Replacing the GDR: Chernobyl, Global Risk and East Germany’s Ecological Movement
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This chapter explores the global and local significance of the disaster of Chernobyl in the context of East Germany’s ecological movement in the late 1980s. Drawing on the theoretical work of Ulrich Beck (1992, 2009) and Ursula Heise (2008) on globalisation, risk society and environmentalism, I will investigate the effects of the deterritorialisation of the ecological risk of nuclear power, and its disruption of cold war notions of place and space in East Germany. As the accident at Chernobyl demonstrates, the inherent environmental risk in modern technologies frequently ignores traditional geographic, political, and cultural boundaries. This new, transterritorial risk demands an entirely new set of responses to the global environmental risk that stands in sharp contrast to ‘modes of spatial belonging’. I argue that these new parameters are exemplified by East Germany’s ecological movement’s strategic use of a specific production of knowledge that contests the country’s isolated Cold War status. Responding to the global threat of a nuclear catastrophe, the environmental movement challenges the GDR’s restrictive official discourses on environmentalism and nuclear power with the goal to foster a new awareness of the country and its environment in a transnational context. I focus on unpublished, archival print material of East Germany’s dissident ecological groups, e.g. the Umweltblätter and other anonymous publications. Unlike the official responses to the disaster, the dissident groups’ disregard for ideology and their critique of established ideological positions in East and West work to their advantage in dealing with a new global threat. Thus the movement represents an overlooked but significant force in the breakup of communist Eastern Europe.