Britta Augustin

The first 11 years in my life, I grew up in GDR, the socialist part of Germany after WWII. When they nowadays speak about air pollution in Germany—they do not know from experience what real polluted air is like. My hometown is Dresden—a big city in a valley. The fresh air naturally coming down from the surrounding hills was stopped by a lot of high-rise apartment blocks. In the GDR times, they had a housing shortage. It was cheaper to build new houses up the valley in mass production than to rebuild or repair old houses. So they built little skyscrapers in huge rows, enlarging the city. By doing this, they closed up the fresh air corridors. In winter, when everybody was heating the coal ovens, there was smog down in the city where I lived with my family. You could see the smog coming out of the chimneys as well as from cars and industry, and you could smell it in the streets.

My first climbing approaches in the Saxon Switzerland (1991).

My skin reacted to the bad air, and in winter it was even more intense. As a little child, I suffered from neurodermatitis and, later on, asthma. They sent me to health resorts with forests and clean air and there I was fine.

The other experience I got from the GDR times was propaganda and misinformation and the people not believing it. The promise of a better world was great, but the reality was terrible. Infrastructure was rotten and the environment got exploited—the rivers and the air stank from industry, the city of Bitterfeld was a symbol for toxic air and sick children around industrial areas, and some areas got blocked to hide dead forests. Everyone knew it was not the truth, what the GDR media was reporting. The adults were reading “between the lines.” They made jokes about the whole situation, in private, of course—everyone knew there were a lot of spies and punishment. 

When, in 1989, the demonstrations against the socialist GDR started, I joined them. One time with my family I brought a banner, where I painted our city’s river, the Elbe, and demanded that the river should be clean. 

Climbing and jumping in Bohemian Switzerland (1994).

What I learned from the propaganda experience in GDR is to think for myself, like my father did. Even after the GDR times, when he reads something in the newspaper that seems strange to him, he does the research himself and often finds a different conclusion. Nowadays some people feel the old GDR times again. Germany’s “energy transition,“ the nuclear phase-out, and certain other topics in the media today are mostly distorted. Doing one’s own research is a necessity again. So I keep an open mind and try to think for myself as much as possible.

Nuclear energy was a topic that interested my father. He hated how the greens argued in a propagandistic way about it, and again did the research for himself. (In fact he is still critical of it, because of the radioactive waste). He had relatives in the western part, so when the border fell and Germany was reunited, we visited them and they took us to Grohnde, where one could visit a nuclear power plant—I loved it!

So early in my life the subject caught me. I did the research myself about the power plants, about radiation, including Tschernobyl and (back-then) future technology like fast breeders. In school I provided a lecture about it and my classmates thanked me for it. They did not know, for example, that in medicine, radiation is used for healing. I also wrote an essay about nuclear energy and got a good mark, but my teacher wrote the comment that she has another opinion. 😉

I loved to argue in the pro-and-contra debates, not only about nuclear energy—and I still love it.

After school I engaged in politics, working in NGOs and partly in the Saxon state parliament. It was common to reject nuclear power, so I avoided the topic, not participating in the mobilizations or providing a mild criticism of the anti-nuclear movement. When I started to study computer science, the subject came to me again. I listened to the lecture on “system-oriented IT,” where the professor told us that this is used, for example, to operate nuclear power plants. Again I got caught. System-oriented IT was the first examination I passed and the first deepening I did, after I finished undergraduate. 

Before I finished my studies in computer sciences, my son was born, and since my husband worked already as an engineer with overtime and business trips around the world, I decided not to pursue the same career but rather to study again to become a teacher of computer science and math. Now, with three kids in school age, I am preparing for the final exams.

My son going down the rock after climbing, with my daughter holding the rope for safety (2019).

Another thing that accompanies me my whole life is my love for the forest. I enjoy nature very much—I used to hike as a kid with my family in Saxon Switzerland. I used to climb the rocks there, and now I hike with my own family—even as little kids, my children were all able to do 10-mile hikes and more. Of course I prefer an energy source that keeps nature intact because it uses so little space. I love the forest. Every one of my vacations since I was a kid involved spending lots of time in forests. Let it be. Let the forests be. Build nuclear power plants.

Family hiking (2019).

So I know why I do this activism: because I always did the personal research about nuclear energy myself. I know the importance of clean air for health from my personal experience. And since I was close to choosing a career in nuclear, please, you mums, dads, and everyone else who operates, builds, and engineers these plants, please enjoy working there. I am so much with you in my thoughts! Let us save existing nuclear power plants, let us build new modern ones, let us use radioactive waste as fuel, let’s close the fuel cycle—let’s do it together: you in the plants, in the research, in the economy—we in civil society and in politics!

Bouldering in Zittau mountains (2019).