Vortrag
Childhood in Times of Political Transformation in the 20th Century

The talk uses the lens of childhood and youth to provide an unconventional diachronic exploration of the relationship between political crises, the longer processes of political and social transformation and their implications for the lives of the young. As throughout history children were often seen as a ‘political tabula rasa’, they literally embody systemic changes and political and social transformations and offer thus a meaningful lens on periods of systemic change. To explore how children lived through and experienced these periods of accelerated change, the papers in this double special issue shed light on three major political ruptures and the longer-term transformations these entailed, including their impact on notions and everyday realities of childhood and youth: World War I and its aftermath, World War II and its following years, and ‘1989’ as the end of the Cold War and the beginning of postcommunism. This diachronic perspective allows us to not only juxtapose the impact of the two World Wars and the Cold War on childhood but also integrate the aftermath of these conflicts into a diachronic perspective on longer processes of political and social transformation. Gathering in this double special issue a range of selected historical case studies of (post)war and (post)socialist childhoods allows readers to detect similarities and differences among children’s everyday lives across time and space and support a thinking of the twentieth century through the lens of ‘transformation’.

Informationen und Anmeldung: https://www.recet.at/event-news/events/detail/childhood-in-times-of-transformation