Debbie Pinfold (Bristol): Conceptions of Childhood in the Literature of the GDR
SML Research Seminar Series
Location: Research Beehive 2.20, Old Library Building
Time/Date: 10th May 2012, 16:00 - 17:00
A twenty-first century western audience is most likely to associate a GDR childhood with images of children in Young Pioneer uniform who had been trained in the socialist ideology of their state long before they even started school, and there is certainly some truth in such images: particularly in the early years of the GDR children were presented mainly as the ‘jüngsten Bürger des Staates’, symbols of new beginnings and raw material for the good socialist citizens of the future. However, while the political discourse of the early GDR did not appear to regard childhood as an intrinsically valuable phase, preferring to focus on the adult in the making, I argue that GDR literary discourse increasingly accorded considerable importance to the child and qualities perceived as ‘childlike’, notably spontaneity and imagination. In this paper I will consider some cultural images of the child and the childlike, in particular from the 1980s, to suggest that writers’ concern with the childlike mirrors and anticipates social and political developments at the end of that decade. I will argue that childhood appears as a counter-cultural ideal which may have gained its particular strength precisely from the way it had earlier been instrumentalised for the state’s own purposes.
Published: 13th January 2012