Incident (Christa Wolf)

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Accident. News one day is a story by Christa Wolf from 1987, published by Aufbau-Verlag , Berlin and Weimar ( GDR ). On the one hand, she describes the Chernobyl reactor accident , whichoccurredin Ukraine on April 26, 1986, and, on the other hand, the brain operation of the narrator's brother. Both meet on one day, so that the narrator has to deal with both the bad and the good sides of technology and tries to answer the question of what happened to people back then.

Wolf began working on the plant in June 1986, two months after the disaster. At the beginning of the book she emphasizes that this should not be understood in an autobiographical way:

None of the characters in this text is identical to a living person. They are all made up by me.

content

The protagonist and first-person narrator spends the day alone in her parents' house in Mecklenburg, a few days after the Chernobyl catastrophe - although the name “Chernobyl” is never explicitly mentioned. At the same time, her younger brother is undergoing a risk-free brain operation. The external action is limited to everyday work, e.g. B. Shopping, gardening, and phone calls from relatives asking about the brother's health. Rather, the main focus is on the protagonist's profound thoughts and memories.

reception

In the GDR, the book became a bestseller despite, or perhaps because of, the criticism of the GDR's adherence to nuclear power.

On November 4, 1987, Wolf received the Geschwister-Scholl-Prize in Munich for her work "Störfall". The laudator was the writer Herbert Rosendorfer . The jury's reasoning stated:

The word - Störfall - is a belittling, appeasing and cover-up, as far as the matter is concerned, it is a horrific word for the narrator of this quiet, private monologue, which is almost something like the representation of speechlessness in the face of horror. This book should be an "accident" in the process of easy thinking, of suppressing the danger of ecological catastrophe that threatens us and that we do not want to admit (...).

literature

  • Arata Takeda : Towards global awareness of nuclear threat: Literary responses to nuclear disasters in Christa Wolf's Accident: A Day's News (1987) and Daniel de Roulet's You Didn't See Anything at Fukushima (2011), in Thomas M. Bohn et al. (Ed .): The Impact of Disaster: Social and Cultural Approaches to Fukushima and Chernobyl . Berlin: EB-Verlag, 2015, pp. 195–214

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ biography. In: Christa Wolf Society. Retrieved May 8, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Evil Heaven. In: DER SPIEGEL 13/1987. Rudolf Augstein, accessed on May 8, 2019 .
  3. ^ Award winner 1987: Christa Wolf. In: Geschwister-Scholl-Preis. Retrieved May 8, 2019 .