4 ideas
An investor needs village land to build wind turbines in Unterleuten, a Brandenburg village north of Berlin. Rudolf Gombrowski, who turned the GDR collective farm into a private agricultural company, and his lifelong communist rival Kron revive decades-old grievances over who owns what.
The novel tells the same events through a series of characters, and each one experiences their own actions as reasonable, defensive and morally justified while reading the others' actions as selfish or malicious. The conflict escalates because each person acts on an accurate inner logic and a wrong model of everyone else, not because anyone is simply bad. Switching perspectives shows that 'who started it' has no stable answer.
Where formal institutions are weak or distrusted, the village runs on an unwritten ledger of favors, obligations and old wrongs, kept by local patrons like Gombrowski. Newcomers assume that contracts, law and rational argument govern outcomes, and they miss that every transaction is also a move in this older account book. So their 'neutral' deals set off retaliation that looks irrational to them.
Green energy and species protection are presented as shared goods, but in the village they work mainly as leverage for private interests: land rents, property values, quiet, and revenge. Once a subsidy scheme or legal protection hands concrete advantage to whoever controls a parcel or a bird's nest, the high-minded cause becomes the vocabulary of a local power struggle. It also sharpens old divides between East and West and between insiders and outsiders.