The Cloud: The dystopian book that changed Germany (2022)

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221101-the-cloud-the-nuclear-novel-that-shaped-germany

by leonidasrup • 4 months ago

33 25 4 months ago

One can see the impact of this cultural-wave on people above ~40 pretty heavily.

Hand-in-hand with the whole "Atomkraft ? Nein Danke" campaign. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Power%3F_No_Thanks)

CalRobert3• 4 months ago

Would be nice to see a similar book about the dangers of fossil fuel use....

phtrivier• 4 months ago

It would be on the top of banned books in Texas schools.

That being said, the first few pages of "The Ministry for the future" will make a great first episode for an HBO show, someday... (or whatever network is not own by an oil company, eventually.)

CalRobert3• 4 months ago

Texas is a writeoff anyway

elcapitan2• 4 months ago

I'm German, born in the early 80s, and I've never heard of that book, tbh.

Obviously the Anti-nuclear movement has been extremely strong in Germany following Chernobyl, but this thing must have been somehow confined to certain circles. Or maybe it became more popular later - the Wikipedia page says it had been sold 50k times by 1988, but 1.5M times by 2006, and by then read in school.

rendx• 4 months ago

Interesting. Southern German, born in the early 80s, and this book was HUGE in my childhood. Definitely covered at school, at depth.

elcapitan2• 4 months ago

Yeah, plausible - I come from a very small state in the south that never had a nuclear plant (hint hint), and as the books read in school are chosen by the state, it probably wasn't a priority.

I have never come across it outside of school either though, even until today, and I still spend a lot of time reading and in libraries and book stores. Which makes me think it only circulated within these 2 groups - political anti-nuclear readership, and then from there into school readings.

number6• 4 months ago

Es gibt den auch als Film. Der ist auch nicht für schwache Gemüter

mc32• 4 months ago

It doesn’t seems to be far off from Jane Fonda’s China Syndrome’s impact on the American nuclear energy industry.

It’s not an exaggeration to say our nuclear energy industries were retarded by her campaign about fifty years or so.

Without her campaign, protests and anti nuclear movement we’d be in a much better place from an energy generation standpoint.

It’s amazing sometimes how people at the periphery with very little subject matter expertise can affect society at large.

KevinMS• 4 months ago

dont forget three mile island accident happened 12 days after this film was released. The combo really created a panic and a lot more activism, nevermind the movie was about bad safety standards at nuclear power plants and three mile island's safety standards contained the problem as expected.

woodpanel• 4 months ago

German here, but from the diaspora. I’ve never read that propaganda kitsch and no one in my family did and now living in West Germany I can really notice the deep impact it has left on them. They don’t even realize how no one else on earth shares this view, even when on almost any other issue they routinely justify implementing it by „because Norway/Denmark/Paris/Sweden does it“.

This is in part to blame on that book, but also on the socioeconomic class that is omnipresent in our publisher‘s editing boards. As study after study has shown German journalists are 4 times as likely to vote for the Greens as the normal population.

tomasphan• 4 months ago

I think also the actual Chernobyl fallout might have something to do with it. They just declared wild mushrooms safe to eat last year, 40 years later.

Of course I agree with you though. This fear based approach doesn’t matter when France, Switzerland and Belgium have tens of reactors on the border.

evanjrowley• 4 months ago

I wonder if my grandmother had heard of this book. She lived 10 minutes from the German border in the Netherlands During this time, she mentioned there were radioactive clouds flying in from Chernobyl.

guenthert• 4 months ago

Isn't it more plausible that she mentioned there were radioactive clouds flying in from Chernobyl, because there were radioactive clouds flying in from Chernobyl? After all, it were the even further away Swedes who discovered the fall out from Chernobyl first and alarmed the world.

looperhacks• 4 months ago

I'm German and have never heard of this book before. Was born quite a bit after it was released, though

zirror• 4 months ago

I'm German and we had to read the book in school. Born in the 80s. I also think It's set around where I live, but it's been a while.

wortelefant2• 4 months ago

Me and most relatives were exposed to this propaganda in school during the 80s and 90s.we produced more clean energy from nuclear power plants than we do now from solar and wind, if you measure actual power generation and not theoretical capacity. The only "cloud" to speak of today is the neverending plume of fine dust particles and carcinogens from the still operational coal plants that we require as backup for our maddeningly expensive bet on intermittent energy.

atopal2• 4 months ago

The maximum amount of energy generated from nuclear in Germany was 171TWh in 2001 [0]. In 2020 solar and wind generated 175TWh and in 2025 they generated 206TWh [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany [1] https://www.smard.de/home/marktdaten?marketDataAttributes=%7...

idoubtit• 4 months ago

Here is an histogram of the energy mix 1990-2020 that illustrates your answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energymix_Germany.svg

The nuclear share (red) is reducing during the 200Os. The wind and solar (light blue and yellow) went over the max nuclear share at the end of the period — it seems there is much more wind than sun in Germany ;-). The fossil fuels (dark colors below red) are still very high.

wortelefant2• 4 months ago

Yes, solar and wind has produced a few percents more in total, after years of subsidies with >18 Billion Euro tax subsidies yearly. But we still need gas and coal plants, because wind and solar fail to produce when energy is needed. We had 573 hours of negative prices in 2025 https://www.enoplan.de/strommarkt-2025-573-stunden-mit-negat...

In summary, we still need fossil fuels, and we have high prices, and we need to pay other countries to get rid of the waste electricity. This is just an utter failure from any economic or climate perspective. Just think of all the clean energy we could export - when it is needed - with nuclear plants still intact. We could have helped austria and poland to reduce their fossil footprint as well!

waweic• 4 months ago

When I was at school in Germany, I read both "The Cloud" and "The Last Children of Schewenborn". At the time (I'm young), I was also reading the ".ausgestrahlt" (a quarterly anti-nuclear magazine) right around the time the Fukushima disaster happened.

As is obvious, I was anti-nuclear myself (and still am, to a degree, but not related to fear of radiation). Looking back, it's clear to me, that there was little scientific understanding, but much fear, of the danger of radiation in the anti-nuclear movement. The books catastrophizing nuclear meltdowns and nuclear war certainly didn't help. The interesting aspect, to me, is, that the effects of radiation are correctly and quite graphically described in the books, but overly exaggerated in proportion and scale.

Being against nuclear power provides a shared identity, a sense of righteousness and there are other strong groupthink effects. Putting things into context gets really hard when everybody is either constantly reinforcing your biases or, alternatively, obviously shilling for the nuclear industry (which I also did see a lot of!).

It seems to me that the anti-nuclear movement is currently dying off. The recent protests against transports of used-up nuclear fuel have been rather small. Since Germany decided to phase out nuclear energy, there hasn't been much of a reason to protest against it and attention has shifted to other matters.

ViktorRay• 4 months ago

I wonder how different things would have been if Germany had increased rather than decreased the reliance on nuclear energy.

After all so much of Germany’s energy now comes from natural gas which is bad for climate change and, in the case of Germany, the natural gas comes from Russia. Helps feed the war machine, etc.

Germany, and the rest of Europe, nowadays would have been less reliant on Russia and have contributed less to climate change if they had used more nuclear energy.

znpy• 4 months ago

Being against nuclear power provides a shared identity, a sense of righteousness and there are other strong groupthink effects. Putting things into context gets really hard when everybody is either constantly reinforcing your biases or, alternatively, obviously shilling for the nuclear industry (which I also did see a lot of!).

I wonder if that happens anywhere else /s

The Cloud: The dystopian book that changed Germany (2022)

Related Stories