Institute of Advanced Studies at the Central European Univ., Budapest; Friederike Kind-Kovács, Hannah-Arendt-Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the TU Dresden; in cooperation with Machteld Venken, Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena (Web)

Ort: Budapest
Zeit: 05.-07.06.2019
Proposals by: 31.01.2019

“Memories of Childhood are folded into the present of the adult person remembering,” Silova, Plattoeva and Miller observed in their 2018 study of post-socialist childhood. In the past years not only in Germany the so-called “Children of the Transition” have come to raise the question of how 1989 and its aftermath affected children’s lives in the past and how their memories still shape their individual and collective biographies up to today. This new perspective on the years of post-socialist transformation allows for examining the historical moment of “1989” not primarily as a political rupture but rather as a social transformation which altered the (everyday) lives of the young. Indeed, when it came to children’s everyday lives, massive privatization, high unemployment, new housing and living conditions/standards, migration to the West, and new pedagogic ideas of children’s care and education brought about fundamental change to children’s upbringing.

But how unique was the post-communist transformation actually in terms of its short- and long-term impact on children’s lives, when compared to other political watersheds of the 20th century? And in what way does the history of childhood contribute to a better understanding of the social implications of political transformations, both for the concerned societies in the past and their … read more and source (Web).