The Miners’ Lamp

“The first glass, the last light to the spirit of the mountain. Remember that.” (A traditional miners’ toast)

“Do you remember how hot it was? —and the stench!” Hans says, taking another sip of beer, “especially when you were stuck on the wrong end of the ventilation.” He laughs. “It was so dusty sometimes you could barely see a thing!” At the monthly get-together in the cafeteria of the former Reden mine—now transformed into an “Adventure Site”—the former miners sit crowded around the tables. They exchange stories about what life was like in the now-lost world underground: the heat, the rats, the pranks, the comradeship, the danger, and the accidents. They commemorate their comrades too, those who have since passed away.

Until the final closure of coal mines in the Saarland in 2012, these men worked in different pits—but for all of them, Reden was the beloved Muttergrube (mother mine). It has been closed for almost thirty years now. Hundreds of meters beneath us lie the abandoned, collapsed roadways and dark coal seams.

On the tables in front of us, alongside beer glasses and objects brought along from their mining days, stand old miners’ lamps, ceremonially lit for today’s occasion. More precisely: petrol safety lamps. I encounter these heavy lamps—made of iron, brass, and steel—everywhere mining is present: displayed in carefully arranged mining corners in their homes; ceremonially lit at club gatherings and commemorations of mining disasters; restored and polished in garages and basements; bought on eBay and exchanged at dedicated “miners’ lamp fairs.” They appear on banners and T-shirts, decorate ashtrays, beer glasses, and porcelain plates. On WhatsApp and Facebook, the lamps are a popular photo motif among former miners for Christmas greetings, commemorations, or death notices.

Introduced and further developed in the nineteenth century as a “safety lamp,” in which the flame was protected by a glass cylinder and brass mesh prevented sparks from escaping, the petrol safety lamp continued to be used underground well into the 1950s as a firedamp inspection lamp for “testing the air.” The shape and size of the flame could indicate the methane content of the air and warn of the danger of a firedamp explosion. Remarkably, such lamps were still carried in mines as a backup in the 1990s. Today, petrol safety lamps are strangely anachronistic objects from a darker and more dangerous era of mining—at once symbol, museum piece, memento, decoration, collector’s item, heirloom, everyday object, and grave light.

Udo, a former miner who gives guided tours at the former Reden mine, always wears—alongside his 1990s work clothes—the miner’s lamp his father used. “For now, we miners still carry the lamp through time,” he says, “but in ten or twenty years it will probably disappear and perhaps only be seen occasionally in museums. Then nobody will need it anymore. More and more lamps are being ‘released’ as miners pass away.” At home, Udo keeps the lamp next to the ashes of his dead dog—so that he, too, may have “his last light.” Perhaps today the lamp burns above all for the dead.

The miners’ lamp is an object of care for a past world that continues to endure. It is woven into a network of practices of preservation, collecting, maintenance, commemoration, and remembrance. For Jörg, who spends many hours restoring miners’ lamps in his garage, they point to danger, mining disasters, and the dead. It is important to him that the thousands of miners who lost their lives are not forgotten. “Miners,” he says, “are often portrayed as heroes, and in the process, the suffering they experienced is forgotten.” As a young miner, he narrowly survived a serious accident underground; his lungs were permanently damaged. Many former miners live with injuries or the long-term effects of dust and toxic substances. The mine is inscribed on and in their bodies.

At the same time, Jörg adds, the mining operation also took care of those who were left with lasting impairments. Often, they were assigned to the lamp room, like his friend Peter, who says: “I had a serious accident, but even so, the mine was always there for me!” In the lamp room, it was also monitored who had returned safely—and whose lamp was still missing.

What fascinates me about this object in the post-mining era of the Saarland is how the miners’ lamp draws together and sustains this ambivalence between care and injury, between protection and harm. The lamp points to the ambivalence of attachments to mining, to what it means to be bound to and through the mine—the ways in which “coal bound us together,” as one miner put it. A world bound to and by mining, forged underground, the miners’ lamp comes from this world and, in a sense, keeps it alive; but it also—and above all—shines for the dead.

The lamp, and other mining-related objects, are more than nostalgic symbols. With and through them, the former miner’s build and sustain a world. Following the cultural geographer Ben Anderson, these mining objects can “bring closer” something that comes to feel necessary to a way of life; they function as “promissory objects” to which people are bound or by which they are held—as trajectories “that tether us, knitting together elsewheres and elsewhens” (2023, 397). These promissory objects function, so to speak, as temporal operators. The miner’s lamp folds the past into the present—and the present into the past in particular ways; a past that calls for care, but also one that continues to leave lasting injuries and furrows in the present.

By Fiona Schrading, Goethe University Frankfurt.