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Coming to Terms with the Nuclear Past: Transnational Paranoia and Chernobyl in Recent German Cinema

2011; Routledge; Volume: 86; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00168890.2011.541751

1930-6962

Jaimey Fisher,

Media Studies and Communication

Representations of the Chernobyl disaster, and its cultural and political resonance, became symptomatic of what the essay analyzes as a transnational imaginary in German cinema around the year 2000. While much has been written (as in the work of Randall Halle, Deniz Göktürk, and Barbara Mennel) about post-1989 transnational cinema, environmentalism and environmental catastrophe is one aspect of the transnational that has been largely neglected. Focusing on Hans-Christian Schmid's 23, the essay suggests that the catastrophe of Chernobyl was a key moment in Germany's political consciousness and represented a transnational turn in the usually national discourse of coming to terms with the past. Schmid's 23 and films like England and Am Tag als Bobby Ewing Starb demonstrate how the Cheronbyl disaster stood in for the trauma and subsequent paranoia (which the essay analyzes in a psychoanalytic framework) of Cold-War politics.