The Worst Enemy

“The miners’ worst enemy is water,” says the tour guide. He uses the word “is,” but there are no miners around currently. Mining isn’t just a job, it’s an identity. The miners’ spirit is around and stays around. We say “Glück auf!” instead of “Hallo.”

Before this field trip, I never really thought about underground mines. About extraction, resource scarcity, environmental degradation? Absolutely. Underground mines in particular? Not really. Now, suddenly, I feel part of the culture, even if just for a few hours. “You are all miners now,” is what they say as soon as we make it out of the shaft, after what felt like half a lifetime in the chilling depths of the mountain.

While we are walking through the mine in Bad Schlema, there is water on the floor, causing my shoes to be covered in mud. I step carefully. I don’t have a flashlight, and the darkness prevents me from seeing the condition of the path. Trusting the person in front of me, I follow their steps. The ceiling is sweating little drops of water which slowly make their way down the walls. It’s colder than I expected. The light T-shirt and the purple rain jacket I’m wearing struggle against the chill the shaft breathes our way. A drop of water decides to leave its position on the ceiling and lands on my cheek. Its touch is cold. In that moment, water is an inconvenience.

My relationship with water became ambiguous in the shaft, at least for a while. Once we make it back to the bus, I realize I’m quite thirsty, and with thirst comes forgiveness.

The tour guide talks about the mining history of Bad Schlema. According to him, mining has been around in this area for approximately 800 years. Coal, tin, copper, iron, silver, cobalt, uranium. Maybe lithium in the future. We have always found something in the earth that could be of use. Nature as a friend. Someone we think we can rely on.

He goes into depth on the uranium history of Bad Schlema. In 1918, Bad Schlema—back then just Schlema—was known for its spa hotel offering radon bath treatments. The bath had the highest radon concentration in the world, he says proudly. What sounds like a curiosity today was once marketed as healing, part of a global fascination with radiation before its dangers were fully understood. Later, during the Cold War, uranium from Bad Schlema became a key resource for the Soviet Union’s nuclear program. I’m not sure I would believe in the healing nature of a radon bath. While some people might classify this kind of water as helpful, I’d probably see it as a threat. Our tour guide will give in and use the bath for the first time this year, to ease the pain in his joints. Maybe in the future, with different circumstances, I will change my opinion.

A day prior to the mining experience in Bad Schlema, I was happy to see water. Under the glistening sun, I dipped my feet into the lake at Großräschen. There was some concern in the back of my mind, since the water had only recently opened to the public. I saw red foam accumulating at the edges of the lake, but it seemed fine. People were swimming, children were laughing. The water looked beautiful. It was clear. There were no algae or other water plants in sight. The absence of nature in the water relieved me; it felt nice to move through the cooling water against one’s skin without the disturbance of plants, but it shouldn’t be a relief. Plants are crucial to the ecosystem. Their absence is not comfort, but warning. Further down the beach, we found an area forbidden to visitors, reserved just for nature. I observed the sign that was supposed to keep people out, but it was covered in stickers. There were more people in the no-people zone than on the beach that had been artificially created just for them.

At the beginning of the field trip, I wasn’t sure how the topic “Ghost Mines” related to me. I’m interested in the environment, in the governance of nature, in resource extraction. But in the end, what stuck with me most was our ambivalent relationship with nature. We use it, we fear it, we live with it, we love it, we need it. Maybe this complexity has always been with us and will always remain. Perhaps we are now building the next layer of complexity on top of the ones we’ve never resolved.