The German term Wende meaning point of transition and ultimately transformation is a term that contemporaries themselves used to describe the fundamental upheaval in the GDR that took place between 1989 and 1990. Between the growing mass demonstrations, the actions of the civil rights and opposition movement, the collapse of the SED's power, the establishment of the round tables (Runde Tische), new elections, the drafting of a constitution - later often referred to collectively as the Peaceful Revolution (Friedliche Revolution) and the increasingly vocal desire for a common German state, a momentous dynamic developed until the so-called new states on the territory of the GDR formally joined the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) finally took place on 3 October 1990. The transformation took place on various levels, the level of the political system and the institutional order but also the level of the living environment and everyday life of the population. This revealed asynchronicities and contradictory (everyday) experiences that extended well beyond 1989/90. The various experiences of upheavals and uncertainties of the people in East Germany and the resulting specific knowledge of them did not always correspond to a simple chronology of political events and the changes in legal and political regulations. Social and political researchers who observed this upheaval at the time and collected various data on it – for example by conducting biographical interviews – spoke of it as a transformation and often meaning the transition to a market economy and democracy. While the historian Philipp Ther referred to a profound and accelerated process that fundamentally changed the economic and political system as well as many different areas of society as a transformative process, which in his view affected many countries in Europe and the former Eastern bloc as a neoliberal transformation – albeit in different ways (cf. Ther 2014, p. 28, in particular pp. 26-40), the contemporary historian Kerstin Brückweh has coined the term a long history of transition/transformation (Lange Geschichte der Wende, Brückweh, 2020). In doing so, she addresses the complex processes of structural re-organisation, different experiences and the changing memories of them. Together with her research group, she made clear that the history of the changes around 1989 goes back a long way and has effects beyond the immediate turning point. A long-term perspective is needed to understand this. In any case, the period between the mid-1970s and around the 2000s should be considered in order to capture as many development aspects and phenomena as possible (Brückweh, Villinger, Zöller, 2020). For the institution of school in particular, it was shown how its long-standing structures and the associated mentalities and ideas of the actors – especially the paradigm of achievement and the idea of meritocracy, which developed in the course of the 19th century – mutually reinforced each other in the face of the challenges posed by the transition / transformation and stabilised school as a living environment, even if the structures of the school system were indeed changed after 1990 and converged with those in the old Federal Republic. The fact that school experiences were not necessarily good, even if memories of school days are positive, is evident not only when looking back at the GDR, but also within a long history of transition/transformation (Zöller, 2020).