Leaving Germany

---

As the taxi driver drove off to take me to Munich airport, he asked me casually where I was going. Japan, I answered, thinking for the first time ever, that that was a loaded answer in Germany. 'Oh, hopefully not to the north east', he replied. 'Oh, yes, I am - I have lots of Japanese friends there I want to see'. I was met with silence. To end the silence before it filled with embarrassment, I babbled on, explaining how my husband used to work in Garching (near Munich), but then he went to work in Japan while I stayed in Germany because of our children's education, so we had lots of friends there.

Once on the plane from Frankfurt to Nagoya, I started sifting through all the newspapers and magazines I'd collected. The headline of the article in the 'Financial Times' read 'Germany's nuclear tensions erupt', and reported on the centre-right coalition government’s defeat in the Baden-Württemberg election. The Lex Column (economic commentary) called last Sunday's triumph of Germany's anti-nuclear Green party 'a triumph of fear over reason'. I turned to 'Le Monde', interested to see what a French newspaper would make of it all, given that France gets around 80% of its energy from nuclear power, and states it quite clearly on the electricity bill. It had an interview with a radiobiologist, who said that the natural radioactivity on the earth varies between 1 and 40 mSv per year, and that up until about 40 mSv, the risk of cancer is negligible.

'Focus', a German current affairs magazine, had several articles about what it termed an 'Atom-GAU' (worst case scenario). In one of the articles a photo caught my eye - it showed the sand being changed in a children's playground in Freiburg in June 1986 after the explosion of Chernobyl in April that year. I was living in Garching at the time, and our children were small. I can vividly recall the charged atmosphere of Angst of that time - children weren't allowed to play outside at Kindergarten or at school, people stopped buying fresh milk and many sorts of fruit and vegetables. At some point the sand in the playgrounds was changed (German playgrounds - or at least Bavarian ones - have sand underneath them). I met up with an English friend during this time, and one of our children was about 7 months at the time. The baby grabbed hold of a bin liner holding her cloth and put it up to her face. I grabbed it off her, saying, 'Well, at least if she suffocates herself, I won't have to worry about her dying early from the radiation'. My friend and I caught one another's eyes and broke into laughter.

---