5 - Rereading Christa Wolf's Störfall following the 2011 Fukushima Catastrophe

Summary

CHRISTA WOLF's Störfall: Nachrichten eines Tages (1987; Accident: A Day's News, 1989), written between June and September 1986 and published in 1987, relates a day in the life of an unnamed female narrator as she struggles simultaneously to comprehend the enormity of a nuclear disaster and to pass the hours as her brother undergoes surgery for a brain tumor. Penned shortly after the catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred on April 26, 1986, at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, this narrative pits public debates about technological advancement against the private concerns that citizens had about the safety of newly emerging technologies. The narrator herself embodies the juxtaposition of public versus private as she ponders how to behave, even what to discuss with others, as she goes about her daily routine in the wake of uncertainty about the dangers of the nuclear fallout. The text confronts the intrusion of nature, science, and technology into everyday life on a private level in the form of her brother's medical treatment and on a public level in the form of media broadcasts and announcements about the status of air, water, and soil contamination after the accident. There is a clear link between the narrator and Wolf, though the text begins with a disclaimer to the contrary: “Keiner der Figuren dieses Textes ist mit einer lebenden Person identisch. Sie sind alle von mir erfunden” (Störfall, n.p.; None of the characters in this book is identical with a living person. They have all been invented by me, Accident, n.p.). In a letter dated December 19, 1986, Wolf declared: “Dieses Jahr gab es Tschernobyl. Ich war zu der Zeit allein in unserem neuen mecklenburgischen Bauernhaus, am gleichen Tag, als die ersten Nachrichten eintrafen, mußte sich mein Bruder einer Gehirnoperation unterziehen. Ich habe diesen Tag beschrieben, Du wirst es wahrscheinlich im April lesen können, der Text heißt Störfall.” (This year, Chernobyl happened. At the time, I was alone in our new farmhouse in Mecklenburg; on the same day as the first news reports came in, my brother had to undergo a brain operation. I described this day. You will probably be able to read it in April. The text is called Accident.)