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When the Disaster Comes to Visit: The Chernobyl Children and the Transnational History of a Nuclear Catastrophe

Oct 07, 2024

Gerda Henkel Lecture Tour at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff | Speaker: Melanie Arndt (University of Freiburg)

After the Chernobyl disaster, more than a million children from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia were sent abroad to recover from radiation exposure and the hardships of everyday life in post-Soviet society. Unexpectedly, an unprecedented transnational network of non-governmental organizations and private individuals emerged to aid them. Their efforts revealed the ecological, medical, social, and political consequences of the nuclear disaster, bringing awareness to hundreds of thousands of people in more than 40 countries about the tangible effects on human lives. This awareness transformed the nuclear accident into a global catastrophe, highlighting that such an event could happen anywhere and impact everywhere. In this talk, Melanie Arndt shows how the Chernobyl children became witnesses to and symbols of a vanishing political system, the dissolution of the bipolar world order, and life in the Anthropocene — an age where human impact on the planet has become increasingly borderless.

This lecture is part of the Gerda Henkel Lecture Series, organized by the Pacific Office of the German Historical Institute Washington in cooperation with the Gerda Henkel Foundation. The program brings German historians to the West Coast to present their research and engage in dialogue with their colleagues in the US and Canada.

About the speaker

Melanie Arndt joined the University of Freiburg in April 2020 as Chair of Economic, Social, and Environmental History and became Vice Rector for Internationalization and Sustainability in April 2024. She studied political science, modern history, and East European studies in Potsdam, Berlin, and London, earning her PhD in history from Humboldt University in 2008. Her dissertation on healthcare in divided Berlin was published in 2009. Arndt has led several international research projects, including Politics and Society after Chernobyl at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam and Contemporary Environmental History of the Soviet Union at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European History in Regensburg. Arndt was a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (2012) and the Stanford Humanities Center (2013/14). Arndt earned her habilitation in 2018 with a manuscript on the transnational consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, published in 2020. The book Tschernobylkinder. Die transnationale Geschichte einer nuklearen Katastrophe (Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht) won the Geisteswissenschaften International (Humanities International) Award, with a translated version set for release by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Currently, Arndt is researching the history of heating and a more-than-human history of wine. She is one of the founding members of the Freiburg Environmental Humanities Network; she serves on the academic board of the Young Academy for Sustainability Research, and she is a member of the steering group of the Freiburg Graduate School Humanities and the Centre for Security and Society. She has also been managing editor of the Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas and serves on the board of Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History and Zeitgeschichte Online.