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Fighting the forest fire in the Elbe-Elster district: The drought summer of 2022 not only destroyed nature, but also many dreams.
Photo:
Jan Woitas / picture alliance
A poster that is currently hanging in many places in Berlin shows a modern new house, floor-to-ceiling windows with a huge pool filled to the brim in front.
It is in the middle of the forest or on the edge of a forest.
The photo advertises a home building fair later this month and looks strangely out of place and out of date in the midst of the heat and drought summer of 2022.
Like a medieval castle or a baroque palace.
Can you still build as if nothing had happened?
It's not just the forests that have been burning for weeks and the rivers that are drying up, it's our dreams that are bursting into flames.
Ideas about life are slipping.
For example, the dream of a family home in the country that many have: less noise, more space for the garden, pool and children.
And around it, preferably, a fence, a hedge and a "dog-watch" sign.
The world with its annoyances should stay outside.
According to a representative survey by the mortgage lender Interhyp, 65 percent of Germans would prefer to live in a single-family house in 2021.
During the corona pandemic, many city dwellers fled to the countryside - home office made it possible.
Those who could not afford their own home looked for a piece of land for a dacha - and then on Sunday evening they were stuck in a return journey.
At the weekend only the poor, the very young and old, are in the structurally neglected city (which is also not prepared for the heat waves, but that would be another topic).
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The demands on housing and the space required for it have also increased: within 25 years, living space consumption per capita in West Germany rose from 38 square meters in 1995 to 48.4 square meters in 2021. In 1950, everyone in the old Federal Republic had an average of only 14 square meters available.
The Greens politician Anton Hofreiter said the obvious in an interview with SPIEGEL before the federal elections last year: that single-party houses use up a lot of space, a lot of energy, and a lot of building materials.
They also caused urban sprawl and more traffic.
Because in the village you usually need two, sometimes even three cars.
It's true that many communities on the outskirts have declared meadows and fields to be built areas for fear of population decline.
This resulted in so-called »donut villages«, as Anton Hofreiter calls them: »bulging on the outside, hollow on the inside, with settlements on the edge and a broken gas station as the sad remnant in the core«.
As a Berliner, you immediately have such villages in the suburbs of the capital in mind.
They are pure places to sleep, without established structures and without connections.
Hofreiter's statements have outraged many people, objections came from all parties.
It was possibly – shortly before the election, as I said – the wrong time.
But in principle he was right.
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End of the boom: real estate prices are falling in the big citiesBy Henning Jauernig
Major fires in Saxony and Brandenburg: Germany is becoming a forest fire countryA column by Sascha Lobo
In fact, we should start the debate all over again.
Because this summer with its extremes should mean a rude awakening for many.
The landscape, the nature that the city refugees are looking for has long been on the verge of disappearing.
Not just since this summer, but this summer has shown the changes with all clarity.
Instead of idyll, peace and retreat, there is heat, lack of drinking water and the risk of fire.
The home builders wanted a retreat from the unreasonable demands of the present and are now in the midst of a catastrophe.
Treuenbrietzen, Beelitz, Lieberose, Mühlberg, Bad Schandau.
These are the names of some of the places near which there was a fire this summer.
Several residents had to be evacuated, others live in fear of the flames.
The fear of possibly losing what they have built and saved is omnipresent.
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Now, one might find it cynical to talk about lifelong dreams while firefighters are still battling the flames in many places across this republic.
But one is connected to the other.
The ecosystems are out of balance and the fires are the extreme sign of that.
A wake-up call, a clear warning.
On the one hand there is the nature of the forests: What is burning in Brandenburg are pine forests, cultivated for rapid growth and for wood processing.
The taz wrote down how harmful this monoculture is because they suck the soil.
I planted pine trees myself when I was a student, that was part of our class, reforestation.
At the time we thought we were doing something good.
That too is a mistake.
Building accounts for 70 percent of surface sealing worldwide.
Over the past few years, building in Germany has been as if there were endless spaces.
As if you could devastate the landscape without affecting nature and the climate.
About 20 years ago, the then federal government decided to reduce land use to 30 hectares a day by 2030 and to reduce it to virtually zero by 2050.
But according to the Federal Ministry for the Environment, 54 hectares are still being designated as so-called settlement and traffic areas every day.
Not everything, but a large part of these areas will be paved or concreted over.
As a result, rainwater can seep away less and is missing from the groundwater supply.
The consequences are drought damage and the risk of flooding.
It was already known before this summer that single-family houses are landscape and space eaters, but now it is also clear that climate change has progressed so far that rural life no longer meets our expectations.
In other words: we destroyed our own dream.
