Only one refusal had been needed, and this damn button wouldn't have been pressed...only one...
"When we drove through Lanthen, everything was still as it always had been. But in the forest, exactly at the turn by the field of Kalden, there was suddenly such a strong flash that we had to press our eyelids onto another. My mother screamed, and my father stepped on the brakes with such stamina that the tires squeaked. As soon as the car was standing, we saw a blinding light behind the treetops, white and horrible, like the light of a large wielding machine or of a flash that doesn't disappear. I just looked into it for a second. Anyway, I was like blind for quite a while afterward."
— Roland Bennewitz, in the opening narration
The Last Children of Schewenborn (German original title: Die letzten Kinder von Schewenborn...oder sieht so unsere Zukunft aus?) is a German post-apocalyptic teenage novel by Gudrun Pausewang (1928-2020), published during the Cold War in 1983 and depicting the scenario of a nuclear war in the Germany of the time.
In the start of the story, twelve-year-old Roland Bennewitz, his parents and his two sisters travel from Frankfurt am Main to Schewenborn, a fictional town in Hessen, to visit their grandparents there. Even an international crisis between the Western and the Eastern bloc cannot stop them. But while they are on their way, tensions escalate. Germany is nuked into shambles. The family nevertheless tries to make a new life in Schewenborn...well, emphasis is on "tries"...
Contains examples of the following tropes:
- Action Survivor: Averted. There is far less action going on in the wasteland than one would expect in the genre.
- After the End: The setting is Germany turned into a nuclear wasteland following the Cold War getting hot.
- Apocalypse Anarchy: State order, police and military seem to have disappeared as soon as the bombs fell.
- Apocalypse How: Class I. Mainly severe societal and environmental disruption.
- Bittersweet Ending: Order in Schewenborn is restored, the town manages a new life and even has a mayor again, also potatoes and more robust vegetables are growing again. Roland and his father stayed there and are now teaching children at the local school. However, the years before claimed countless lives and the children born since the apocalypse are usually severely disabled. Nevertheless, Roland believes into teaching them, since they are “the last children of Schewenborn” and even if humanity has only some years left, it shall be good years.
- Born After the End: Deconstructed. There are rarely children born, and those who survive are usually disabled by mutations. One example is the protagonist’s sister Jessica Martha.
- Bury Your Disabled: Jessica Martha Bennewitz is born without eyes and arms due to radiation. Her father kills her after her birth out of the cold logic that she couldn’t survive anyway.
- Crisis Point Hospital: The local hospital is overflowing with radiation sickness patients when Roland helps there.
- Death by Childbirth: Roland’s mother dies due to complications and No Healthcare in the Apocalypse when Jessica Martha is born.
- Death of a Child: All siblings of the protagonist die, including the two other children his family took in. Not to forget all the other children who must have died, especially in the initial attacks.
- Doomed Hometown: Frankfurt am Main, the protagonist’s old hometown, was destroyed in the nuclear attack. The same thing happened to every other larger Central European city (implied by the protagonist meeting Czech and Dutch survivors), including rather meaningless ones like Fulda, and the Bennewitz family are implied to be the last living inhabitants of Frankfurt.
- Great Offscreen War: Downplayed. We hear that tensions rose between the Western and Eastern bloc the weeks before. We also see something of the war, but it is only a flash from a nuclear blast close by.
- Mercy Kill: Committed by Roland's own father to his newborn sister Jessica.
- The Plague: Epidemics are common in Schewenborn after the nuclear blast, and the diseases were usually believed to be no danger anymore. Due to No Healthcare in the Apocalypse and bad hygiene in general, they are again.
- Polluted Wasteland: What most of Central Europe becomes in the story.
- Take Care of the Kids: A woman Roland meets in the hospital asks him to care for her two children before she dies of radiation sickness. Roland complies and brings the children to his mother, who cannot bring it over herself to send the two away again.
- Vacation Episode: The Bennewitz family is traveling to visit their grandparents' in the beginning.
- World War III: Happens as the plot-triggering event and is implied to last less than a single hour.
