The last children of Schewenborn

The last children of Schewenborn or ... is this how our future looks? is the title of a novel by Gudrun Pausewang , published in 1983 , in which she develops the scenario of a West Germany after a nuclear war . The place Schewenborn is fictional, but, as the author describes in the afterword of the book, it has a real model: Schlitz in East Hesse , Pausewang's former place of residence.

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The story takes place during the Cold War . The first-person narrator is Roland Bennewitz from Frankfurt-Bonames , 12 years old at the beginning of the story , who drives to Schewenborn with his parents Klaus and Inge and his sisters Judith and Kerstin to visit their grandparents. Despite an international crisis between West and East , the family decides to travel. During the journey, a few kilometers from Schewenborn, she witnessed a large, glaring explosion. The father immediately suspects that an atom bomb must have exploded and wants to turn back, but the mother worries about the grandparents and only wants to see them in Schewenborn. As fallen trees prevent them from continuing their journey, parents and children walk the rest of the way.

The family arrives in Schewenborn unharmed. The grandparents are not at home, but at the time of the explosion were evidently in Fulda , about thirty kilometers away ; Roland's mother goes there on foot and finds that the city has been completely erased. After her return, she reports to her husband that no one survived there and hopes that the grandparents "burned out immediately". She also tells of survivors from the places between Schewenborn and Fulda who fled towards Schewenborn seriously injured. Since the streets are blocked by fallen trees, the family can no longer drive back to Frankfurt.

She therefore settles in the damaged house of her grandparents and from then on has to deal with the consequences of the attack: There is no more electricity or tap water, the telephone network does not work and the place is cut off from all sources of news. In Schewenborn, which has been partially destroyed, order soon dissolves completely, food becomes scarce and looting with murder and manslaughter ensues, especially after it becomes clear that no outside help is to be expected: reports from wandering survivors indicate that not only Fulda, but apparently also many other cities were destroyed by atomic bombs. Apparently there is no longer any state order, as there are no aid measures and no police or military can be seen.

Roland volunteers to help in the local hospital and sees the suffering of the wounded, most of whom have come to Schewenborn from outside and almost all of them suffer from radiation sickness in addition to their serious injuries . Like the hospital staff, he can hardly do anything for them, as there will soon be no more medication or bandages; a girl he became friends with also eventually dies of radiation sickness. A dying woman asks him to take care of her children, Jens and Silke. Roland takes her home, where his mother doesn't have the heart to send her away again. Despite the scarcity of food, the two are taken into the family. Together with a school friend, Roland's mother tries to look after the many orphaned children who are in the hospital courtyard.

Despite the burial of the dead in mass graves, the hygienic conditions suggest something bad: In fact, a typhus epidemic breaks out in Schewenborn . Soon all members of the family fell ill with typhus - except for Roland's older sister Judith, who, however, showed the first symptoms of radiation sickness. Kerstin, Roland's biological sister, and Silke, his stepsister, do not survive the disease. When Roland and his parents are on their feet again, Judith dies of radiation sickness. Since he is too weak to bury them, he has to hand them over to men who collect and burn the dead in the city. When Roland and his father have regained their strength, they begin to collect food and firewood. During their wanderings, they notice traces of radioactive contamination. At first Roland doesn't want to eat anything more for fear of the rays, but soon the hunger is stronger. The situation becomes even more difficult when Roland's mother finds out that she is pregnant.

The novel leaves open the extent of the nuclear exchange and whether there was such a thing at all - at least all of Central Europe seems to have been destroyed, as Roland and his father in search of food people from Czechoslovakia , the Netherlands and others Meet countries. One day they arrive at the inner-German border, which is no longer guarded, and learn from a local that Eisenach and Meiningen have been destroyed and that “no stone is left unturned” around Berlin . However, there is still no official news; the family can only get an idea of the situation through reports from wandering survivors and rumors.

However , they see with their own eyes that Frankfurt am Main has also been destroyed: In view of the misery in Schewenborn, Roland's mother developed the obsession that order had to be restored in her hometown of Frankfurt long ago. Although the father tried to convince them that Frankfurt has to be destroyed for sure, she insists on her mind, there a halfway normal life is possible again and even through eyewitness accounts that the completely devastated Frankfurt Rhine-Main saw not to dissuade it. She persistently reinterprets all the facts: Since there are no survivors from Frankfurt on the way, the city must still exist! She ignores her husband's objection that there are no survivors to be found even from the completely destroyed Fulda, because no residents have survived.

Finally the pregnant mother packs her things and wants to hike back to Frankfurt with little Jens. Since the father cannot stop them and thinks it is better if all family members stay together, he and Roland join in. So the family moves to Frankfurt and, as expected, sees only a field of rubble. On the way back, Jens dies of the flu that has broken out in the meantime and kills many people. In many places the family is refused accommodation, numerous villages have secured themselves with barbed wire and no longer allow strangers in, as the residents are afraid of epidemics and thieves. Roland and his parents return disillusioned and completely exhausted.

A nasty surprise awaits them in Schewenborn: a neighbor who was supposed to take care of the grandparents' house now regards it as their property and denies them entry. However, Roland's mother has gone into labor, so the baby, a girl, is born in the ruins. The mother dies in childbirth and Roland and his father have to discover in daylight that the baby has severe deformities due to the radiation. Since the father cannot feed her and because of the handicap she hardly has a chance of survival, the father kills little Jessica Marta.

Roland is 17 years old at the end of the novel and teaches the local children in a school that he and his father built. In a review it is reported how the survivors were further decimated by hunger and radiation sickness in recent years, as hardly anything grew in the fields because of the radiation. Only through the accidentally discovered supplies of an underground military base were they able to survive the worst of times. In the meantime, however, her life has normalized a bit, mainly because at least potatoes and robust vegetables are thriving again. The order among the survivors has returned, at least to some extent, Schewenborn even has a mayor again and the residents are trying to help each other as best they can. But almost all of the few children who are still born are disabled or die after a short time. The book ends with Roland's assumption that the sick and disturbed children in his school class are probably “the last children from Schewenborn”.

Classification in the work of the author

The novel can be classified as a book "for warning and shaking up". Pausewang said at the time of publication that "afterwards nobody should be able to say that we didn't know". It is a widely read book, especially in schools, that can appeal to young people as well as shock them. In some federal states, such as B. Saxony-Anhalt or North Rhine-Westphalia it belongs to the subject matter of the eighth grade.

A similar youth book by the same author is Die Wolke . Both books are set in the same place and reflect the fear of nuclear contamination that prevailed especially in the early 1980s and after the Chernobyl accident in 1986.

Today the cloud is considered to be part of the “collective memory of the twenty to forty-five year olds” in West Germany since it was read by most members of this generation in school lessons. This should also apply to The Last Children of Schewenborn .

criticism

Jörg Sundermeier emphasizes the ambivalence of the book in his review for the fluter magazine . Pausewang shocked, but did not explain. With vivid descriptions of the consequences of a nuclear war, Pausewang would like to warn the reader. Here she is a typical representative of the peace movement of the 1980s. From today's perspective, however, the subject of the book seems anachronistic . In addition, the bloodthirsty language is noticeable, as well as the undifferentiated treatment of the term Holocaust and the euthanasia issue. Ultimately, the 13-year-old boy's perspective also prevents an objective look at the circumstances of the nuclear war.

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literature

Gudrun Pausewang: The last children from Schewenborn or ... is this how our future looks? New edition, Ravensburger Taschenbuch 8007, Ravensburg 2003 (first edition 1983), ISBN 978-3-473-58007-1 .
Wilhelm Roer: A book goes to school: "The last children of Schewenborn" . Documentation of project days for this book and presentation of the political learning process of students, parents, teachers and school supervisors. AOL, Lichtenau 1986, ISBN 3-923478-18-6

Individual evidence

↑ “The cloud” comes true: The fear-mongering book of our school days FAZ , March 15, 2011, accessed on March 17, 2018.
^ Gudrun Pausewang: The last children of Schewenborn ( Memento from May 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )

[1] “The cloud” comes true: The fear-mongering book of our school days FAZ , March 15, 2011, accessed on March 17, 2018.

[2] Gudrun Pausewang: The last children of Schewenborn ( Memento from May 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )