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

Anna Saunders has noted the prevalence of the symbols and characters of
childhood within Ostalgie (nostalgia for East Germany), for example, the character
of the Sandmann as portrayed on East German children’s television. 6 Another
example is the commercial success of a series of books dedicated to childhood
memories of the GDR, Aufgewachsen in der DDR – Wir vom Jahrgang… (Growing up
in the GDR – Born in the Year …). 7 For Russians there are websites and online
communities dedicated to Soviet childhood, in which participants share stories,
photos, and multimedia recordings of, for example, Young Pioneer songs, or
popular cartoons. 8 Other examples of Russian popular culture drawing on Soviet
childhood include a popular St Petersburg band, Kim & Buran, whose music derives
from the sound effects of Soviet children’s TV shows, and a TV series broadcast in
2008, Sinie nochi (Blue Nights), set in a Young Pioneer summer camp. 9
The Primary Texts
The texts chosen for analysis include narratives which are clearly defined as either
autobiographical or fictional, as well as several texts which are not easily
categorised but which seem to have some autobiographical basis. The notion of
autobiographical truth and where the boundary between fictional and
autobiographical narratives lies has been widely discussed and theorized. 10 This is
6 Anna Saunders, ‘“Normalizing” the Past: East German Culture and Ostalgie’, in German
Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-first Century: Beyond Normalization, ed. by
Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), pp. 89–119 (p.
101). The complex nature of Ostalgie will be discussed in Chapter 2.
7 The GDR series has been published by Wartberg since 2007. See
[accessed 3 August 2012].
8 See, for example, the livejournal community, ‘Rozhdennye v SSSR’ (‘Born in the USSR’)
[accessed 3 August 2012]; and the website, ‘76–
82: Entsiklopedia nashego detstvo’ (‘76–82: Encyclopedia of our Childhood’)
[accessed 3 August 2012].
9 On Kim & Buran see Alexei Yurchak, ‘Post-Post-Soviet Sincerity: Young Pioneers,
Cosmonauts and other Soviet Heroes Born Today’, in What is Soviet Now?, ed. by Thomas
Lahusen and Peter Solomon (Berlin: LIT, 2008), pp. 257–276 (pp. 260–62); The title, Sinie
nochi, comes from the first line of a well-known Young Pioneer song. The series is referred to
in Dmitrii Tikhomirov, ‘Zolotoi sovok’, Kommersant, 8 December 2008, section Den′gi
[accessed 28 January 2009].
10 For discussion of autobiographical truth (including generic conventions, meanings of
autobiography after poststructuralism, and famous cases of ‘fake’ autobiographies) see Linda
R. Anderson, Autobiography, (London: Routledge, 2001); Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson,
Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis, MN: University
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