V a t t e n f a l l - Sweden´s other face

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If Vattenfall continues to support its German subsidiary LAUBAG's mining of brown coal and simultaneous destruction of Sorb villages in Eastern Germany, then this is a sad continuation of the policy of the GDR regime, namely the systematic annihilation of Sorb culture.
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The Sorbs are a people that have lived for 1500 years in the area around the cities of Bautzen and Cottbus. In Sorb they are know as Budyšyn and Chošebuz. There were Sorbs here before the Germans, and they have survived attempts at Germanization as well as National Socialist oppression.
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Hitler did in fact persecute the Sorb educated class, but otherwise avoided the Sorb question by designating the Sorbs as "Sorb-speaking Germans". For it was difficult to portray the hard-working, orderly, in part wealthy and respected Sorb farmers to the German population as a kind of "Untermensch".
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The GDR dictatorship sabotaged bilingual Sorb schools and forced children to attend German schools. What Hitler didn't do and Ulbricht didn't complete, Vattenfall is now apparently trying to carry through..
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There are at least 40 000 Sorbs. But, as with every ethnic group, where many members are bilingual and affiliation to a particular language is not officially registered, numbers can be variously calculated. There are, in any case, more than double the number of Saami in Sweden, an ethnic minority whose rights are protected.
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The Sorbs speak their own language, which is related to Polish, Czech and Slovakian. To be more precise, there is Upper Sorb (the area around Bautzen) and Lower Sorb (the area around Cottbus). One could compare the Sorbs with another lingual minority, the Swedish-speaking Finns on the west coast of Finland (Österbotten Province). Both have in common a vibrant cultural life with choral music, theatre and literature.
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Characteristic for the Sorbs is that their language and culture thrive in villages. When a village is destroyed and the inhabitants move into towns, the village community is also wiped out. And new villages cannot be created. The Sorbs move into towns and a part of Sorb culture is lost forever – a culture that, despite its vitality, is very sensitive to such influences.
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I visited the Sorb areas around the time of German reunification, and wrote about them in the "Namn och Nytt" [Names and News] column in Dagens Nyheter. These huge areas, where brown coal is strip-mined, are hell on earth - gigantic dipper dredges and lifeless, sterile moon landscapes. Perhaps brown-coal strip-mining sites can be so recultivated, that in a hundred years they will regain the character of an old, shady and idyllic landscape with green pastures, on which red deer graze. But Sorb rural culture can never be recreated.
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Even in the economically highly-effective USA, road-building is halted and power plants not built, when the existence of small animal species is threatened. Here, a civilized and – in the truest sense of the word – unique culture in Eastern Germany is threatened by brown-coal strip-mining. When a culture and a language die out, humanity is poorer. Does Vattenfall – and also in the broadest sense the Swedish parliament, which controls state concerns – really want to contribute to this annihilation, of which not even Hitler and Ulbricht proved incapable.
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*Dagens Nyheter/Staffan Skott
Translated by Michael Gromm
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*Dagens Nyheter: Sweden's most respected conservative daily newspaper