Antizipationen vergangener Katastrophen

Abstract

This paper focuses on the political nature of dystopian literature and children’s literature. It proceeds by comparing the aesthetics as well as the narrative and spatial strategies of dystopian texts with texts written for children. The works I examine constitute ‚warning‘ narratives, deriving their power from their references to historical disasters. In this case study I analyze and compare two literary texts, both inspired by the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. The two novels, Christa Wolf’s Storfall and Gudrun Pausewang’s Die Wolke, both deal with this disaster by placing a female narrator and heroine at center stage. Both heroines experience the crisis as a multifaceted incident that has private and psychological impact as well as global reach. I argue that both texts work in the mode of dystopian literature, combining on the one hand the specific aesthetics of seemingly ‚lowbrow‘ children’s literature with highly psychologized and aestheticized ‚highbrow‘ literature on the other. These texts, though seemingly very different, share similar strategies. Together they help to demonstrate how dystopian texts are always political, and how children’s literature share with dystopian texts the elements of engaged literature. In leveling criticism against utopian visions that ignore the individual aspects of social progress, they deal thereby with aspects of contemporary morality and ethics. They further question what has been valuable in the culture’s past, especially by reflecting on the cultural impact of the Chernobyl disaster.