As the GDR’s main source of energy, brown coal was of paramount importance until the state’s very last days. The GDR’s dependence on brown coal began when the Soviet Union cut deliveries of oil at the end of the seventies and then gradually raised prices. The exploitation of seams of brown coal through strip mining wrought massive changes on the landscape in mining regions: entire villages disappeared, and rivers and railway lines were redirected. Here, one sees the aftereffects of strip mining: the lunar landscape left behind in Eythra, near Leipzig, in the state of Saxony (April 1986).