Remembering the Socialist Past - Bad request! - University of Exeter

specifically East German or Soviet experience portrayed and the narrative
strategies employed in each text. Investigation of these two aspects demonstrates
how certain aspects of, and concerns about the socialist past tend to be
foregrounded in the German and Russian émigré texts, and underplayed in the
Russian texts. Finally, Chapter 4 considers the reception of the texts. I analyse
reviews by both critics and readers in order to show the extent to which issues of
memory and identity are explored in, or are conspicuously absent from responses
to the texts. The analysis of reception also demonstrates how some texts may be
actively shaping memory of the socialist past.
Why Childhood?
Childhood is a particularly appropriate subject for narratives which seek to position
a personal past within a wider context which considers issues of memory and
identity. On a personal level childhood is usually seen as the most crucial part of
our past for defining who we are. This derives from increased knowledge of
developmental theories of childhood during the late nineteenth century, followed by
the early twentieth-century interest in psychoanalysis, which made the child an
indicator of and even the key to understanding the adult. This created a situation in
which ‘new information about childhood was abstracted, or conceptualised into the
figure of “the child”, or the idea of the child’ and as a result ‘the child figure
becomes a central vehicle for expressing ideas about the self and its history’. 3
Marianne Gullestad suggests that the widespread and popular acceptance of
psychoanalytical theories which see early childhood experience as central to adult
development is often a reason for the inclusion of childhood in autobiography:
‘Childhood is seen as the “natural” foundation of the adult self.’ 4 Gullestad also
3 Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority,
1780–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 5.
4 Marianne Gullestad, ‘Modernity, Self, and Childhood in the Analysis of Life Stories’, in
Imagined Childhoods: Self and Society in Autobiographical Accounts, ed. by Gullestad (Oslo:
Scandinavian University Press, 1996), pp. 1–39 (p. 2).
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