Veranstaltungen

Disziplinen

Beschreibung

International Conference

From Birth To Death: Age and Ageing in the Postsocialist Transformation

26-28 September 2023, HAIT (Dresden)

Up to today the post-1989 transformation has had long-lasting effects on lives and biographies in postsocialist societies. Yet, there are no uniform experiences of ‘the’ transformation. Be it in East Germany or the countries of East Central Europe, the various age groups experienced and responded differently to the political and social transformation in the past and remember and speak about it today in different ways. This requires paying special attention to the dimension of age when it comes to understanding the political, social, and biographical implications of the postsocialist transformation. 

Against this backdrop, the proposed interdisciplinary conference seeks to engage with the question of how the various ages experienced the changing postsocialist realities. To comprehend the specific repercussions of the long transformation on different age groups, we wish to contrast and set into relation their various experiences. Furthermore, we propose to go beyond the understanding of age as an attribution to a fixed and coherent group; instead, we wish to use the notion of ‘ageing’ to focus on the process of ‘becoming older’, not only to study the generation of the old, but also to understand how the transformation altered the process of getting older of the young. And lastly, we wish to explore how deeply experiences of the transformation affected the political identity of the respective age groups and how they figure in the retrospective recollections of 1989 and the postsocialist period. Here we seek to highlight which age groups were more likely to become or identify themselves as so-called ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of the transformation. On that basis, we are hoping to gain insights into the connection between age and political identities from the postsocialist transformation until today.

Online participation via zoom is possible for all registered attendees. Please register until 17 September by email to: Maren.Hachmeister@mailbox.tu-dresden.de

Conference Program

Tuesday, 26 September 2023

14:30 Registration and Welcome Coffee

15:00-15:30 Welcome & Opening: Maren Hachmeister & Friederike Kind-Kovács

15:30-17:30 PANEL 1: “Young Children” 

Chair: Stephanie Zloch (TU Dresden)

Max Gawlich (Heidelberg University): Catching up with Reflexive Childhood? Young Children during the East German Transformation and in Contemporaneous Research

Friederike Kind-Kovács (HAIT, Dresden): “Children in/of the Postsocialist Transformation: East German recollections”

Leyla Safta-Zecheria ((West University Timișoara/Central European University, Vienna): Growing up amid the Transformations of LargeInstitutions for Children with Disabilities in Romania

Discussant: Silke Fehlemann (TU Dresden)

19:00-21:00 Dinner (Restaurant “Raskolnikoff”, Böhmische Straße 4, 01099 Dresden) 

WEDNESDAY, 27 September 2023

10:00-12:00 PANEL 2: “Young Adults”

Chair: Thomas Lindenberger (HAIT, Dresden)

Ivanka Petrova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia): Young Adults at the Beginning of Transition: Cultural and Social Capital and Economic Development in Bulgaria's Postsocialist Transformation

Claudia Dreke (University of Applied Sciences, Magdeburg-Stendal): Political Imaginations: Upheaval in the GDR as seen in Drawings of Students then, and in their Memories today

Maren Francke (Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam): Fidesz as a Youth Movement during Regime Change in Hungary

Discussant: Carsta Langner (Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena) 

12:00-13:30 Lunch (Restaurant „Ganesha“, Liebigstraße 24, 01187 Dresden

13:30-15:30 PANEL 3: “Generations and Family Constellations” 

Chair: Klára Pinerová (HAIT, Dresden)

Josephine Starke (HAIT, Dresden): The Endangered Promise of 1989. A Cohort-based Perspective on Transformation and Dictatorship in the Political Biographies of East German AfD Politicians

Ana Luleva (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia): The Bulgarian Postsocialist Transformation viewed through the Lens of three Generations: Continuities and Changes in Life Courses

Katarzyna Waniek (University of Łódź): Experiences of Poles born between 1980 and 2000: Between Traditional and Fluid Biographical Orientation

Discussant: Till Kössler (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

16:00-18:00 PANEL 4: “Adults”

Chair: Maren Hachmeister (HAIT, Dresden)

Greta Hartmann (Leipzig University): The (L)ost Generation? On the Arrival of Former GDR Citizens in the New System

Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova (Kansas University) - online: Disease as Dissent in the Coming-of-Age Novels of Poland’s Last Communist Generation

Annina Gagyiova (Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague): Did Age Matter?: Hungary’s Socialist Entrepreneurs and their Transition to Market after 1989

Discussant: Johannes Schütz (TU Dresden)

19:00-21:00 Dinner (Restaurant “Lila Soße”, Alaunstrasse 70, 01099 Dresden) 

THURSDAY, 28 September 2023

10:00-12:00 PANEL 5: “Old Age”

Chair: Friederike Kind-Kovács (HAIT, Dresden)

Petr Fučík (Masaryk University, Brno): The Role of Education in Partner Biographies during the Late Postsocialist Transformation: Implications for Contemporary Ageing Men

Maren Hachmeister (HAIT, Dresden): Double transitions? Early Retirement and the Postsocialist Transformation through the Lens of Care Workers in East Germany

Viktoriya Sukovata (Kharkiv National Karazin University in Ukraine): Images of the Old Men in the Post-Soviet Cinema

Discussant: Judith Brehmer (Collegium Carolinum, Munich)

12:00-12:30 Coffee Break and Sandwiches 

12:30-13:00 Final Discussion: Maren Hachmeister (HAIT, Dresden) & Friederike Kind-Kovács (HAIT, Dresden)