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2 - OKV Biographies: Shared Memories and Arguments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2020

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Summary

Abstract

Based on interviews with several OKV activists, Chapter 2 analyzes the social and political factors that shaped their worldview. The OKV has largely been organized and maintained by men from the Hitler Youth generation who, after the horrors of Nazism and WWII, converted to communism and experienced the GDR as a provider of recognition, self-respect and social mobility. While the leading activists come from various backgrounds, and in the GDR embarked upon different professional trajectories, all explain their own biographies with the help of a common set of political arguments. These self-descriptions reveal commonalities with the genre of “socialist autobiographies” that were systematically trained in Central/Eastern Europe's socialist states before 1989.

Keywords: socialist autobiography, memory, antifascism, social mobility, narratives, generation

The following chapter discusses the (auto)biographies of several OKV activists. How do they look back on their lives in the GDR, and how have they experienced life since 1989? How can this explain their attachment to the OKV? This chapter focuses on the personal narratives of individuals and is largely based on the interviews I conducted with 30 persons between 2012 and 2015. Most of them were active in one or several member organizations of the OKV. My interviewees hail from the three largest OKV organizations, ISOR, GRH and GBM, as well as from several of the OKV's smaller associations. Through their networks I also got into contact with people who were not active in any specific organization attached to the OKV, but who can be described as sympathizers belonging to the extended network of OKV members and friends. Generally, I first asked them to tell me about their lives in the GDR and after 1989, and then about the activities of their respective organizations and their personal role therein. Interviews and conversations usually lasted from two and a half up to four hours, and sometimes even longer, stretching over several days. As a rule, people already expected to be asked to tell about their personal past, and were happy to do so. The acting directors of ISOR (Wolfgang Schmidt) and the GRH (Hans Bauer and Dieter Stiebert) preferred to talk mainly about organizational matters. Because of their central roles in these organizations and the valuable insights they could give as to the development of these organizations from the early 1990s onward, I spoke with them several times.

Type
Chapter
Information
German Post-Socialist Memory Culture
Epistemic Nostalgia
, pp. 89 - 132
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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