On the northern shore of Knappensee lies the village of Maukendorf, witness to a long-forgotten cultural landscape. The bed of the Altes Schwarzwasser flows along beside mighty trees and gives the village, which is now home to 450 inhabitants, an idyllic character. Not far from Maukendorf begin the fields and meadows of the Sorbian Catholic town of Wittichenau. Founded in the middle ages by the Lords of Kamenz, it has a connection to the Cistercian monastery St. Marienstern in Panschwitz-Kuckau, which is still active today.
Maukendorf was incorporated into the town of Wittichenau in 1994.
Knappensee itself was created through spontaneous flooding from 1951 to 1953. It is the first Lusatian lake created from an opencast mine. In 1932, the Sorbian village of Bukojna/Buchwalde, first mentioned in 1401, was destroyed in order to make way for the development of the opencast mine Werminghoff I. Farms were abandoned, 350 inhabitants resettled. Many became miners and workers. They moved to the newly formed workers’ village of the briquette factory Werminghoff, named after the president of Eintracht AG, Joseph Werminghoff (1848 - 1914). In Koblenz (Lohsa) a memorial commemorates the village.
From 1917 to 1945, about 59 million metric tons of coal were extracted from the open-cast mine and refined in the nearby briquette factory Werminghoff. This exciting history of industrialisation, of the town of Knappenrode/Werminghoff, the factory and the people, from the founding to decommissioning of the plant in 1993, is told by the Saxon Industrial Museum, the Energiefabrik Knappenrode. The museum, which is open all year round, is an anchor point on the European Route of Industrial Heritage and a site of the Lusatian Energy Route.
Knappensee covers 1.1 square miles (2.8 km2), 406 football fields. It is characterised by wide white sandy beaches, excellent water quality and an almost perfect infrastructure for tourism. Located right at the gates of Hoyerswerda, until it was closed for remediation in 2014, it was, for decades, the beloved “bathtub” and a nearby holiday paradise for many generations. After the rehabilitation, Knappensee should regain its original significance.