Papers by Astrid Kirchhof
Technikgeschichte 88, 2021, Heft 4, S. 391-398, 2021
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Sabine Mödersheim/Scott Moranda/Eli Rubin, Ecologies of Socialism, (Berlin: Peter Lang), 2019
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Eric Bussière/Anahita Grisoni/Hélène Miard/Christian Wenkel (Hg.), The Environment and European Public Sphere: Perception, Actors, Policies, (Winwick, Peterborough: White Horse Press), 2020
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Patrick Kupper/Anna-Katharina Wöbse (Hg.), Protecting the Environment, Contemporary European History Series, (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter), 2021
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Martin Sabrow, Tilmann Siebeneicher, Peter U. Weiß (Hg.), „1989 – Eine Epochenzäsur?“, (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag), 2021
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Simone M. Müller/May-Brith Ohman Nielsen (Hg.), Hazardous Time-Scapes. How to Study Toxicity and Pollution from Multiple Timed, Spaced, and Embodied Perspectives, Ecology and History Series, (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press), 2022
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Timothy Moss (Hg.), “Ecologies of the Technopolis: Contested Environments and Infrastructures of Berlin, 1871-2020”, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), 2022
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Giacomo Bonan and Katia Occhi (Hg.), Environment and infrastructures form the early modern period to the present: challenges, knowledge, and innovations, (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter), 2022
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Deutsches Bergbau Museum (Hg.), Bergbaufolgelandschaften im deutsch-deutschen Vergleich, (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter), 2022
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Technikgeschichte, 2021
This paper discusses the increasing role of nuclear history in public history, the reasons for th... more This paper discusses the increasing role of nuclear history in public history, the reasons for this development, the challenges and changes this involves.
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Studies 4. Pathways into and out of Nuclear Power in Western Europe Pathways into and out of Nuclear Power in Western Europe. Austria, Denmark, Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, and Sweden, 2020
Following the United States’ launch of the Atoms for Peace program in the 1950s, nuclear power ap... more Following the United States’ launch of the Atoms for Peace program in the 1950s, nuclear power appeared to be the modern solution to humankind’s energy problems. West European democracies like Austria, Denmark, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, and Sweden developed plans to supply nuclear energy nationwide. Early protests started in 1954 after atomic testing in the Pacific and were directed against military use of nuclear power and atomic weapons. Later protests shifted the focus to civilian use of atomic power like nuclear energy supply. Although in the course of the 1970s trust in this technology began to fade in many European countries, including the five states presented in this book, each of them dealt with this challenge in a different way. This volume identifies commonalities and differences in the nuclear pathways of the five European countries and points out the crucial impact of democratic traditions and national histories for a European continent urgently trying to find its common identity.
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Pathways into and out of Nuclear Power in Western Europe. Austria, Denmark, Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, and Sweden, 2020
Nuclear energy is intertwined with developments in social, economic, environ- mental, political, ... more Nuclear energy is intertwined with developments in social, economic, environ- mental, political, and cultural spheres. Therefore, it is a complex social and tech- nological phenomenon that influences societies but is also shaped by societies as can be explored in this chapter about the history of the relations between nuclear energy and society in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany).
In the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, when the United States had launched the Atoms for Peace program and the first nuclear power plant went on- line in Germany, nuclear power seemed to be a modern solution to humankind’s energy problems. Just over a year after the Federal Government had adopted the Atomic Energy Act in 1959 on the peaceful utilization of atomic energy and the protection against its hazards, the first nuclear power plant went online at the border of Hesse and Bavaria. With it, nuclear power in West Germany started as an industrial business. In the 1960s a phase of development and planning followed that was hardly noticed by the public. The first commercial nuclear reactor went on the grid in 1961, but it took many government incentives to convince energy companies to switch to nuclear power completely. The planning and building of nuclear power plants, radioactive waste disposal facilities, or reprocessing plants in the federal states of Baden-Württemberg (Wyhl), Schleswig-Holstein (Brokdorf), Lower Saxony (Gorleben), North Rhine-Westphalia (Kalkar), and Bavaria (Wackers- dorf) provoked massive and recurring protests throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The protests against the construction of the plant in Wyhl (Kaiserstuhl) on the French border in Germany’s southwest gave power to the nascent environmental movement when – in 1975 – 30,000 people demonstrated, occupying the site and developing protest structures.
Where nuclear sites were close to two or sometimes three different countries – for instance this was the case in protests against nuclear plants in Wyhl, people of diverse nationalities usually had similar interests. Furthermore, since the travel distances were rather minimal, it was easier to join and support local protests. Through activists, but also experts, politicians, organizations, and the media there was an exchange of knowledge and ideas. Women were often at the forefront among critical citizens and since the 1970s they had raised their voices louder than ever. Especially the Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe in April 1986 led to an upswing of intensified debates in Germany and also gave rise to the Mothers against Chernobyl movement. As a result, a Ministry for the Environment was founded at the federal level and citizens’ initiatives – many initiated and run by women – sprang up in high numbers. In 1998, the red-green coalition agreement
decided to phase out nuclear energy within 20 years. Two years later, the Federal Government and electric supply companies signed an agreement about the future operation of German nuclear power plants. After a tsunami and partial meltdown at the Japanese nuclear power plant Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, the topic received renewed attention with continued protests. Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the shutdown of all German power plants by 2022 with eight of the 17 operating German reactors shut down immediately. Until March 2011, these 17 reactors produced 25 percent of the country’s electricity. In 2016, the remaining eight reactors produced 16 percent, while half of Germany’s electricity was generated from coal.
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Journal for the History of Environment and Society, 2019
This article examines the porosity of national borders using the examples of two nuclear faciliti... more This article examines the porosity of national borders using the examples of two nuclear facilities at Gorleben and Morsleben located at the West German municipality in the state of Lower Saxony as well as the former Börde district of Saxony-Anhalt (former East Germany). Gorleben and Morsleben became known for their final nuclear waste repositories located directly at the German-German border.
Debates and protests surrounding the facilities began in the 1970s and continued after the wall came down. Since opponents had to deal with two different political systems, protests differed in their duration, effect, and methods, even though the border as such was not the problem since West Germans were allowed into the GDR.
Transboundary relations were much rather limited by the dictatorial regime on the one side, by the absence of anti-nuclear groups in the GDR until the mid-1980s, and by sufficient coalition partners for West German activists in their own country.
Since the disclosure of environmental data by the East German government and the Chernobyl accident a few years later, transboundary relations increased and activists interconnected in many ways. With their protest they indicated that even if the border was a fact, concerns of people in both states transcended it and that borderlands are often characterized by relationality and entanglement.
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Papers by Astrid Kirchhof
In the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, when the United States had launched the Atoms for Peace program and the first nuclear power plant went on- line in Germany, nuclear power seemed to be a modern solution to humankind’s energy problems. Just over a year after the Federal Government had adopted the Atomic Energy Act in 1959 on the peaceful utilization of atomic energy and the protection against its hazards, the first nuclear power plant went online at the border of Hesse and Bavaria. With it, nuclear power in West Germany started as an industrial business. In the 1960s a phase of development and planning followed that was hardly noticed by the public. The first commercial nuclear reactor went on the grid in 1961, but it took many government incentives to convince energy companies to switch to nuclear power completely. The planning and building of nuclear power plants, radioactive waste disposal facilities, or reprocessing plants in the federal states of Baden-Württemberg (Wyhl), Schleswig-Holstein (Brokdorf), Lower Saxony (Gorleben), North Rhine-Westphalia (Kalkar), and Bavaria (Wackers- dorf) provoked massive and recurring protests throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The protests against the construction of the plant in Wyhl (Kaiserstuhl) on the French border in Germany’s southwest gave power to the nascent environmental movement when – in 1975 – 30,000 people demonstrated, occupying the site and developing protest structures.
Where nuclear sites were close to two or sometimes three different countries – for instance this was the case in protests against nuclear plants in Wyhl, people of diverse nationalities usually had similar interests. Furthermore, since the travel distances were rather minimal, it was easier to join and support local protests. Through activists, but also experts, politicians, organizations, and the media there was an exchange of knowledge and ideas. Women were often at the forefront among critical citizens and since the 1970s they had raised their voices louder than ever. Especially the Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe in April 1986 led to an upswing of intensified debates in Germany and also gave rise to the Mothers against Chernobyl movement. As a result, a Ministry for the Environment was founded at the federal level and citizens’ initiatives – many initiated and run by women – sprang up in high numbers. In 1998, the red-green coalition agreement
decided to phase out nuclear energy within 20 years. Two years later, the Federal Government and electric supply companies signed an agreement about the future operation of German nuclear power plants. After a tsunami and partial meltdown at the Japanese nuclear power plant Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, the topic received renewed attention with continued protests. Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the shutdown of all German power plants by 2022 with eight of the 17 operating German reactors shut down immediately. Until March 2011, these 17 reactors produced 25 percent of the country’s electricity. In 2016, the remaining eight reactors produced 16 percent, while half of Germany’s electricity was generated from coal.
Debates and protests surrounding the facilities began in the 1970s and continued after the wall came down. Since opponents had to deal with two different political systems, protests differed in their duration, effect, and methods, even though the border as such was not the problem since West Germans were allowed into the GDR.
Transboundary relations were much rather limited by the dictatorial regime on the one side, by the absence of anti-nuclear groups in the GDR until the mid-1980s, and by sufficient coalition partners for West German activists in their own country.
Since the disclosure of environmental data by the East German government and the Chernobyl accident a few years later, transboundary relations increased and activists interconnected in many ways. With their protest they indicated that even if the border was a fact, concerns of people in both states transcended it and that borderlands are often characterized by relationality and entanglement.
In the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, when the United States had launched the Atoms for Peace program and the first nuclear power plant went on- line in Germany, nuclear power seemed to be a modern solution to humankind’s energy problems. Just over a year after the Federal Government had adopted the Atomic Energy Act in 1959 on the peaceful utilization of atomic energy and the protection against its hazards, the first nuclear power plant went online at the border of Hesse and Bavaria. With it, nuclear power in West Germany started as an industrial business. In the 1960s a phase of development and planning followed that was hardly noticed by the public. The first commercial nuclear reactor went on the grid in 1961, but it took many government incentives to convince energy companies to switch to nuclear power completely. The planning and building of nuclear power plants, radioactive waste disposal facilities, or reprocessing plants in the federal states of Baden-Württemberg (Wyhl), Schleswig-Holstein (Brokdorf), Lower Saxony (Gorleben), North Rhine-Westphalia (Kalkar), and Bavaria (Wackers- dorf) provoked massive and recurring protests throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The protests against the construction of the plant in Wyhl (Kaiserstuhl) on the French border in Germany’s southwest gave power to the nascent environmental movement when – in 1975 – 30,000 people demonstrated, occupying the site and developing protest structures.
Where nuclear sites were close to two or sometimes three different countries – for instance this was the case in protests against nuclear plants in Wyhl, people of diverse nationalities usually had similar interests. Furthermore, since the travel distances were rather minimal, it was easier to join and support local protests. Through activists, but also experts, politicians, organizations, and the media there was an exchange of knowledge and ideas. Women were often at the forefront among critical citizens and since the 1970s they had raised their voices louder than ever. Especially the Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe in April 1986 led to an upswing of intensified debates in Germany and also gave rise to the Mothers against Chernobyl movement. As a result, a Ministry for the Environment was founded at the federal level and citizens’ initiatives – many initiated and run by women – sprang up in high numbers. In 1998, the red-green coalition agreement
decided to phase out nuclear energy within 20 years. Two years later, the Federal Government and electric supply companies signed an agreement about the future operation of German nuclear power plants. After a tsunami and partial meltdown at the Japanese nuclear power plant Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, the topic received renewed attention with continued protests. Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the shutdown of all German power plants by 2022 with eight of the 17 operating German reactors shut down immediately. Until March 2011, these 17 reactors produced 25 percent of the country’s electricity. In 2016, the remaining eight reactors produced 16 percent, while half of Germany’s electricity was generated from coal.
Debates and protests surrounding the facilities began in the 1970s and continued after the wall came down. Since opponents had to deal with two different political systems, protests differed in their duration, effect, and methods, even though the border as such was not the problem since West Germans were allowed into the GDR.
Transboundary relations were much rather limited by the dictatorial regime on the one side, by the absence of anti-nuclear groups in the GDR until the mid-1980s, and by sufficient coalition partners for West German activists in their own country.
Since the disclosure of environmental data by the East German government and the Chernobyl accident a few years later, transboundary relations increased and activists interconnected in many ways. With their protest they indicated that even if the border was a fact, concerns of people in both states transcended it and that borderlands are often characterized by relationality and entanglement.
German version: Am 1. Oktober 1894 nahmen die ersten evangelischen Bahnhofsmissionarinnen am Berliner Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse ihre Arbeit auf und leisteten Orientierungshilfe fuer die massenhaft Stellung suchenden Frauen, die in die deutsche Hauptstadt einwanderten. In die stadtische Offentlichkeit traten Frauen jedoch nicht nur durch ihr wohlfahrtspolitisches Wirken an den Berliner Fernbahnhofen, sondern auch durch ihr Engagement im Tragerverein der Bahnhofsmission, dem Verein zur Fuersorge fuer die weibliche Jugend, als auch im Dachverband der sich langsam entwickelnden Evangelischen Deutschen Bahnhofsmission.Damit gelang es ihnen, ueber viele Jahrzehnte auf verschiedene Weise und mit unterschiedlichem Einflusspotenzial offentliche Raume - wenn auch begrenzt - zu konstituieren und zu erhalten. Astrid Kirchhof zeigt, dass ein bis weit in das 20. Jahrhundert hinein wirkendes Konstrukt, das die Gesellschaft in eine vermeintlich klar getrennte private und offentliche Sphare trennt und Frauen sowie Manner je einem Bereich zuordnet, wenig tauglich ist, die sozialen Beziehungen zwischen den Geschlechtern und die historische Wirklichkeit von Frauen angemessen zu analysieren.
English version: On October 1st, 1894, the first Protestant train station missionaries took up their work at the Berlin Friedrichstrasse train station and provided guidance for the masses of job-seeking women who immigrated to the German capital. Women not only assisted the urban public at the Berlin train stations because of their welfare-political work, but also because of their commitment to the Association of Station Missions, the Association for the Care of the Female Youth, as well as the umbrella organization of the slowly evolving Protestant German Railway Station Mission. In this way, they succeeded over many decades, in different ways, and with different potential influences, to constitute and maintain public spaces. Astrid Kirchhof shows that a construct lasting well into the 20th Century that divides the society into supposedly clear private and public spheres and assigns women and men to specific roles is not adequate to analyze the social relations between the sexes and the historical reality of women.
This special issue is the outcome of the symposium “Going Green. The Emergence and Entanglements of The Green Movement in Australia, the USA, and Germany — 1970 to Present Day” held at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany, 2013. The contributors met for a couple of days in order to allow participants to discuss papers that they had prepared and distributed beforehand and then refined the form and structure of this issue together.
In the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, when the United States had launched the Atoms for Peace program and the first nuclear power plant went on- line in Germany, nuclear power seemed to be a modern solution to humankind’s energy problems. Just over a year after the Federal Government had adopted the Atomic Energy Act in 1959 on the peaceful utilization of atomic energy and the protection against its hazards, the first nuclear power plant went online at the border of Hesse and Bavaria. With it, nuclear power in West Germany started as an industrial business. In the 1960s a phase of development and planning followed that was hardly noticed by the public. The first commercial nuclear reactor went on the grid in 1961, but it took many government incentives to convince energy companies to switch to nuclear power completely. The planning and building of nuclear power plants, radioactive waste disposal facilities, or reprocessing plants in the federal states of Baden-Württemberg (Wyhl), Schleswig-Holstein (Brokdorf), Lower Saxony (Gorleben), North Rhine-Westphalia (Kalkar), and Bavaria (Wackers- dorf) provoked massive and recurring protests throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The protests against the construction of the plant in Wyhl (Kaiserstuhl) on the French border in Germany’s southwest gave power to the nascent environmental movement when – in 1975 – 30,000 people demonstrated, occupying the site and developing protest structures.
Where nuclear sites were close to two or sometimes three different countries – for instance this was the case in protests against nuclear plants in Wyhl, people of diverse nationalities usually had similar interests. Furthermore, since the travel distances were rather minimal, it was easier to join and support local protests. Through activists, but also experts, politicians, organizations, and the media there was an exchange of knowledge and ideas. Women were often at the forefront among critical citizens and since the 1970s they had raised their voices louder than
ever. Especially the Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe in April 1986 led to an upswing of intensified debates in Germany and also gave rise to the Mothers against Chernobyl movement. As a result, a Ministry for the Environment was founded at the federal level and citizens’ initiatives – many initiated and run by women – sprang up in high numbers. In 1998, the red-green coalition agreement decided to phase out nuclear energy within 20 years. Two years later, the Federal Government and electric supply companies signed an agreement about the future operation of German nuclear power plants. After a tsunami and partial meltdown at the Japanese nuclear power plant Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, the topic received renewed attention with continued protests. Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the shutdown of all German power plants by 2022 with eight of the 17 operating German reactors shut down immediately. Until March 2011, these 17 reactors produced 25 percent of the country’s electricity. In 2016, the remaining eight reactors produced 16 percent, while half of Germany’s electricity was generated from coal.
Donnerstag, 12.05.2016 Axel Zutz (Cottbus): Von den Mühen der Ebene in der Peripherie Brandenburgs: Protagonisten, Periodika und Praxis des Natur- und Heimatschutzes in der Niederlausitz zwischen 1900 und 1990
Donnerstag, 19.05.2016 Veronika Settele (Berlin): Die Produktion von Tieren. Landwirtschaftliche Tierhaltung in Deutschland, 1950 – 1980
Donnerstag, 09.06.2016 Alison Kraft (Birmingham): Radiological Dangers: From Unsafe Spaces to Environmental Hazard, 1900 - 1958
Donnerstag, 23.06.2016 Regine Auster (Potsdam): Umweltrecht in der DDR –
Zum Wirken von Ellenor Oehler
Donnerstag, 30.06.2016 Christina Gerhardt (Hawaii, USA):
A Rose is a Rose is a Rose: Natural History in Adorno's Negative Dialectics
Donnerstag, 14.07.2016 Santiago Gorostiza (Coimbra): Building a Fascist Wall: The Transformation of the Pyrenees during the Francoist Dictatorship in Spain (1939 – 1959)
Donnerstag, 21.07.2016 Anja Neumann (Frankfurt, Oder): Die Obstbausiedlung „Eden“ bei Oranienburg unter dem Einfluss völkischer Ideen (1893-1933)
Short Bio:
J.R. McNeill has held two Fulbright awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations as well as the Woodrow Wilson Center. His books include Something New Under the Sun (2000), winner of two prizes, listed by the London Times among the 10 best science books ever written (despite not being a science book), and translated into 9 languages; The Human Web (2003), translated into 7 languages; and Mosquito Empires (2010), which won the Beveridge Prize from the AHA and was listed by the Wall Street Journal among the best books in early American history. In 2010, he was awarded the Toynbee Prize for “academic and public contributions to humanity.”
Albert Presas I Puig (Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
HoNESt – Exploring the History of Nuclear Energy and Relations with Society in Europe
Societal perceptions of and political responses to nuclear power differ widely between European countries. Funded by Horizon 2020/Euratom, the collaborative research project HoNESt (History of Nuclear Energy and Society) sets out to explain variety and change in European societies’ relations with nuclear energy on the basis of the historical experience. Assembling an interdisciplinary team of 22 partner institutions in Europe, HoNESt embarks on the first comprehensive comparative and transnational analysis of nuclear developments and their relations with society in 20 countries during the past 60 years. Providing an innovative interdisciplinary framework, the project embraces the complexity of political, technological and economic dimensions, issues of safety, risk perception and communication, public engagement and media framing. It takes seriously the role and often contradictory perspectives of the actors involved – industry, policy makers, experts, civil society actors and the media –, as well as the rapidly changing contexts over the past 60 years.