2023-04-21 20:54:04
In her film about Germany’s first large nuclear power plant, Marion Ammicht tells how a village lived with the new technology.
View into the opened reactor of the nuclear power plant in 2010Stefan Puchner/dpa
The fission of uranium was followed by social fission. Brokdorf, Gorleben, Whyl and Grohnde were perceived less as village names of German provinces and more as staging areas for a fight against a diabolical technology. “Fight back, resist…”
Gundremmingen? When the first large nuclear power plant in the Federal Republic of Germany went online in the Bavarian-Swabian village in 1967, the news hardly attracted any attention and the local elite proudly claimed it as the starting signal for a better future. That has had social consequences. The power station attracted young, well-educated staff, and the village split into an upper and lower village, much as sociologist Norbert Elias described in his study of a British community, Established and Outsiders.
View from the pensioner bank
Marion Ammicht’s film about life in the shadow of cooling towers has the character of a Heimatfilm. The rural idyll only became uneasy when the protests spilled over from Whyl in Baden, where the winegrowers in particular feared for the reputation of their Kaiserstuhl wine due to the construction of the new power plant. The first demonstration took place in Gundremmingen after the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, although one employee had already died in a reactor accident.
An accident at work for Horst Diepenbruck. As a young employee for special tasks, he was there from the start. Almost 50 years later, from his pension bank, as he calls it, he observed how no more steam escaped from the last cooling tower after the complete shutdown in 2021. Diepenbruck acquired the bench, which once served as a break bench on the power plant site, for sentimental reasons. Most of the villagers have grown fond of the plant, even if the social conflict surrounding nuclear power sometimes ran right through families. Diepenbruck’s daughter has found her “prince” in the lower village, who makes “in biogas”. Renewable energies – in Gundremmingen that was almost considered suspicious.
A kind of home movie
The slowness of the film images in this documentary takes the drama out of the years of bitter debate about nuclear energy, and it refers to the emotional states that go hand in hand with a technology that is changing the world around us and which is not decided solely on the basis of rational calculations. Not in relation to nuclear energy anyway, as the discussion about the continued operation of the last three remaining power plants recently showed. Gundremmingen is about the different speeds that come with progress. Even run ahead of him or fall behind. Who knows that exactly?
Gundremmingen – a German nuclear story from the provinces. A film by Marion Ammicht. 52 minutes, Arte, April 22, 11:40 a.m. and in the Arte media library
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