Germany’s climate change frontline

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The beautiful Hambacher Forest is disappearing. Over the past four decades, it has been slowly devoured by a voracious coalmine in the German Rhineland. The forest has become a powerful symbol of climate change resistance. Protesters have been staging a last stand to protect the trees. But they have arrived too late to prevent the demolition of two villages that also stand in the way of the mine’s relentless progress.

Manheim has become a ghost village. Most of the 1600 residents have now moved out. Many of the houses have already been pulled down. But a few people still live there against a backdrop of diggers pulling their village apart. Some are sad that the kart track where local boy Michael Schumacher learned to drive is likely to fall victim to the excavators. And many felt threatened last year by the protesters, in hoodies and face masks, when they moved into to occupy empty houses.

Yet the protesters seem to have the German government on their side. It recently commissioned a report, which recommended Germany stop burning coal by 2038 in order to meet emissions targets. That’s a problem for RWE, the company that owns the mine and nearby power stations. It’s going to keep digging for as long as it can. Tim Mansel joins the protesters for their monthly gathering on the forest edge; meets the villagers who simply want a quiet life, away from the front line; and asks RWE if it will ever stop mining.

(Photo: Protesters defending the Hambacher Forest. Credit: Tim Mansel/BBC)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This was your house.
0:04.0	your house?
0:05.0	Yes, the old one.
0:08.0	There's not much to see.
0:09.0	No.
0:10.0	A little bit broken now. You're listening to assignment on the BBC World Service.
0:16.0	I'm Tim Manzel and I'm in Germany not far from the Dutch border
0:21.0	in a small village called Mannheim or what's left of it.
0:25.0	Basically there's a wire fence running along the edge of the road and behind it simply a large pile of rubble and Claudia,
0:37.0	Marco, this is where your house stood.
0:41.0	Yes, it was the living room here and behind we had our
0:45.6	yeah wonderful garden and now you see what's left here some trees and that's all.
0:51.6	Well there's a pile of rocks, a few tree stumps, a little bit of
0:57.6	undergrowth and a rather lonely looking pine tree I think in the background. Yeah yeah. The house was pulled
1:06.8	down a few weeks ago at the end of April. Marco who's 50 as an IT engineer he was at work when it was being demolished, but Claudia,
1:16.3	who was a couple of years younger and works in a travel agency, came to watch.
1:21.2	There were moments. there were tears falling because it was very emotional in that moment because you hear it. You can hear the sound of, yeah, how to explain.
1:32.0	The cracking off of the wood from the roof and of the concrete.
1:37.0	Watching the video Claudia took, it was very emotional.
1:41.0	It was emotional and there were some tears. It's a bit like a funeral. Right.
1:49.0	Within the next couple of years the diggers will have destroyed everything. The houses, the shops, the church, the whole
1:57.6	village, a village that once had a population of 1600 is literally going to disappear from the face of the earth.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.