‘Goodbye, Lenin!’ Exploring Cold War childhood memories and knowledge production with Child as Method

In this article, we use ‘Child as method’ to read Cold War memories of childhood both for and via narrators’ figures of the child and conceptualizations of children and childhood. Drawing on the archive of memories generated by the Cold War Childhoods project (https://coldwarchildhoods.org ), we indicate how the child figure appears as protagonist in storied narratives which unfold and act on readers in culturally specific ways. We attend specifically to political agencies, affects and emotions, and both present and past relationalities elaborated in these memories, to explore narrators’ wider cultural–political projects. Asked to recall childhood memories within the frame of the Cold War, participants’ choice and narration of memories often indicated specific geopolitical and ideological aspects. We offer an analyses of such memory stories alongside reflections on what these might indicate both about the intersection of historical generational orders and geopolitical contexts. It is suggested that this analysis, via the analytical lens of ‘Child as method’, informs as well as invites further critical engagement with modes of knowledge production that use personal memories of childhood. Specifically, it facilitates links with and interrogates the connections between figurations, affective and political economies of childhood and colonialism.