20–28 JUNE 2026 · POTSDAM, GERMANY
Under the Heat Dome in Germany
First-person description of lived environmental extreme quality
By the evening of the third consecutive day above 30 °C, beginning on 20 June, the situation had already begun to take shape as a lived weather extreme. The sky above Potsdam appeared without visible cloud forms. It appeared cloudless, but not clear. The whole sky-field was covered by a monochrome, milky-grey veil. Blue was absent not only as colour, but as depth and openness. The sky did not open; it remained a veiled lid. Cloudless did not mean “blue beauty.” Sunlit no longer meant clear.
24 June
At 7:20 pm, the sun was still high enough above the horizon to dominate the sky with glaring, burning light. Opposite it, a more-than-half-lit moon was already visible near the middle of the sky. This simultaneity sharpened the observation: sun and moon appeared within the same bright, cloudless, yet milky-greyed monochrome sky-field. The unusual white brightness seemed to consume the outside. The atmosphere took on an aggressive quality: not the softness of an early summer evening, but a glare one did not want to open the window into. The experience reached the threshold of inhabitation. The window, which on an early summer evening in Germany would usually open the room toward air and outside life, had to remain closed. The outside no longer invited entry; it pressed against the room’s lived interior as heat and aggressive brightness. Spatial shelter became uncertain: the boundary still held, yet the outside visibly and bodily entered the inside.
Still, toward the glaring sun, anthropogenic traces remained visible: aircraft stripes crossed the sky and gradually dissolved into the same pale background. Once dissolved, only the diffuse veiling remained. The closed-off quality persisted.
Outside, nothing moved. The chestnut trees did not stir; their leaves hung exhausted, as if the crowns had lost their inner hold. Their exhaustion appeared continuous with the same field of heat and dryness in which the human body also stood.
25 June
The next morning did not break the atmospheric situation. Around 11 am, no clouds were visible. The sky continued as a monochrome, milky grey-blue sky-field, tending toward white. The sun had already regained its force, and doors and windows were closed again. The day did not begin with freshness; it continued in closure.
The body registered the night as part of the same atmospheric situation: slight cold-like signals after waking, a sore throat, headache — after a night spent trying to make sleep under the heat dome possible with a small fan and a hot-water bottle repurposed as a cold bottle. Cooling the room became its own exposure. The interior was no longer a secure opposite to the outside; it had become part of the same negotiation with heat.
By midday, a few white clouds appeared, scattered across the still milky background.
Inside, the air in the high, large rooms of the old stone building is thick and stuffy. Breathing is flattened and shortened with the air. Here, nothing invites deep breathing, as the memory of a fresh spring forest does, where one wants to draw the air deeply in. The skin sticks. It sticks to the desk.
Even the desire for hot coffee is gone.
The heat is stronger than addiction.
26 June
No notes. No thoughts. Lived emptiness, close to desperate exhaustion.
27 June
Early morning to midday: aircraft stripes entering, spreading, and dissolving across a milky sky.
On 27 June, a sky was visible that was already scored by human-made lines, with aircraft stripes present in different degrees of entry, spreading, and dissolution.
After more than a week of heat and dryness, the extreme environmental situation was no longer lived as external weather alone. The abstract and mediated concept of the climate crisis had become lived knowledge through the experiencing body: through breath, skin, room, vegetation, and sky.
On 27 June, this is written from within the situation: from more than a week of heat and dryness, from closed windows, shallow breath, sticky skin, exhausted vegetation, and a sky visibly scored by human-made lines. From here, the human-environment relation is not an abstract relation. It is a vital relation under pressure. It should make us more humble in assuming that it can be continuously impacted without existential consequence.
In the evening, lightning, thunder, and rain broke into the day — not as the forecasted storm expected for the following evening, but already there, ahead of prediction. Yet even the thunderstorm did not release the heat. The night remained hot, and the situation continued into the next day.
28 June
It is 3 pm, and the situation is still ongoing. For this evening, a thunderstorm is forecast, possibly marking the end of this heat period.
What has been documented up to this point is not observation from a distant perspective. It is direct experience from within the situation itself. It documents lived environmental quality as it unfolds with extreme and unprecedented environmental conditions. As such, it contains lived knowledge of the human-environment relation — knowledge that distance alone cannot provide …