Public Health in a Radioactive Age: Environmental Pollution, Popular Therapies, and Narratives of Danger in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949–1970

Abstract

AbstractIn the 1950s and 1960s, West German citizens found themselves living in a “radioactive age.” The public learned that radiation exposure pervaded postwar society, not only from atomic testing but also from medical treatment, workplace exposures, and radium consumer goods. By 1970, West Germans—ranging from farmers and housewives, to physicians, scientists, and bureaucrats—had recast nuclear radiation from a technological wonder or health aid into a public health hazard. This article illustrates that anxieties about uncontrollable technology, ineffective institutions, disingenuous political leaders, and volatile citizens persisted from the 1950s to the 1970s, coexisting with optimism and progress, without truly subsiding in the 1960s, as historians often suggest. Further, it advocates taking those fears seriously, showing that they played a critical—and lasting—role in shaping public policy and state-society relations in the early Federal Republic.