Polarised memories of the Youth Initiation Ceremony in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). A positioning analysis of biographical-narrative interviews

The topic of the article is the memories of East Germans of the Youth Initiation Ceremony in the GDR. This ceremony is a ritual introduced in 1954 in the GDR, in which young people were supposed to profess their allegiance to the state and its ideology. It was an important part of the anti-church education system and was in direct competition with confirmation. Using the example of selected interviewees, the article examines the question of how adults today articulate themselves on the subject of the Ceremony more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The data are based on 50 biographical-narrative interviews conducted between 2020 and 2021, which will be evaluated using positioning analysis. It becomes clear that there is a divided remembrance of the Youth Initiation Ceremony: some remember it in the sense of a dictatorship memory, which focuses on the politics and the ideology, others in the sense of a legitimation memory that focuses on everyday relevance, basic and all-round education as well as the festivity of the rite. The conclusion discusses the implications for the history of education and the handling of biographical-narrative interviews.