_We are headed down into the coal mine, sixteen of us huddled tight in the cage. The walls of the mine shaft peek through diamond-shaped holes in a metal grate. We zoom past steel wall supports, pipes, and electrical wires. Wind blasts around us. The cage shakes and rattles.

Halfway down we stop at a landing. A coal miner in a blue shirt and white helmet speaks to us from outside the door. Coal dust is smeared across his face. “Welcome,” he says. “How’s it going?” He pours snuff tobacco onto his hand and snorts it. “Glad you’re here,” he says. “Have fun. Glückauf.”

The German phrase has no clean translation. It’s a miner’s greeting, something between “good luck” and “be safe.”

After another minute descending, the cage clangs to a halt. The door slides open. A web of tunnels spans out in front of us.

Despite what my senses tell me, I’m only a few feet underground. That’s because it’s not a real coal mine. I have come to the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum, or the German Mining Museum, in Bochum. The cage, called a “pit descent simulator,” didn’t descend at all. The scenes were projected onto screens. The rattling played through speakers. Fans blew the wind.

It’s the safest way to experience history in Germany’s Rust Belt, a region in the northwest called “the Ruhr” after the river it follows. Schools bring their students here. Tourists come from across central Europe. Upstairs, in the museum, you visit the prehistoric swamps where coal formed. You track the development of machinery from the pickaxe to the continuous miner. You learn how coal declined in the 1960s, and how the Ruhr region suffered but emerged successfully on the other side. That’s the agreed-upon narrative at least.

I traveled to the Ruhr with a research grant in the fall of 2024. I had just finished graduate school and moved from the coast of North Carolina into an uncertain world. I tracked election polls from the other side of the Atlantic. Rising inflation topped headlines. Wars raged in Gaza and Ukraine, and Hurricane Helene devastated the southeastern U.S. I was concerned about my future and the future of my home region: Kentucky, the Appalachian foothills where I grew up.

The Ruhr’s last coal mine closed in 2018. When I was in Germany, Alliance Resource Partners, the eastern U.S.’s largest coal producer, announced it was closing its Kentucky operations. More than 75,000 Kentuckians—75% of some counties’ male populations—were once employed in the industry. Today it’s less than 4,000. The prophecy arrives slowly. I went to Germany to see the future.

_Located about forty miles north of Cologne, the Ruhr is a flat, lowland area known prior to industrialization as fertile farmland. The arrival of the steam engine in the nineteenth century allowed industrialists to mine the rich coal seams that lay nearly half a mile under the Ruhr's surface. Cities grew rapidly and simultaneously as immigrants from Polish-speaking regions of Prussia filled the need for workers in the coal and steel industries; after World War II, guest workers from Turkey, Greece, and Italy arrived. The contemporary Ruhr is a sprawling, continuously urban area and Germany’s most culturally diverse region, home to five million people. Riding a train between cities, borders are hardly distinguishable. In the Ruhr, you’re never coming or going; you’re simply in.

Appalachia, in contrast, is a vast geographic region that follows the Appalachian Mountain chain across thirteen states, though most of the coal economy was in central Appalachian states like West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. The region is a collection of isolated, rural towns developed in the hollers or valleys between mountain peaks, though it includes some urban regions like Pittsburgh.

Appalachian coal was the primary fuel for the U.S. economy from the 1800s until the 1970s. Employment peaked during World War I when 700,000 miners produced coal that was used in ammunition factories, for railroads, and to heat homes. Another link between industry and war fueled coal’s dominance in the Ruhr: Mine employment topped 600,000 when guest workers fueled West Germany’s economic recovery after World War II.

In both places, market demands precipitated coal’s demise. Because of the depth of the Ruhr’s coal seams, coal became cheaper to import than to mine during the energy crisis of the 1960s and ’70s. More than thirty thousand miners marched on the West German capital of Bonn in August 1959 to protest the government’s failure to solve the coal crisis. Ruhr mining companies consolidated into one holding company in 1969.

Mechanization first took coal jobs from Appalachia, then it was competition from coal states out west. By 2011 natural gas had become so cheap that it replaced coal as a top energy source, and regulations against carbon emissions have made mining more difficult and costly. Although the 2010s saw pushback against the perception of President Obama’s “war on coal,” the fight for coal has lost both hope and political power. At a 2016 campaign stop in West Virginia, Donald Trump donned a miner’s helmet and promised “we’re going to have clean coal and we’re going to have plenty of it.” He made no such promises in 2024.

(On April 8, 2025, while this story was being prepared for publication, Trump signed a series of executive orders reportedly intended to bolster the coal industry. At the time of this writing, both the short- and long-term impacts of these policies are not yet known; considering market trends across many years and administrations, it remains unlikely that coal will return to its economic and cultural dominance in central Appalachia.)

_When I make an appointment to visit the montan.dok, the German Mining Museum's archives and collections unit, I receive a detailed map. The archive is currently housed in a temporary space in an industrial part of Bochum. Cross a parking lot, the instructions say. Go behind a large warehouse. You'll think you're in the wrong spot, but you aren't.

Dr. Stefan Moitra, a historian and researcher who works at the archive, makes me coffee, then sits at his desk and asks what I’m looking for. It’s difficult to explain that I’m not looking for any one thing. I want to understand how history gets preserved in regions like this, what even makes up an archive of industrial memory.

We walk together to a nearby building where he unlocks an unassuming door on the third floor. Inside is a large room filled with shelves, cabinets, and drawers. There are thousands of books. And busts—every owner and board member of a coal company commissioned a bust of themselves. Dr. Moitra shows me photos, blueprints, maps and architectural models, paintings, and old mining equipment. Tapes and discs hold hundreds of hours of oral histories. If there is one place in the Ruhr where memory is most tangible, it’s here.

Moitra speaks of “history from below,” or preserving narratives of regular people and not just powerful leaders. He shows me a gray and blue boxing glove. Women activists from the Ruhr had sent the glove to a different group of women from Aachen. The Aachen women had chained themselves in front of the Federal Ministry of Economics in 1989 while protesting mine closures; the glove was a gift of solidarity.

“It was a symbol of resistance,” Moitra says. “Women were just as affected by the threat of mine closures as their husbands.”

Coal is a ghost in the Ruhr today. It looms over the landscape in a constellation of abandoned headframes, blast furnaces, and smokestacks. The grassy hills that cover the otherwise flat landscape are, in fact, slag heaps of industrial waste. In the more than fifty industrial history museums and the region’s prominent tourism campaigns, coal is a memory, but sometimes a myth. At times cultural memory foregrounds the pride of coal more than the labor struggles; the importance of economic development more than pollution or disease. Coal lingers in the German language too: "Kumpel," a word that miners once used to refer to their peers, now means friend. "Kohle" once meant coal, but now it's just money. In some Ruhr areas, the miner's greeting "Glückauf" now substitutes for hello.

Despite the complicated legacies of heavy industry, structural change is largely seen as a success in the Ruhr. Thanks in part to strong trade unions and in response to mass demonstrations, the German government developed a plan in the 1960s for phasing out coal. The coowed miners to transfer mines when one closed. Eventually they were offered early-retirement packages that were supported by the state, or they were retrained in new industries. Coal companies paid into funds that subsidized employers who hired out-of-work miners.

Money from this fund also pays what the Germans call "Ewigkeitskosten," or, literally, "the costs of eternity." The Ruhr is sinking. Hundreds of years of mining left cavernous tunnels into which the land is caving. In some places, the water table has been reversed. Rivers have no way out. A large-scale water-pumping system keeps the land above water.

Even as mines closed, industries that had developed in conjunction with coal, like steel and chemicals, continued to operate. Steel is still an active, though dwindling, industry in the Ruhr, and chemical companies founded to process coal byproducts now make polymers and sealants used in textiles, cookware, and furniture. Logistics and transportation are also major industries. DHL, Deutsche Bahn Schenker, and Amazon transport goods on the same railways and roads built to move coal. The Ruhr is home to over two hundred museums and twenty-two colleges and universities that serve as hubs for research and development; these are some of the region’s top employers.

In contrast to Germany, there is no comprehensive plan for transitioning Appalachia’s economy. While coal and coal-adjacent industries developed in parallel in the Ruhr, coal was a monoeconomy in central Appalachia, subject to the booms and busts of heavy industry. As in the Ruhr, industrial architecture is a specter that lingers over Appalachia. Driving through a coal town in eastern Kentucky or West Virginia, you pass under the conveyers that transported coal into now-abandoned tipples where it was sorted, washed, and loaded. Old company stores, washhouses, and rail stations emboss memory into the landscape. It’s easy to get lost among a holler town’s repeated structures; uniform coal company houses form a grid near where mines used to be.

The land of Appalachia will forever bear the costs of a century of extraction, our own Ewigkeitskosten. In addition to the gutted caverns, there are also enduring ramifications from surface mining, particularly in the form of mountaintop removal, a process by which valleys are filled with the earth that lies above the coal: mountains displaced, land flattened. Sites reclaimed by mining companies contain fragments of their once wonderous beauty. Education, healthcare, and access to clean foods lag behind other parts of the country. On the Human Development Index, many Appalachian communities are on par with developing countries. The pain of grueling labor combined with little opportunity, plus exploitive pharmaceutical companies and doctors, made Appalachia one of the places hardest hit by the opioid crisis. Many flattened mountaintops now house prisons and drug rehab facilities, a new industrial complex taking root.

_Two months into my stay in Germany, I return to the German Mining Museum for an event called "Meet a Miner." Eight former coal miners linger at stations around the demonstration mine, showing how the equipment works and answering questions.

A coal mine, even a fake one, is a disorienting place. It’s like a spaceship or a deep well, a totally manufactured environment. I hunch over to squeeze through the tight tunnels, following the rail line deeper into the mine. Four thousand miles away from home, I have come closer to my grandfather’s experiences in the mines of eastern Kentucky than ever before. 

Paul Schenkel wears his blue mining shirt and white helmet and stands next to the cutting machine he operated for twenty-nine years.

Tourists—mostly families with young children—stand in front of Schenkel and ask him questions: How did you get that machine down here? How does it work? Did women work in the mines?

“These kids can’t imagine this,” one father says, hands on his son’s shoulders. “Not in their digital worlds.”

_Schenkel started working in a coal mine in 1980. His last day was in March 2009.

“That was a happy day actually,” Schenkel says. “My job was important, but I was fed up with the stress and the hustle and fear.” Schenkel says there are better jobs than mining now, but other miners at the event disagree. They still define themselves by the industry. Now they put on their uniforms just once a month and come here to be the bearers of history.

When Paul Schenkel escorts me out of the mine, he reaches up to ring the bell that signals a rail car is coming through. “One last time,” he says, smiling wide as he pulls the string. The loud ping echoes through the tunnels.

If the Ruhr has prophecies for Appalachia, these are the legacies to heed: Organized labor played a significant role in a just economic transition, and the robust German social safety net picked up the miners and families who fell through. Unlike in the U.S., bankruptcy didn’t exempt coal companies from responsibilities to their workers, land, or communities. The Ruhr found ways to reuse coal infrastructure, in their case for logistics, and Germany invested hundreds of millions of dollars in both historical preservation and economic development. These two pursuits—cementing the past and ushering in the future—have been smartly interwoven.

Even still, the Ruhr bears warnings for Appalachia. Certain Ruhr cities, particularly those in the working-class areas in the north, are still some of Germany’s most economically depressed places. Culture has attempted to fill the gaps in identity that coal’s disappearance left behind, but the perceived dignity of coal mining hardly compares to sorting shipping crates or packages. Even the architectural transformations in the Ruhr are revealing. To this day, the symbol of the region is the headframe, the towering steel structure used to lift and lower miners and equipment.

Appalachia deserves a diverse economy resistant to the booms and busts of extraction. Eric Dixon, a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, points to environmental restoration as a central part of Appalachia’s economic future. “Reforesting wrecked landscapes and cleaning toxic streams create construction jobs that are accessible without a college degree and can’t be outsourced,” Dixon says. “A restoration economy—cleaning up not just abandoned mines but coal ash, orphaned gas wells, and other damaged lands and waterways—is already taking off, helped by a $16 billion investment in the bipartisan infrastructure law.” The region’s rivers, mountains, and forests provide a vibrant backdrop for ecotourism, and restored mine sites are great candidates for large-scale solar projects, supporting even more construction jobs.

Broadband access must continue to be expanded in the region to make technology a viable area for growth. The machinery industry connected to coal might lay the groundwork for other technology-intensive sectors, and many Appalachian states have created incentive programs to draw employers and remote workers to the region. A few prominent Appalachian tech projects have failed in recent years, unfortunately. Kentucky-based agricultural startup AppHarvest raised $800 million from funders like Martha Stewart and J. D. Vance for its hydroponic greenhouses, but amid operational inefficiencies and legal disputes, the company declared bankruptcy in 2023. Virgin Hyperloop planned to bring thousands of jobs to West Virginia by building a certification center for high-speed transportation, but they terminated the project in December 2023 due to financial challenges and lack of contracts. Still, investors are interested—if only sound planning and management followed.

Appalachia should be a testing ground for policies focused on the working class, hosted in vocational-training and entrepreneurial centers, universities, colleges, and research spaces. As seen in the Ruhr, a successful economic transition will need to address not just unemployment and new business, but also infrastructure, research, education, and quality of life. Residents of coal communities worldwide once defined themselves by their resources and the grueling labor that transformed those resources into fuel—fuel that wrote their countries’ histories. The most pressing question for these regions is: What’s next?

_The central irony of my stay in the Ruhr: I went to see the future, but I spent most of my time focused on the past. I visited museums and archives, slag heaps and repurposed industrial spaces, interested in how historical narratives were assembled and what roles those stories played in creating the future.

Coal is ancient. It formed when carbon-rich plant and animal matter from prehistoric swamps was buried and compacted. Burning coal means releasing carbon—carbon stored deep in the earth for millennia—back into the atmosphere. My travels got me thinking about history and cycles, how something old transforms into something new and the consequences of that transformation. These are the Ewigkeitskosten: the burdens of the past, the costs of eternity.

My time in the Ruhr led me to believe that new sources of pride might lie buried even deeper in the past. There was, after all, a history before coal, and there will be history after. The Ruhr’s two anchor cities—Duisburg in the west and Dortmund in the east—were part of the Hanseatic League, the thirteenth-century mercantile and defense alliance that laid the foundations for Europe. Today’s Duisburg is the final stop on the New Silk Road, a central hub for trains from China.

Similarly, Appalachia has long been defined by the flow of people and goods. The region’s vibrant outputs—folk and bluegrass music, handcrafts, mountain dancing, storytelling, superstitions, and more—resulted from the blending of people and cultures in the mountains. Indigenous peoples like the Cherokee and Shawnee were the first to call Appalachia home. Scots-Irish settlers traded the mountains of the British Highlands for the Appalachians in the eighteenth century, and enslaved Africans were brought to work the land. As much as Appalachia is known for coal, it should be known too for its hard work and resilience.

Moving through the Ruhr, I often felt I was seeing Kentucky. The reflection was bent—the land flatter, sky longer, its accents round in different ways. The image refracts and repeats across the globe, in places like Shanxi, China; Jharia, India; Mpumalanga, South Africa. Buried in the rhetoric of leaving behind coal is another message: leave behind coal communities. To look closely at the treatment of fossil fuel regions is to confront each nation’s soul, to reckon with the ways its people and lands have been exploited for their resources, underserved, neglected, then forgotten. But just as the pasts of these places are inseparable from our countries’ histories, our futures are too.

_The Ruhr’s last coal mine, Prosper-Haniel in the city of Bottrop, closed on December 21, 2018. Today, a tall industrial slag heap stands beside the mine. On a sunny afternoon in November, just days before I fly back to the U.S., I hike to the top on the heels of mountain bikers. The trail is marked with the fourteen Stations of the Cross that Jesus walked on the way to his crucifixion. Each station contains an artifact from industrial history: Station 1, marked “Pilate condemns Christ’s death,” features a giant steel bucket used to raise coal; Station 11, “Jesus nailed to the cross,” has a wooden tower used to hold up the coal tunnel.

The stations were built in 1987 when Pope John Paul II visited. Decision-makers in economics and politics “must not simply accept unemployment or place their trust in the market mechanism alone. They bear particular responsibility for forward-looking solutions,” he said to the thousands of miners and steelworkers threatened by unemployment who had gathered that day.

On top of the slag heap are an amphitheater and an art installation, a semicircle of painted poles made from rail splits. Beside me, a boy and his father unfurl a kite. Looking out across the Ruhr, its flat landscape, I see everything: abandoned smokestacks, green fields, wind turbines. I recognize distant slag heaps, ones topped with other artwork and structures. And there, just below me, is Prosper-Haniel, the mine where hundreds of years of industrial history came to a close.

Everything about a coal mine suggests motion: the spinning wheels of the turbines, the chains that pulled and hoisted, the conveyers on which coal moved, the rail lines receding into the distance. Here, above Prosper-Haniel, everything is still. Or perhaps it’s energy at rest, waiting.

This story appears in the Summer 2025 print edition as “The Costs of Eternity.” Order the Y’all Street Issue here.