Searching for Childhood Gummi Bears

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.