The Germanic Review, 86: 1–22, 2011 Copyright c  Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0016-8890 DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2011.541751 Coming to Terms with the Nuclear Past: Transnational Paranoia and Chernobyl in Recent German Cinema Jaimey Fisher Representations of the Chernobyl disaster, and its cultural and political resonance, be- came symptomatic of what the essay analyzes as a transnational imaginary in German cinema around the year 2000. While much has been written (as in the work of Randall Halle, Deniz G ¨ okt¨ urk, and Barbara Mennel) about post-1989 transnational cinema, envi- ronmentalism and environmental catastrophe is one aspect of the transnational that has been largely neglected. Focusing on Hans-Christian Schmid’s 23, the essay suggests that the catastrophe of Chernobyl was a key moment in Germany’s political consciousness and represented a transnational turn in the usually national discourse of coming to terms with the past. Schmid’s 23 and films like England and Am Tag als Bobby Ewing Starb demonstrate how the Cheronbyl disaster stood in for the trauma and subsequent paranoia (which the essay analyzes in a psychoanalytic framework) of Cold-War politics. Keywords: Chernobyl, Cold War, coming to terms with the past, environmentalism, Ger- man cinema, national cinema, paranoia, politics, psychoanalysis, Hans-Christian Schmid, Soviet Union/Russia, transnational cinema, trauma, 23. T he historical past remains omnipresent in post-1989 German culture as well as Ger- man studies scholarship. The attractiveness of the past as a topic has been confirmed recently in the variegated realms of German culture, for example, by the debates on German victimhood and on the (air)war in works like G¨ unter Grass’s Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang; Eine Novelle, 2002) and J ¨ org Friedrich’s The Fire (Der Brand, 2002); by the extended controversy surrounding the Holocaust Memorial in the center of Berlin; and by the phenomenal global success of Stefan Ruzowitzky’s Oscar-winning The Counterfeiters (2007) as well as Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall (2004). Given this afterlife, German studies scholarship has con- tinued to hone its critical notions of both collective and individual coming to terms with the past. A full forty years after Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlichs’ The Inability to Mourn (1968), many studies of postwar Germany continue to focus on Germany’s often-flawed engagement with the past. 1