Re-Connect / Re-Collect: Crossing the Divides through Memories of Cold War Childhoods

This collaborative, international and interdisciplinary project brought together cultural insiders from both sides of the Cold War that divided people by geopolitical, economic, generational and cultural borders. The Cold War also construed a cognitive organisation of the world that shaped mutual perceptions of people and research traditions and practices by laying down a conceptual geography of East versus West. Even though the Cold War is over, these dichotomies are further perpetuated in political organisations of the world, recent conflicts as well as knowledge production.
Our goal was to create connections across these divides and break the historical hierarchy of knowledge production in which East European scholars are normally expected to provide empirical data and cases, while theorisation, abstract thinking, or conceptual work is reserved for Western scholars. Ourselves experiencing the Cold War during our childhood, we reached back to our own childhood memories that told about experiences of everyday life free of stereotypical interpretations that were often used in research to portray children’s life as ideologically driven and oppressed. This project expanded on this idea and included participants who grew up in state socialist or non-state-socialist societies, and those who were born around 1989, a new generation after the end of the Cold War who were mostly brought up without knowing too much about their parents’ pasts. All scholar and artist participants - regardless of their career stage or geopolitical position - participated as knowledge producers, thus removing the legacies of geopolitical knowledge hierarchies. They engaged with memories to cross the divides between the researcher and researched, between art and science, and between the sciences and society, which commonly exist in scientific research.

We used collective biography as a method to remember and write memory stories. Memory stories are rich narrations of personal everyday experiences of childhood written in a way that readers can imagine being the protagonists in these stories. These stories became a part of the memory archive to make visible the relations between children’s experiences across state socialist countries. The memories portray the experiences of children as diverse, complex and exhibiting commonalities and differences that earlier research has not examined. In the context of state socialist countries, for instance, they appear as less structured by state institutions and ideological discourses than earlier presented, and often paralleled children’s experiences in the capitalist countries. In these memory stories children act as knowing subjects, rather than victims of the so-called ‘indoctrination’ as often portrayed in academic and popular literature, art portraying the era or socialist or anti-socialist propaganda. Working with memories we developed ways to critically research them without creating new regimes of truth and nostalgia, or reinforcing unreflected stereotypes, tropes of childhood and biases.

The more than 250 memory stories in 13 languages that came from more than 30 countries representing all continents make up a part of our archive. These memory stories were collected during collective biography workshops, conference presentations or university courses, from visitors of our museum exhibitions and theatre performances or browsing through our website sourcing these memories as citizen science. These memory stories together make up a diverse, multivocal, and uneven digital, online, and open access collection. The archive invites further explorations of lived childhoods through scholarly and artistic endeavours, pedagogical engagements or simply by delving into the rich memories of childhood to be moved by them as we continue to remember and share memories in return.

Memory stories tell about how children eked out an existence for themselves in adult-produced spaces. The palpable energies and changes in the routines, norms, behaviours, emotions in the adult-generated spaces reassemble in children’s spaces in everyday life. Children create their own sense and feelings of the events unfolding around them and act on initiatives derived from their world-making. Childhood memories are heavy with minor events despite the monumental time of the Cold War reminding us of the multiple ways we thread the world through memories. The archive does not belong to the past nor is it composed of usual archival materials, techniques and procedures. Its organising idea escapes the urge for total control and ordering as it remains in constant motion, unfolding in unknown and sometimes unpredictable directions by accommodating new memory stories, objects, multimedia artworks, performances, literary and scientific texts.