Sometimes the fish kill is far away. Namely, when Henry Schneider does not think about it. But at some point it comes up again, in a conversation or because a journalist asks, as now. Schneider says it's actually smart to think seriously about whether it is still acceptable for him to continue running the family business. Only: "Thinking about it is stressful," he says. "And the closer it gets, the more emotional it is." Schneider doesn't know what's in store for him. He only knows that the fish kill can happen again.
Kim Maurus
Volunteer.
- Follow I follow
The 43-year-old is a fisherman on the Oder, he leads his fishing in the fifth generation of the family. When he talks about "it" getting closer, he means the interplay that largely wiped out life in the Oder over 500 kilometers last summer. A gigantic poisonous algal bloom in early August is estimated to kill about 50 percent of all fish and 80 percent of all mussels in the river. Residents and helpers collected several hundred tons of carcasses over days.
The Oder was unlucky at the time. Prymnesium parvum is a brackish water algae and not native to rivers. Wind must have carried the microalgae from the Baltic Sea into the Oder. Normally, such an alga does not survive if it does not end up in the sea. But in the Oder the conditions were excellent: The river had low water due to the heat, it was dammed, upstream in Poland there are many barrages. And there was salt in the river. Far too much salt from discharges from Polish industry.
The fishermen have banned themselves from fishing
About seven months have passed since then. Actually, a good time to ask: How are the people who live from the river doing now? But people like Schneider do not think about the catastrophe in the past tense. It is a threatening future for them. Rather, you have to ask them: How do they prepare for this? And why do they have to do that at all, since the interaction has been clarified?
"We never thought something like this would happen. I would rather have thought that the Oder would dry up," says Schneider. Its fishery is located in Brieskow-Finkenheerd, a few kilometers south of Frankfurt (Oder) on Lake Brieskow, which flows into the Oder. If it hadn't been for the fish death, Schneider would now be out on the water. But the fishermen have hardly gone out since then. "The bad thing is, you can't do anything," he explains. "If my car breaks down, I go to a garage and they fix it, quite simply. There's nothing I can do about this. This is where politics comes in." Schneider likes to compare the river with property, and that is fitting, because according to independent fishing rights he is allowed to fish on 175 kilometers of the Oder – at least up to the german-Polish border in the middle of the river; for fishermen, this invisible passage is sacred.