Student Projects

Student projects

Audio walk “New Landscape Ronneburg” – Searching for traces in a transformed landscape

(?André Karvath,?Ronneburg - Schmirchauer H?he, wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.5)

Landscapes tell stories – sometimes openly visible, sometimes hidden beneath their surface. The “New Landscape Ronneburg” in eastern Thuringia is a place where the past, present, and future overlap in an impressive way. Today, the area presents itself as a gently rolling green space with viewpoints, walking trails, and a babbling brook. But this seemingly idyllic place was once a center of uranium mining in the GDR – marked by deep craters, spoil heaps, and radioactive contamination.
With the audio walk “New Landscape Ronneburg,” which was created in the summer semester of 2024 as part of the seminar "‘Blossoming Landscapes’ and ‘Radiant Heritage’: Remembering Uranium Mining" at the University of Regensburg under the direction of Prof. Dr. Juliane Tomann and Dr. Grit Ruhland, we invite you to explore this past. The project was realized with financial support from the Center for Remembrance Culture and is now freely accessible at: ronneburg.dilewe.de.
"The expansive green space before you has an eventful history. The residents of Ronneburg know it well – but it may come as a surprise to visitors. For a long time, this area was anything but green: it was once the site of a huge open-cast mine. However, it was not coal that was mined here, but radioactive uranium ore." This is how the story begins on the website, which is continued in eight audio stations at various locations in the landscape.
The audio walk opens up a variety of perspectives on the new landscape – with voices from former miners, environmental activists, residents, and experts. The contributions tell of losses and new beginnings, of vanished villages and lasting health consequences, but also of tourist development, visions for the future, and the aesthetic redesign of the landscape. It becomes clear that even though the traces of mining are now partly overgrown, the past has not disappeared – it lives on in memories, stories, and symbolic markings in the terrain.
The project invites you to take a closer look and listen more closely – while also offering a reflection on how landscape change and collective memory are intertwined. It addresses forms of conscious remembering and selective forgetting, as well as the role of non-human actors in the culture of remembrance. In this way, the audio walk contributes to the question of how societies deal with places whose history is toxic, contradictory, or uncomfortable—and how new forms of remembrance and inheritance emerge from this.

Blooming Landscapes and Radiant Heritage? Development of an Audio Walk on the Former Uranium Mining Site Ronneburg (Thuringia)

Impressions from the first excursion with students to Ronneburg in May 2024. We explored various forms of the post-mining landscape of uranium ore mining - from the aestheticized and meticulously composed "New Landscape" in Ronneburg to the unmarked old dump "Stolzenberg," where the Geiger counter registered high radiation levels. Additionally, the students visited the exhibitions of two mining associations that preserve the heritage of uranium ore mining from the perspective of Wismut SDAG. The motto of the panel discussion we attended at the beginning of the excursion in Gera guided our thoughts throughout the days of the excursion: "What Remains of Wismut."

? Juliane Tomann