The nesting grounds of rare migrating birds with the telling name “Kampflaufer” (fight runners) are the focal point of mounting tensions within the community of Unterleuten in Juli Zeh's novel of the same title (2016). The old and new inhabitants of the village contend with the plan to build wind turbines that would, presumably, impact the birds and lower property values for some inhabitants but allow others to make a considerable profit. Valeska Grisebach's film Western (2017) contrasts scenes of construction sites with shots of pristine, wild landscapes as a team of German contractors begin work on an EU-funded hydroelectric power station in rural Bulgaria, close to the Greek border. Tensions erupt as the German men interact with locals and as their construction project stalls. In Anna Sofie Hartmann's film Giraffe (2019), Dara, an ethnologist, explores the ways in which the preparations for a tunnel project between Germany and Denmark displace people and change the rural landscapes. Dara becomes preoccupied with diaries she finds as she explores an overgrown garden and an abandoned house marked for demolition, and has a brief romantic relationship with a much younger Polish migrant worker.

In their depictions of preparations for large-scale infrastructure projects, all three works confront specific social and historical tensions. In Unterleuten, the legacies of divided Germany, socialism, and collectivist, state-run farming operations haunt the village. Western addresses the legacies of Nazism and German militarism in the rural border zones it depicts. Giraffe shows tensions within the EU, both between urban and rural areas and between richer and poorer EU countries. None of the three works is about environmental activism, specifically or exclusively; none of the three is dystopian or utopian, yet all three works depict plans to take over land and alter landscapes in the name of profit and progress. They show the failures of and challenges for infrastructure projects in multi-layered, fictional, documentary-style narratives.