Die Wolke, which received several awards, became a popular book for reading in class and was adapted for film and stage, has been regarded as Pausewang's signature work.

[4][5] Pausewang wrote the novel Die Wolke in 1987, after the Chernobyl disaster when nuclear fallout rained down on much of Europe.

She used information that the organisation "Ärzte gegen den Atomtod" (Physicians against nuclear death) had published at the end of the 1970s.

[9] Pausewang wrote in 2011, after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, that she was determined to take her readers seriously regardless of age, and she wanted to warn of dangers of her time.

[11] The heroine of the story is a fourteen-year-old girl who flees the contaminating cloud of radiation and experiences the ensuing breakdown of social order.

The story begins at school where Janna-Berta and the other students and teachers are alarmed of a nuclear accident in the vicinity.

While the initial panic after the disaster is similar, the action is later focused on the relationship of two young people, Hannah (age 16 in the film, and played by Paula Kalenberg) and Elmar (played by Franz Dinda [de]).

[17] Die Wolke was translated into English by Patricia Crampton and published in 1997 by Viking under the title Fall-Out.

[12][18] In 2014, a stage adaptation in Japan, titled Mienai Kumo (Invisible Clouds), was written by Misaki Setoyama.