It’s noisy in Lützerath. Hammer blows thunder through the protest village at the Garzweiler II opencast mine. With a sledgehammer and a pickaxe, a young activist works his way through a ten centimeter thick layer of road tar on Thursday afternoon. Wearing safety goggles and an orange bandana as a face mask, he kneels on the asphalt, with every blow flaking stone splinters hissing past his face. It’s his first hole, he says. But there are more craters around him. Later they want to put obstacles in the ground here, in the street that leads to the place of their resistance. Maybe the steel girder lying ten feet from the road. And just about anything else that could hinder the eviction. Take a look.

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