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Coal, and even more so, brown coal or lignite, is currently under-researched in the energy humanities. Lignite still provides approximately 25% of “green” Germany’s energy; its extraction obliterates human settlements and vibrant ecosystems, and its incineration produces more CO2 than any other fossil fuel, contributing massively to climate change. After discussing German mining history, the genres of the energy narrative, the bioregional novel, and ecopoetry, and earlier literary treatments of lignite mining, I analyze recent lignite novels by Anja Wedershoven, Andreas Apelt, Bernhard Sinkel, and Ingrid Bachér, and ecopoems by Max Czollek and Marion Poschmann. I discuss socioenvironmental issues such as “slow violence” and “environmental injustice” enacted upon rural communities that are being resettled in “sacrifice zones” for national energy needs; political–economic entanglements, and activism against this complete devastation of the naturalcultural landscape; differences in representation in narrative and lyrical texts; and how the authors frame local perceptions of the mining operations and the resulting “moonscape” within the larger temporal and spatial scales of the Anthropocene. I argue that these literary texts prefigure where the Earth may be headed in the Anthropocene, and that Germany’s lignite extractivism can be considered a trope for the Anthropocene.

The Past Erased, the Future Stolen: Lignite Extractivism as Germany’s Trope for the Anthropocene