The Cloud: The dystopian book that changed Germany (2022)

The Cloud: The dystopian book that changed Germany

For many Germans, The Cloud remains the ultimate "catastrophe book". But did it empower generations of children or leave them traumatised for life, asks Sophie Hardach.

It was an ordinary day in 1986, in what was then West Germany, and I was playing in the garden with one of my brothers. We didn't mind the light rain. I probably wouldn't even remember that afternoon, if it hadn't been for the news that broke the next day: "Apparently, there has been a serious nuclear accident in the Soviet Union," a worried-looking presenter announced on the evening news.

Slowly, more details trickled out. The accident had happened two days before, at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. Clouds had carried radioactive rain over to Germany, and children were told not to play outside. For us, and many of our friends, the warning came too late: we'd already been in that rain, just like the rain-splashed lettuce and mushrooms we were now told not to eat. Diggers arrived to remove the damp, contaminated sand from playgrounds. In our local grocery shop, people walked along the shelves with printed lists in their hands, showing the radioactivity levels of different foods, to check which ones were safe to eat. Many of us could barely grasp the concept of radioactivity. A childhood friend of mine recalls asking her dad some days after the disaster: "Papa, is there still this TV-activity?"

Around that time, a then relatively little-known German writer and teacher called Gudrun Pausewang was watching the unfolding events with horror. Her son was away on a hiking trip, and when he called her, she yelled down the phone: "Don't sit down on the grass! It's contaminated!" Pausewang had recently published a children's book about nuclear war, and considered atomic energy an existential threat. Now her fear of a disaster had come true, and she could see the impact even in her little hometown of Schlitz. "The children weren't allowed to play in sandboxes anymore, they couldn't eat fresh vegetables anymore, or mushrooms," she later recalled. She pictured what it would be like if it had occurred even closer, at Grafenrheinfeld, her nearest local nuclear plant. "I thought: what if this kind of catastrophe happened right in the centre of Germany? I had to warn people."

Four weeks later, she began to write a story about a fictional nuclear accident, and a girl's struggle to survive the aftermath. She titled it Die Wolke ("The Cloud", published in English as Fall-Out).

The Cloud went on to sell more than a million copies, and defined an entire era. To many West Germans – especially the so-called "Generation Pausewang" who read it as children and teens – it is as emblematic of the 1980s as stonewashed jeans, Nena and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Schools have been named after Pausewang, environmental organisations have showered her with prizes for spreading anti-nuclear awareness, and Germany's Green Party has celebrated her work with screenings of a film version of The Cloud. After the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, the book shot back into German bestseller lists. The fact that she used real-life locations in the story – Schlitz, and the Grafenrheinfeld reactor – added to its visceral impact. But Pausewang's ultra-bleak, unflinching style also drew criticism. "She brought the apocalypse into children's bedrooms," wrote a critic for Die Welt after the author's death in 2020. She "gave thousands of schoolchildren nightmares," claimed another. To this day, critics argue over whether she empowered children – or traumatised them for life.

Era defining

"The Cloud was incredibly timely, because it was written right after Chernobyl. And it coincided with that entire discussion around the risks and danger of nuclear power, but also, in the late 80s, the end of the Cold War, disarmament, and reconciliation," says Cornelia Rémi, a German literature scholar and one of the jurors who awarded Pausewang the German Youth Literature Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.

The Cloud begins with an ordinary school day. Fourteen-year-old Janna-Berta is looking out of the window, admiring the cherry blossoms. She leads an idyllic life in Schlitz with her parents and her little brother Uli. Her sweet, caring grandmother, Oma Berta, spoils her with homemade waffles. Suddenly, the sound of a siren disrupts the lesson, the school is evacuated, someone cries: "Grafenrheinfeld! Alarm in Grafenrheinfeld!" No one seems to know what's going on; the adults run for their lives, the children are left to their own devices. "They keep talking about some sort of cloud," Janna-Berta's brother says, listening to the radio. "And that cloud – it's toxic."

The siblings escape the town on their bikes, and the narrative begins to veer between chaotic scenes of societal collapse, and flashbacks to Germany's past. Pausewang wrote almost 100 books, not all of them bleak. But her name is mostly associated with so-called "Katastrophenbücher", "catastrophe books", novels for children and teens that explore every imaginable social, environmental and political cataclysm.

While typically seizing on real-life, external threats or dangers, Pausewang's books ultimately reflect her lifelong reckoning with her own conscience. Born in 1928, Pausewang was, in her own words, a "fervent National-Socialist" as a teenager. Her opposition to nuclear power was, in her view, a way of learning from past wrongs. As she put it in an essay explaining why she wrote The Cloud: "I don't want my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to ask me: 'Why didn't you prevent it?'"