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

Twark’s study of humour in representations of East German experience both before
and during the Wende has particular relevance to three of the German primary
texts analysed in this thesis. 44 There have also been a large number of articles
published which consider literary portrayal of East German childhood and
adolescence. In many cases these are concerned with how such texts fit into, or
represent something more complex than, the trend for Ostalgie. 45 Jana Hensel’s
Zonenkinder is frequently selected for analysis, often as part of discussions of the
particularity of her generation who were adolescent or young adults at the time of
the Wende. 46 Less work has been done which explores the reception of these texts.
Jennifer Bierich-Shahbazi has examined the critical reception of Hensel’s
Zonenkinder and Rusch’s Meine freie deutsche Jugend. 47 I have not found any
scholarship which gives extended consideration to readers’ responses to literary
portrayal of East German childhood. This aspect of my research therefore brings a
new element to the study of these texts.
26
Compared to research within German studies, memory has less frequently
been a guiding concept in studies of Russian society and culture, in part because
there has been relatively little discussion of the Soviet past in the public sphere in
44
Jill E. Twark, Humor, Satire, and Identity: Eastern German Literature in the 1990s (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 2007).
45
Particularly useful for the present study were: 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; Oliver Igel, Gab es die DDR wirklich?
Die Darstellung des SED-Staates in komischer Prosa zur "Wende" (Tönning: Der Andere
Verlag, 2005); Owen Evans, ‘“Denn wir sind anders”: “Zonenkinder” in the Federal Republic’,
German as a Foreign Language, 2 (2005), 20–33 [accessed 11 November 2008]; and Nicole Thesz, ‘Adolescence in the
‘Ostalgie’ Generation: Reading Jakob Hein’s Mein Erstes T-Shirt Against Sonnenallee,
Zonenkinder, and Good Bye, Lenin!’, Oxford German Studies, 37 (2008), 107–123.
46
See, for example, Susanne Ledanff, ‘Neue Formen der “Ostalgie” – Abschied von der
“Ostalgie”? Erinnerungen an Kindheit und Jugend in der DDR und an die Geschichtsjahre
1989/90’, Seminar, 43.2 (2007), 176–193. Katja Warchold also considers representations of
GDR childhood with a particular focus on generational differences between those born in the
mid-1970s compared to those born even just a few years earlier who reached adulthood
before the collapse of the GDR, see Katja Warchold, ‘“Ich wollte eine Distel im sozialistischen
Rosengarten sein” – autobiographische Texte von zwei DDR-Jugendgenerationen’, German
Life and Letters, 63 (2010), 354–368.
47
See Chapter 4, pp. 264–65.