«Ist Ihnen bekannt, daß sechs Wasserstoffbomben genügen, um die ganze Bundesrepublik in einen Atomsumpf zu verwandeln?». Günther Weisenborns Stücke gegen die nukleare Aufrüstung

Weisenborn’s political commitment, which had already emerged in Nazi Germany and in the post-war GDR, led him to sympathise with the campaigns against rearmament. In 1958, he reshaped the Göttingen Manifesto in a spoken and sung adaptation, the Göttinger Kantate, the first of two plays in which he dealt with the nuclear question. Shortly after that, he wrote Die Familie von Makabah which, while showing formal differences, is thematically related to the Kantate. This article investigates the leitmotifs in both texts by focusing on the cluster “fear-manipulation”, conceptualized by Weisenborn as a critique of the theory of mutual deterrence.