There's a Buzz in Wanlo. In this 1,000-strong village in the heart of the Rhineland, it sounds like a major city. The small place is never truly quiet. Not even at night. But the hum here doesn't come from trains or cars; it comes from a gigantic coal excavator eating away the ground east of Wanlo.
Elli no longer hears the roar anymore, she has to concentrate to notice it. "The pit is about 500 meters from here," says the 32-year-old. Elli speaks Rhineland dialect. She has whitish-blonde hair, wears a green hoodie, and cuddles a golden-brown hen held in her arms. She grew up in Wanlo.
"The Pit" is what Elli calls the Garzweiler opencast lignite mine, which covers 3,000 hectares making it one of the largest surface mines in Germany. In its center, six bucket-wheel excavators extract up to 880,000 cubic meters of coal daily. That's more than the world's largest container ship can transport at once.
"Wanlo was supposed to be mined out too. But that was prevented very early on because people fought back," says Elli. She is an anarchist. She lives in a communal arrangement with two friends, Ramu and Samu. They all want to remain anonymous and be referred to by their nicknames and first names only in the newspaper. The three met in Lützerath, formerly occupied by activists. After the eviction in spring 2023, they moved onto Elli's property in Wanlo and founded their own anarchist community there.
"Gladbach's Last Corner" follows Elli, Samu & Ramu, three young people living in a small caravan park on the edge of the Garzweiler 2 opencast lignite mine. After the eviction of the long-occupied township Lützerath in January 2023, media interest in the region quickly faded. Later that same year, photographer Max Schlag and journalist Annika Reiß traveled to the Rhineland to tell the story of the three.