They will come. Everyone who wants to defend the occupied village of Lützerath from the coal excavators of the energy company RWE knows that. It is not clear when the police will arrive to clear the area. And because that’s the case, things are a bit strange here – relaxed but busy: A man in a pink balaclava carries a crate of beer and spirits from the car into a house. A street further on, two masked men are heating up the asphalt of the former highway 277 with a gas burner and are hammering holes in the ground with a pickaxe.
There will be blockades here on day X when the clearing of the place that RWE wants to excavate for lignite begins. Mara grins a bit embarrassed when asked about the holes in the ground: “We don’t want to make it too easy for them to get in here,” says the activist. Last autumn she came to Lützerath. Since then she has lived in this “place of resistance”, which has become the new big symbol of the climate movement. Twenty-five-year-old Mara doesn’t want to say where she originally comes from. The only thing that really matters is how long she’s been here. Something stops with Lützerath. And something starts.