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11. Children on their Own: Cold War Childhood Memories of Unsupervised Times

Chapter of: (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War(pp. 259–280)

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Metadata
Title11. Children on their Own
SubtitleCold War Childhood Memories of Unsupervised Times
ContributorNadine Bernhard(author)
Kathleen Falkenberg(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0383.11
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0383/chapters/10.11647/obp.0383.11
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightNadine Bernhard and Kathleen Falkenberg
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2024-04-22
Long abstractChildhood in formerly socialist countries is often depicted in research as ‘organised’ or ‘uniform’―a perspective we challenge in this paper. Using collective-memory work, we analyse our own childhood memories from the late GDR and memories taken from the memory archive of the Reconnect/Recollect project, focusing on unsupervised times, when institutional access to child supervision was no longer available and adult supervision could not (yet) be guaranteed. With this focus, we broaden existing literature on post/socialist childhood, which mainly focuses on institutionalized settings. Our analysis finds three patterns of unsupervised times present across different memory stories―unsupervised times perceived as freedom and contentment, responsibility, and loneliness. These patterns show that unsupervised times created opportunities for important children’s experiences to take place―from being creative to imitating adults, breaking rules, and building communities with peers and siblings. Additionally, we find many similarities across geopolitical boundaries that break down the stereotypical dichotomies of childhoods between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’.
Page rangepp. 259–280
Print length22 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Nadine Bernhard

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5062-3685

Nadine Bernhard was born in the late GDR and spent the first nine years of her childhood in this system. She also experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the transformation process and its impact on her everyday life, her family and friends, which strongly influenced her identity. She was fortunate to meet the editors of this book in Berlin and to participate in the Recollect/Reconnect project. Nadine works as Professor for Higher Education in the Context of Digital Transformation and Diversity at the Technische Universität Berlin and her research interests are thus mainly in the evolution of postsecondary education, inequality studies in education, and internationalization. However, the Recollect/Reconnect project touched her academically and personally so much that she decided to also study (post-)socialist childhood memories more intensively.

Kathleen Falkenberg

(author)
Postdoctoral Researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3170-7098

Kathleen Falkenberg grew up in the former German Democratic Republic, a country that no longer exists. Witnessing the transformation years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the manifold challenges this brought to family and friends she developed an ever-growing interest in (post)socialist identities, presents and pasts. As a researcher in Comparative and International Education at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin she learned about Recollect/Reconnect project, which turned out to be a transformative encounter both personally and academically. In her research, Kathleen, furthermore, explores different conditions of growing-up and learning, including assessment in school from a justice-theory perspective or marketization effects in early childhood education.

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