I would like to write a paper on the A-bomb literature written in Indian Languages. The mournful incident of Hiroshima and Nagasaki left a deep impact on the Indian authors. Indian citizens were not directly affected by the nuclear weapons or by the nuke-war threats but the Indian authors, from a humanitarian viewpoint, expressed their concern over the nuke-power demonstration during the Cold War and raised their voices against all types of nuclear weapons. The trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was often portrayed in several short stories, poems and plays written by the Indian authors.

Badal Sircar, the pioneer of the Third Theatre and a famous playwright, wrote a play named ‘Tringsha Shatabdi (30th century)’. In this play all the real-life characters associated with the atomic bomb-dropping incident stood in front of the 30th century human beings to be judged for their action. He presented contemporary nuke-politics also in other plays as a minor theme. Famous Indian poets like Sahir Ludhianvi, Amulya Baruah, Agyea and others wrote poems reacting to the destructive mushroom cloud. In a short story written by Deependranath Bandyopadhyay, a mother was deeply worried for her child’s future in a nuke-threatened society. After the experimental nuke-bomb test done by India in 1998, a renowned poet Joy Goswami composed a long poem criticizing the anti-humanist celebrations and jingoism of the state machinery. The traumatic events of the atomic bomb explosion were mentioned in many other Indian literary texts.

In last three decades Indian Govt. tried to build several nuclear power plants and imported nuke-technology from other countries. Such decisions gave birth to protests and agitations from the common mass. Not only in Bengali but in other Indian languages such reactions have been narrated. Tamil writer and playwright Sankaran Gnani staged plays written by the Indian playwrights during anti-nuclear movement in Kudankulam. Trauma of Bhopal gas tragedy and Chernobyl triggered fear in Indian citizens’ minds. Also, the degradation of bio-diversity in the neighborhood areas of those nuke plants instigated eco-political movements. several Indian authors expressed solidarity with such movements. On the other hand, a nationalistic propaganda associated with nuke-bomb emerged through the ideological propaganda of the state as well through a few literary texts.

How did the writers in Indian languages present the nuke-power reality in literary texts? How did the anti-nuclear war consciousness of Indian citizens merge with the worldwide socio-literary scenario? How did the trauma and fear of the atomic bomb turn into nationalist pride?

I would like to analyze the above-mentioned texts to trace the answers to these questions.

Japanese literary works depicting the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were actively translated and introduced in the Soviet Union. Such works had a political significance amid the Cold War since they served to criticize the inhumane violence conducted by the United States army. Soviet poets such as Rasul Gamzatov and Mikhail Matusovsky composed pieces of poetry concerning the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, conveying messages of peace. Moreover, science fiction writers, who were particularly aware of the potential futures that the development of nuclear technology might bring, showed great interest in Japan’s experience of the atomic bombings and explored this theme in various ways in their works.

This presentation analyzes the image of the atomic bomb in Soviet science fiction from three perspectives. The works primarily discussed are The Inhabited Island by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, The Ice Is Returning by Alexander Kazantsev, and The Last Pastoral by Ales Adamovich.

Firstly, many works deliberately emphasize the history of “evil nuclear power,” from the development of atomic energy to the dropping of the atomic bombs by the United States. At the same time, however, the existence of Soviet nuclear weapons is rarely mentioned, while the use of nuclear power for transforming nature is presented as an example of “good nuclear power” in Soviet science fiction.

Secondly, although the theme of human extinction due to total nuclear war in the near future was common in science fiction around the world during the Cold War period, it was hardly mentioned by Soviet writers. The reason was that the topic of human annihilation would place Soviet and American nuclear weapons on equal footing and would not allow for the demonstration of the superiority of the socialist bloc. A nuclear war could be depicted only by setting the story in the distant reaches of cosmic space, away from the context of real international affairs.

Thirdly, this paper examines the theme of the “human shadow etched in stone,” where the silhouettes of people burned by the atomic bomb were imprinted onto surfaces. This image, which became widely known in the Soviet Union through the work of journalist Vsevolod Ovchinnikov and poet Matusovsky, also inspired science fiction writers. The phenomenon of the “human stone” reminds of the process of optical exposure in photography, however, differently from many atomic bomb photographs, it lacks the subjective gaze of a photographer. Furthermore, the victims burned by the atomic bomb also vanish, leaving only their shadows as traces. Our aim is to explore how this absence (both of those photographing and photographed) is represented in literary works.

* I am the discussant of this panel, so I will not be making an actual presentations. Instead, I will comment on the presentations given by my colleagues.

In post-war German literature, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began to be depicted in the 1950s. This was triggered by the impact of the Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in March 1954. This shock was reinforced by the fact that the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru was contaminated by nuclear fallout from the test. The spread of information about the extensive damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which had previously been restricted, also encouraged writers to take up the subject of atomic bomb in literature. Germany, divided into East and West, was at the forefront of the Cold War in Europe. As a result, the fear of nuclear weapons was both a familiar and a very realistic theme at that time. There were many genres of works written, but in this presentation, I will focus on poetry and analyze what kind of nuclear representations are created and how are they formed, paying attention to the following three aspects.

1) I will discuss how the destabilized image of the world caused by modern nuclear physics is linked to the fragmentation of the language of poetry, focusing on poems by Gottfried Benn and Wolfgang Weyrauch.

2) For many poets, nuclear tests and atomic bombings are events they had not experienced in person, but only through the media. Against this background, I would like to discuss how media representations of the damage caused by nuclear tests and atomic bombs are incorporated into the poetic images, concentrating on symbolic motifs spread through the media, such as "mushroom clouds" and the "human shadow etched in stone.” In this context, I will also touch on poems in which the media experience itself is problematized, such as those by Günter Eich, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Marie Luise Kaschnitz and others.

3) In relation to the second perspective, I would like to focus on the theme of memory and “Erinnerung” to discuss how memories of past events, such as atomic bombs and nuclear tests, can be recounted in literary texts. Günter Kunert, Peter Huchel and other contemporary poets are taken as examples here.

World War II had been over for several months on the European continent when Czechoslovak media came with the almost unbelievable news of the destruction of Hiroshima, and a few days later, Nagasaki, by a newly and secretly developed weapon of mass destruction, the atomic bomb. The scale of devastation was beyond comprehension. Photographic evidence of the bombings and their aftermath was unavailable, and words could scarcely convey the immensity of the destruction.

At the time, there were no survivors or eyewitnesses with first-hand accounts to communicate the tragedy to the people of Czechoslovakia. Geographical distance, language barriers, and censorship — the “outer” censorship imposed by the Allied Forces and later, after 1948, the “inner” censorship imposed by the communist regime — delayed and distorted the dissemination of nuclear-related information. Nevertheless, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the nuclear experiments of the 1950s and the looming threat of nuclear war, became significant themes in Czech and Slovak poetry.

This presentation examines two distinct waves of atomic-themed poetry in postwar Czech and Slovak literature. The first wave, emerging in the years immediately following the bombings, includes works such as František Hrubín’s Hiroshima (1948) and Karel Kapoun’s Night Ride (1948). The second wave, beginning in the mid-1950s and engaging a broader range of poets, features works such as Vítězslav Nezval’s The Sun Sets Over Atlantis Again Tonight (1956) and poems by Ivan Diviš, Milan Lajčiak, and Rudolf Skukálek.

This presentation examines the distinctive characteristics of the two waves of atomic-themed Czech and Slovak poetry within the context of the shifting political and ideological landscape of postwar Central Europe. It also explores how contemporary ideological perspectives, including the communist World Peace Council's campaigns and the rise anti-nuclear movement in the mid-1950s, shaped the literary narrative surrounding the atomic bombings.