‘Bekennen gegen den Atomstaat’. Die Evangelische Kirchen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die Konflikte um die Atomenergie, 1970–1990Medizin gegen den Kalten Krieg. Ärzte in der anti-atomaren Friedensbewegung der 1980er Jahre

Abstract

The final third of the twentieth century has been described by the intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers as an ‘age of fracture’, when the means of talking about the ‘aggregate aspects of human life’ changed dramatically. Similarly, Tony Judt argues in his magnum opus Postwar, old political constituencies based on ‘elective affinities of large groups of voters’ gave way to interest in specific policies by much smaller, more closely defined groups in the 1970s. So it is fitting that two new books on the debate over nuclear technology, which became a seminal subject within West German politics during the late 1970s and early 1980s, approach the issue from the perspectives of particular confessional and professional organizations, and thus contribute to our understanding of the way politics functioned in a disaggregated society.