From stressed utopias to pervasive anxiety

Three films imagining post-apocalyptic dystopias - Smog (Petersen Germany 1973), Operation Ganymed (Erler Germany 1977) and Die Hamburger Krankheit (Fleischmann Germany 1979) - concretise and dramatise environmental, political and social stresses on the West German national imaginary during the 1970s. Articulating cultural motifs hitherto associated with national success within the conventions of the disaster film, the films would exacerbate cultural stress throughout the decade by gradually uncoupling it from its historically specific sources and rendering it as a diffuse yet inescapable national mood. Taken together and read in sequence, the three films show how dystopian thinking takes hold while its specific causes grow less clear and obvious, expressing fundamental doubts about ‘post-war’ utopian aspirations.