Childhood Experiences in the GDR

The project "Childhood Experiences in the GDR" focuses on reconstructing today's view of the imaginations that people born between 1943 and 1984 develop when describing their childhood and youth in the GDR. This case study, whose survey is based on 50 (2020 to 2022) biographical narrative interviews on childhood and youth in the GDR, is dedicated to the systematic comparison of political, social and generational differences in memory articulations on the basis of positioning analyses. The question is: How are childhood narratives similar and different depending on whether a person was born early or late, grew up in a confessional or non-confessional, system-loyal or oppositional, working-class or intelligentsia milieu?