Katharina Gerstenberger
Nuclear Narratives:
Representations of Atomic Disaster in the Works of German-speaking Artists from the 1950s to the 2020s
Nuclear disasters push against the limits of human understanding because of their scale, their unpredictable consequences, and the extraordinary time frames they involve. Theorists have developed terms and ways of thinking about massive events like atomic catastrophes, ranging from Ulrich Beck’s characterization of Chernobyl as an anthropological shock to Timothy Morton’s larger-than-life hyperobjects. Vital materialism, a concept put forward by political scientist Jane Bennett, makes a comparable argument when it attributes agency to material objects and phenomena like radiation. Going beyond the idea of atomic disaster as exception, some scholars have begun to capture the pervasive presence of things nuclear in everyday life; these include anthropologist Joseph Masco’s nuclear uncanny, literature scholar Gabriele Schwab’s nuclear subjectivities, or historian Gabrielle Hecht’s nuclearity. In different ways, these theories argue for fundamental shifts in how we conceive of the human position in relation to nonhuman entities.
Artists have responded to nuclear disaster and the challenges it poses to the human imagination with vocabularies of their own. In my talk, I look at works of art from German-speaking countries about nuclear catastrophe from different periods and with different aesthetics aimed at capturing the immensity of atomic events. The texts and films in question reference actual events from the nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll (1946-1958) to the 1986 Chernobyl reactor explosion and the 2011 triple catastrophe of Fukushima. The evolving linguistic and visual approaches to nuclear disaster cover the spectrum from finding words for boundary-transgressing events to creating imagery for human-caused alterations of the planet. In that, they echo the theoretical propositions that nuclear disaster calls for new ways of imagining the world.
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Katharina Gerstenberger is professor of German in the Department of World Languages & Cultures at the University of Utah. Her work is in contemporary German literature and culture, and in the Environmental Humanities. She is the author of Truth to Tell: German Women’s Autobiographies and Turn-of-the-Century Culture (2000) and Writing the New Berlin: The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature (2008). She co-edited three volumes and serves as editor of German Studies Review. She is completing a monograph on nuclear narratives.