Previous articleNext article FreeBook Reviews Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present. Dolores L. Augustine. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. xiv + 289 pp. Illustrations, graphs, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $120, e-book $110.16.Astrid M. EckertAstrid M. Eckert Emory University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTaking Germany’s scheduled “exit” from nuclear energy production in 2022 as a vanishing point, Dolores L. Augustine’s study provides a history of the shifting perspectives on, and emerging opposition to, nuclear energy in Germany. Notably, Augustine makes a point of integrating East and West German nuclear history, responding to long-standing calls among German historians to address Cold War Germany in a relational framework instead of resurrecting the country’s former division in scholarship.Augustine conveys how Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain related to the “Atomic Age” in the 1950s and 1960s when news coverage oscillated between praising the potential of the “peaceful atom” and raising fears about nuclear testing and nuclear war. She also offers a fascinating discussion of safety regimes and nuclear accidents in both German states, showing each side as being closely tied to their respective Cold War superpower. Predictably, the West Germans came away with a better track record, but Augustine emphasizes that this was not because the East Germans lacked technical know-how. Rather, political conditions did not allow them to engage critically with Soviet technology and learn from past mistakes. Incidents were shrouded in secrecy, and the meddling of the Secret Police precluded technical and procedural improvements. Because all of the major studies on the East German nuclear industry remain available only in German (for instance, those of Mike Reichert, Wolfgang D. Müller, Johannes Abele, Sebastian Stude), Augustine’s work provides a welcome window onto the Soviet-inflected East German experience with nuclear power.For readers already conversant with German nuclear history, the book offers the familiar narrative of the West German anti-nuclear movement, with chapters dedicated to the power plants at Wyhl and Brokdorf and the perennial question of violence within the protest movement. Here, too, it is the inclusion of East German anti-nuclear activists, few as they were, that makes the book particularly valuable.Augustine’s most important contribution is elucidating the role of science in German anti-nuclear protest. Whereas proponents of nuclear energy wielded scientific arguments to create authority, pitched nuclear energy as modern, and defined the legitimate speakers in the debate, anti-nuclear activists eventually enlisted “counter-experts” to challenge the widespread nuclear consensus of the 1950s and 1960s. The anti-nuclear movement was not hostile to science; rather, opponents of nuclear projects educated themselves about technical and scientific intricacies and “made the West German public aware for the first time that experts could disagree among themselves” (p. 5). Indeed, allegedly objective science came to be seen as taking sides in a highly politicized and ideological debate, contributing to the erosion of trust in the state, political elites, and the scientific establishment.Surprisingly, given its declared focus on the role of science and technocrats in German nuclear history, the book almost completely ignores the Gorleben Hearings of 1979. Convened under the chairmanship of the physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker to discuss the feasibility of West German nuclear waste reprocessing and long-term storage, the widely reported event brought together twenty non-German nuclear scientists, bureaucrats, industry representatives, journalists, and—in the condescending words of the conveners—members of the “qualified public.” Here, Augustine missed an opportunity to address the core themes of her study that the hearings threw into sharp relief, although she highlights the event in passing as the breakthrough of the counter-experts (p. 83).Augustine reads the German anti-nuclear movement as “one of the most successful popular revolts against technocratic thinking” (p. 242) in postwar German history. Although it was the Fukushima disaster of 2011 that triggered Germany’s exit from nuclear energy production, this volte-face was predicated, in her view, on decades of anti-nuclear protest. Whether the resurgence of nuclear energy among some discussants in the climate emergency debate will eventually put a dent in the “success narrative” of the German anti-nuclear movement remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the movement changed German political culture. Its methods, once pioneered by concerned citizens against the nuclear industry and the state, have gone mainstream. It has become fashionable to protest any odd infrastructural project, from the train station Stuttgart 21 to the power lines designated to carry alternative energy from north German wind turbines to south German industry (p. 228). It is an irony that anti-nuclear protest culture now delays and blocks projects that those very activists would once have embraced. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 25, Number 1January 2020 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Views: 94Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emz074HistoryPublished online November 06, 2019 © 2019 The Author. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.