I’ve also been there. That “brown coal” is LOADED with sulphur, which creates terrible acid rain along with everything else. I saw in one East German city how the acid had eaten all the carving detail off the cathedral there.
But the oh-so-smart Germans would rather shut down their far, far cleaner nuclear plants.
The only concern the envirowackos have is with carbon “release”, and so-called brown coal has the highest. Sulfur emission can be controlled far easier.
The shutdown of nuke plants happened under Merkel; she and her government fearmongered over what happened to the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan despite the low likelihood of such a thing occurring in Germany.
German (West German tech) coal plants have the scrubbers and etc that US coal plants do, and that East German (commie, 1920s tech) coal plants didn’t.
Your observations are of historical relevance only.