Abstract
AbstractHistories of civil defence have tended to focus on large-scale endeavours during the early Cold War. In West Germany, however, civil defence became more successful after concepts of ‘total defence’ and accompanying shelter construction programmes were discontinued. From the mid-1960s, officials who had initially spoken of ‘disasters’ to avoid the unpopular term ‘war’ began focusing on less obtrusive, attainable all-hazards measures. Similarly, the majority of German physicians involved in disaster medicine pragmatically imagined scenarios up to, but not exceeding, nuclear reactor meltdowns or isolated nuclear strikes. In the wake of political détente and technical disasters during the 1980s, most critics came to agree that at least some specialised preparation for more extreme scenarios might be warranted and did not necessarily amount to militarisation.
Highlights
There is a ubiquitous quality to the term ‘disaster’.1 While it is certainly used to refer to worst-case scenarios or—adhering to a more technical definition—to events which exceed locally available resources (Münkler 2013: 135), it is probably more often utilised to describe mere inconveniences, especially in everyday life
This chapter will focus on retracing the nature of the dystopian sociotechnical imaginaries put forth by West German civil defence institutions, how they changed over time and what measures were taken to counter them
Using the term ‘imagined disastrous’ to stress both the act of imagining and that of labelling, it shall be argued that the relativity of the employed terminology allowed civil defence officials to model and adapt their proposed sociotechnical imaginary to befit the amount of preparation attainable by them
Summary
The Imagined Disastrous: West German Civil Defence Between War Preparation and Emergency Management 1950–1990. Without denouncing the pressing factuality of many catastrophic events, as some scholars tend to do, an event does not necessarily have to be disastrous in and of itself to be labelled as such, and a disaster may just as much be considered a product of communication than of the forces of nature or the dangers of technology (Imhof 2004: 145). It is this relativity and context-dependency which has encouraged
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