Europe’s last utopia
A dream in Falunrot: mining in Kiruna, Sweden
Source: picture alliance/dpa/Scanpix Sweden/epa
Extensive deposits of rare earths have been discovered in northern Sweden. Now Europe is dreaming of becoming independent from China when it comes to the raw materials for digital technologies. A romantic from East Prussia told a similar story 204 years ago.
EA young sailor named Elis Fröbom turns to mining. He had sailed around the world from Gothenburg for the East India Company. Fröbom made good money from global trade. Back home in Sweden, however, he is overwhelmed by the grief for his family – the father took the sea, the brothers stayed in the war, his mother died of grief – and the longing for his own soil.
While still in port, an old miner clears his doubts. “Down into the horrible depths of hell and like the mole digging and digging for ores and metals, for the sake of despicable profit?” asks Fröbom. And the old man grumbles: “Disgraceful profit! As if all the cruel torment on the surface of the earth, such as that brought about by trade, were nobler than the work of the miner, whose science, whose undying industry nature opens up to her secret treasuries.”
In his 1819 story The Mines at Falun, ETA Hoffmann celebrates ore mining in the province of Dalarna. The Swedish mines fueled the industrial revolution with raw materials and fascinated the romantics in Germany. Novalis, Tieck and Hofmannsthal also rave about copper veins, iron traps and the minerals of Falun in a fairytale-like underworld. They get drunk on such beautiful words as pyrosmalite and almandine. Hoffmann describes the hero as “Neriker”, as a withdrawn, thoughtful, melancholy Scandinavian.
The technical terms, Kuxe, Frälse and Teufe, sound as exquisite as the so-called rare earths, which are said to be stored in Kiruna in northern Sweden and which everyone is talking about: elements such as ytterbium and thulium, holmium, terbium and erbium, which are their home already carry in the name. Without such rare earths, devices like smartphones would not exist. They are still mainly promoted in China, where the world market is controlled by the shipping companies in Europe, just as the whole of Asia was in Elis Fröbom’s time.
German Gothic: ETA Hoffmann in fabulating
Quelle: picture-alliance / Mary Evans Picture Library
In Hoffmann’s story, dystopia becomes utopia. “Not a tree, not a blade of grass sprouted in the bare crumbling cleft of stone. In the abyss stones, cinders, burnt-out ore lie in wild confusion, and an eternally numbing vapor of sulfur rises from the depths, as if the broth of hell were being boiled below, the vapors of which poison all the green pleasures of nature. One would think that Dante descended here and saw the inferno with all its bleak torment, with all its terror.”
Fröbom sees the miners rising like fiends, like black earthworms. But then he falls in love with her most beautiful daughter. He slips away on the wedding day to come in and get her a rare blood-red gem. Then, says Elis Fröbom, everything will be fine on earth. “It is only necessary that I haul this stone up to the surface, and that is what I intend to do now.”