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

The first five chapters are centred around events within her family or at school,
while later chapters focus on her personal relationships as a young adult. The
protagonist’s experience of the Wende is not portrayed and although there are a
few incidents narrated in which the East German context is relevant, it is not
central to the story. The text is instead focussed on the protagonist’s feelings and
development from a child to a young woman.
18
Growing up in the GDR was a particularly popular topic among young former
East German authors from the mid-1990s up to the late 2000s. 17 In addition to the
texts discussed in detail in this thesis, other representations of GDR childhood
include semi-autobiographical texts by Falko Hennig, Jakob Hein and Michael
Tetzlaff, all of whom describe growing up in the GDR in the 1970s-1980s. 18 Falko
Hennig’s Alles nur geklaut (1999) is the story of the narrator’s criminal career, from
his first theft of a toy car at kindergarten, to insurance and welfare scams after
1989. Both Tetzlaff’s Ostblöckchen (2004) and Hein’s Mein Erstes T-Shirt (2001)
provide humorous accounts of childhood and adolescence in the GDR.
The Russian Texts
The Russian texts I will analyse have been selected to demonstrate a range of
Soviet childhood experiences and a variety of ways in which these have been
presented. 19 In order to make a fair comparison with the German texts, I only
considered for inclusion narratives of Soviet childhood set after the end of Second
World War.
17 Texts focussed more on East German adolescence include Sascha Lange, DJ Westradio:
Meine glückliche DDR-Jugend (Berlin: Aufbau, 2007), Andre Kubiczek, Junge Talente (Berlin:
Rowohlt, 2002); Thomas Brussig, Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (Berlin: Volk und Welt,
1999); and Jochen Schmidt, Müller haut uns raus (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002).
18 Falko Hennig, Alles nur geklaut (Augsburg: Maro, 1999); Michael Tetzlaff, Ostblöckchen:
Eine Kindheit in der Zone (Frankfurt am Main: Schöffling, 2004); Jakob Hein, Mein erstes T-
Shirt (Munich: Piper, 2001).
19 Other Russian literary portrayals of Soviet childhood not examined in this thesis include:
Denis Iatsutko, Bozhestvo (Moscow: OGI, 2005); Evgenii Grishkovets, Reki (Moscow:
Makhaon, 2005); Eduard Kochergin, Kreshchennye krestami (Saint Petersburg: Vita Nova,
2010) and Liudmila Ulitskaia, Devochki (Moscow: Eksmo, 2002).