992 and on that of the successor company RWE Power AG again from 2006 onwards. The toleration of the contract by the responsible politicians, the state administration and the institutions for preservation of historical monuments, also has an aftertaste. Particularly because, as a rule, every other company in Germany has to contribute to the excavation and documentation costs in the run-up to its own construction measures. At the latest after the amendment of the NRW Monument Protection Act in 2013, which stipulated a cost sharing of the initiator, a dissolution of the contract should have been discussed. So far, only a few people have attempted this publicly. Those known to the author are quoted in this article.