From Birth to Death | Age and Ageing in the Postsocialist Transformation

International Conference from the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the TU Dresden

Tuesday, 26 - Thursday, 29 September 2023, 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.

See the conference documents for more details:

Conference Poster

Conference Program