150 FRANK UEKÖTTER
quake with a magnitude of 5.2 on the Richter scale, followed by a 5.5
event on 13 March 1989; both rank among the most powerful seismic
events in the global history of mining. In order to maximize salt yields,
the East German mining company had reduced the size of salt pillars
beyond a critical point, resulting in the sudden collapse of an entire bed
that stretched across several square kilometers. A number of historical
buildings had to be torn down as a result.^5 These geological shock waves
turned into political ones when the GDR sought to shift the blame to
the Federal Republic. It falsely claimed that the injection of waste lyes
into the ground had destabilized the GDR’s underworld. As it happened,
underground injection of waste lyes was in turn a response to GDR pollu-
tion, as it kept pollution levels in the river from rising even further.^6
Whereas the rivers ran from East to West, the air mostly moved in the
opposite direction because of prevailing winds. This became a matter
of concern in the 1970s, when the long-range transport of air pollutants
received growing attention. East Germans suff ered tremendously from
the emissions of domestic lignite coal mines, but West Germans added
to the burden in no small measure. The FRG took advantage of their up-
wind location with a measure of chutzpa and commissioned the infamous
Buschhaus power plant near Helmstedt in the 1980s. Built to burn par-
ticularly sulfuric high-salt lignite, the original design allowed Buschhaus
to produce no less than 6 percent of the FRG’s total power plant emis-
sions by annually releasing 150,000 tons of sulfur dioxide into the air
each year while contributing a paltry 0.4 percent to the country’s electric
power supply. Its 300-meter-high smokestack, West Germany’s tallest,
sent pollutants straight into the eastern part of the Harz mountains when
the wind blew from the west. Environmentalists wondered aloud whether
this was how the government of Lower Saxony envisioned reunifi cation.^7
Buschhaus provoked a major demonstration and a special session of Ger-
many’s parliament in the summer of 1984, and the operators hurriedly
retrofi tted the new power plant with sulfur scrubbers.
However, winds do not always blow from the west in temperate zones.
In late April 1986, for example, easterly winds blew air from Ukraine
across central Europe. As a result, radioactive particles from the Cher-
nobyl disaster fell to the ground on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Ger-
mans shared an experience of contamination that even made its way into
sociological theory via Ulrich Beck’s concept of a risk society.^8 Beck ar-
gued that environmental risks eliminated boundaries and inevitably en-
dangered everyone, irrespective of class and political system, and this
idea resonated widely in the general public for some time. But in reality,
there was no uniformity in the exposure to Chernobyl’s radioactive toll,
as the degree of contamination diff ered enormously. It was highest in