How does resettlement work?

The opencast mining is eating its way through densely populated North Rhine-Westphalia on such a large scale that people inevitably have to make way for it.

Entire towns have been and are being excavated for opencast mining. Residents must have their houses and properties valued by an appraiser and then sell them to RWE. If they don't sell, they can be forcibly expropriated.

New places are being built for the resettlers. Often several old villages are combined into a new location and attached to an existing location.

Whether the residents accept the offer of relocation together or move somewhere else is up to them.

According to the brown coal plan Garzweiler II (basis for carrying out open-cast mining), a closed resettlement of the population in the old towns is desirable. It is said that the aim of those responsible in politics, business and administration is to ensure that as many residents as possible move to the new location. The following advantages are described in the lignite plan:

The resettlement rate has leveled off at 55% during the last resettlements. According to the lignite plan, a quota of between 80% and 50% is sufficient to “essentially preserve” community life in the new location. 

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Well I have to say: I haven't done anything with RWE yet. I didn't negotiate with them, didn't make a phone call, or anything, because the moment you just talked to them on the phone, you're included in these statistics as a person who negotiates.

So I'm definitely one of the twenty percent who haven't done anything yet. It is usually the case that RWE will write to you again and again until you have the appraisal done at some point. You can use the appraiser from RWE, where I always say it's always like that, or you can get your own appraiser. Then you have to pay it in advance and hope that you get the money back from RWE at some point. Then the appraiser comes and inspects the house. He counts every socket, every tile and so on; and accordingly it is calculated. I can't say exactly how this works.

So normally it is the case that you are really entitled to the appraiser's price. That's what it says in the contracts. You are entitled to what the house is worth, plus allowances and so on. But then of course it happens again: your own appraiser says one thing and the RWE appraiser says something different and then everyone haggles over every cent. And that's what makes you incredibly tired, because people lose their strength. This is actually a fight.

It's actually more of a cramp what's going on, and these are things that no one actually needs. And I always say, they want something from me. They want my house. They want my property. Then they should come to me. Then they shouldn't just write. Then they should come and ring my doorbell. I won't voluntarily go to them and say, here, I'll have an appraisal done here and then you can have my house. No. That's why I say clearly: "They want something from me. They should come."

I actually don't think I'll go to the new place. But I can't say it yet. There are still nine years until I have to leave here, if I have to leave at all. I can't decide now what will happen in nine years. I don't know what will happen in nine years. Whether I'm still with my husband, whether some of my children still live at home, whether I want to move somewhere else. It might as well be that in nine years I say I want to live in Gran Canaria. You don't know. And that's why I don't want to commit myself in any way.

All I can say is: I don't like the new place by any stretch of the imagination. At the new location there is the B57 at the front and the green waste disposal system at the back. I live in a village and there are farmers here and a lot of unpleasant smells, but the green waste disposal system behind this area - this smell is horror. Any smell of a farmer, of a slurry tank, is pleasant in comparison.

Thankfully, there is also the motorway and the train tracks behind it. So it can't be compared with the peace and quiet here in the village, even though tractors drive by and it's loud early in the morning. The peace and quiet we have here, in contrast to the new place, is heavenly. That's a huge difference and these are all reasons why I say: "I don't actually want to move to this new place."

It's really like being in a chicken cage. House after house after house, as planned on a drawing board. And it's urban area. There is no village life there anymore. There are no more farmers there, directly in the town itself, but these
were outsourced. There are huge expanses of fields between the towns and one place is really connected to the other and you basically fall from Berverath to Keyenberg and there are a whopping four and a half kilometers between Berverath and Keyenberg. And it's all far too narrow for me. This is not a mature village in the sense that it is here.

Berverath exists since 1377, it is a grown village. One house is older than the other. And everything is really consistent and new and - no, it's not mine. It's not mine at all.

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Alexander Tetzlaff lives in Keyenberg (old) and will have to leave his home in the coming years. The complete interview with Alexander Tetzlaff can be found on the website Keyenberg.

First of all, I've grown up so much and I see it as moving to two different places. Because Berverath, Ober- and Unterwestrich belong to Keyenberg, I express this very particularly because it is very important to me. These are individual locations, but they belong to Keyenberg. So we are talking about two places, namely Kuckum, Keyenberg connected with Ober- and Unterwestrich and Berverath as two village communities.

It's difficult to move to such a close place and then say that we're going to carry out our own program in parallel, which affects our village and local life. I also think we would be giving each other a run for our money. Of course, there are still, as usual, differences between the villages. You now hear when it comes to the reservation of land and the purchase of land, but in the area of ​​Neu-Kuckum there would be a top property, then you hear people say: "No, after Kuckum, I don't belong there." I would say that we have to work on it, we have to look towards a common future and not insist so much on our own local law. We have to take a common path. 

I don't see any other way for the brotherhoods than to say that we may remain two separate clubs because it is very difficult to bring them together, but we always alternately organize the shooting festival every two years. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense to celebrate three shooting festivals in such a small area within weeks - if you also take Borschemich into account. We're ripping each other off and wasting potential unnecessarily. That's how I see it.