Thursday (October 16, 2025 – February 5, 2026) | 14.00 – 15.30

Building 815, Room S 252, Classen-Kappelmann-Str. 24

This course begins with the observation that our current moment is seeing a revival of a number of nuclear discourses. On the one hand, worries about the United States’ commitment to NATO have set off a series of discussions about nuclear deterrence and the possible need for a German or European bomb. On the other hand, nuclear energy is being revived and lauded as an easy way towards a clean energy future after fossile fuels. Simultaneously, the specter of nuclear pollution hovers over these questions, be it because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused damage to the containment structure around the Chernobyl reactor or because of the release of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean from the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan. To properly understand and think through these interlocking fields this course will survey the atomic imagination from 1945, the date of the detonation of the first nuclear weapons, to the present. As such, we will encounter various literary and cultural artifacts, such as texts by John Hersey, Herman Kahn, and Don DeLillo as well as films by Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet, and Shu Lea Cheang. Over the course of the semester, the guiding questions for the seminar will be informed by theoretical angles from ecology, accident and risk theory, as well as broader questions of the relationship between technological and imaginative possibilities.

Further information for students of the University of Cologne: Klips