Childhood in the GDR

This study explores how adults look back at their GDR childhoods and youths. It examines what is deemed worthy of telling and how they position themselves in their narratives about the GDR as a state that no longer exists. The study thereby takes up discussions around articulating remembered experience, examines the extent to which social discourse about the GDR influences the interviewee’s narratives and how they position themselves within this discourse.

For the study, 50 people born between 1943 and 1973 and raised in the GDR were interviewed regarding their childhood and youth memories. The interviews were conducted between 2020 and 2021. A central preliminary finding was the absence of a uniform narrative about growing up in the GDR. The interview partners either framed their upbringing according to legitimation memory (Legitimationsgedächtnis) or dictatorial memory (Diktaturgedächtnis). The respective ways of positioning are associated with the experiences the interviewees made in their families, in educational institutions (at nursery, kindergarten, school, in the Pioneers or the Free German Youth (FDJ), i.a.), as well as with their experiences after the fall of the Wall and their ways of dealing with the ensuing period of transition / transformation.