This thesis examines how the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 was constructed differently in East and West German newspaper discourse. Using a comparative critical discourse analysis based on the Discourse Historical Approach of Reisigl and Wodak (2016), the study analyses selected articles from four newspapers, two from the Federal Republic of Germany and two from the German Democratic Republic, published in the two weeks following the disaster. The comparative analysis focuses on the three themes of risk, responsibility and environment and examines how each was constructed across these different contexts and ideologies. The findings show that while the West German press treated the disaster as a severe and ongoing crisis, , the East German press minimised the scale of the disaster, reproduced official Soviet narratives without critical distance and delegitimised Western reporting as politically motivated. These differences reflect the fundamentally different political and ideological conditions under which journalism operated in each system. The study contributes to media and communication research by demonstrating how political systems, power and ideology shape the boundaries of public discourse and how the framing of environmental crises is always ideologically conditioned, a finding that remains relevant in the context of contemporary challenges to press freedom and environmental communication.