The Chernobyl Case As Seen By German, Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian Authors and the Crisis of the Modern Future

The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (then part of the Soviet Union, now located in Belarus not far from the Belarusian-Ukrainian border) was a so-called super-nuclear-disaster and remains the most serious nuclear power accident in history to this day. This is not only due to the extent of the ecological catastrophe that resulted from the accident, but also because, as a historical catastrophic event, it represents an interface between (geo)politics and ecology. The accident occurred in the spring of 1984, just a few years before the collapse of the 'Soviet bloc' and thus on the threshold of the global geopolitical turning point, marking the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a new era in which politics, society, the fate of the individual and ecocide are no longer separate problems, but are very closely intertwined. At the same time, Chernobyl was a visible symbol of the bankruptcy of one of the greatest future projects of modernity, the communist state. In my lecture, I will use literary and essayistic texts by Christa Wolf, Oxana Zabuzhko, Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich and Michał Gołkowski (the texts were written between 1986 and 2014) to analyse how the various authors from Central Eastern Europe narratively grasp this political-ecological crisis of the modern future and how it affects their image of society.