Melanie Arndt

In the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, more than a million Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian children were sent abroad. Aided by the unprecedented efforts of transnational NGOs and private individuals, these children were meant to escape and recover from radiation exposure, but also from the increasing hardships of everyday life in post-Soviet society. Through this opening of the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands of people in over forty countries witnessed the ecological, medical, social and political consequences of the disaster for the human beings involved. This awareness transformed the accident into a global catastrophe which could happen anywhere and have widespread impact. In this brilliantly insightful work, Melanie Arndt demonstrates that the Chernobyl children were both witness to and representative of a vanishing bipolar world order and the future of life in the Anthropocene, an age in which the human impact on the planet is increasingly borderless.

Berlin spielte im Kalten Krieg durch seine geographische Lage und seinen politischen Status eine Sonderrolle. Melanie Arndt zeigt dies am Beispiel der Gesundheitspolitik der Jahre 1948 bis 1961. Im geteilten Berlin waren die Handlungsspielräume der gesundheitspolitischen Akteure maßgeblich durch die Systemkonkurrenz abgesteckt. Diese gewährte einerseits Freiräume, die es in den Bezugsstaaten DDR und Bundesrepublik schon nicht mehr gab und schränkte andererseits die Weiterführung auch von gemeinsam begonnenen innovativen Projekten ein.