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This thesis is a study of the attempts by the leadership of the GDR to devise a concept of the nation which suited their objectives regarding the future of the state and of Germany as a whole, from 1949 until 1989. A simple analysis of official pronouncements on the subject over the years reveals serious inconsistencies and dramatic U-turns. This thesis considers various factors which may have shaped the official line, including the influence of Bonn and Moscow, public opinion and personal convictions. In particular it examines the input of experts from academic institutions in order to answer the question of whether or not the official line on the nation had a clear theoretical basis, or was purely determined by pragmatic considerations. In order to investigate what lay behind official policy, extensive use has been made of material from the SED's Central Party Archive, and interviews were conducted with leading theorists. In this way it was possible to gain a better understanding of the interaction between the political and theoretical aspects of the National Question in the former GDR. The findings reveal that the official concept of the nation was primarily determined by pragmatic, or even opportunistic considerations, and was viewed by the SED leadership as a means to legitimise the GDR in the absence of alternative methods. Initially the intention was to reinforce the claim that the GDR was a model for a future united socialist Germany, but later a concept was fashioned to support the idea that it was an independent sovereign state, and in no way linked to the Federal Republic. However, the regime was heavily reliant on the skills of theorists to provide credible (Marxist-Leninist) justifications for policy changes, and to modify policies in order to make them more acceptable and therefore more effective as a means to legitimise the state.

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This study compares German memory of life in the German Democratic Republic with Russian memory of life in the Soviet Union, as represented and created within fictional and autobiographical narratives of childhood, published since the collapse of each regime. The chosen texts are, to varying degrees, fictionalized and/or autobiographical. A comparison between German and Russian narratives is particularly interesting because the socialist past is remembered very differently in each country’s public discourse and culture. An examination of narratives about childhood allows for a complex relationship between the post-socialist present and the socialist past to emerge. I study the texts and their reception, in conjunction with an analysis of the dominant ways of remembering the socialist past circulating within German and Russian society and culture. This allows the analysis to go beyond a straightforward comparison between the representations of the socialist past in the two groups of texts, to also explore how those representations are interpreted and received. It also demonstrates how the surrounding memory cultures appear to be producing quite different approaches to representing memories of broadly similar socialist childhood experiences. Chapter 1 explores the role of literary texts in revealing and shaping both individual and collective memory with a review of relevant research in the field of memory studies. Chapter 2 draws on existing scholarship on post-socialist memory in German and Russian society and culture in order to identify dominant trends in the way the socialist past has been remembered and represented in the two countries since 1990/1. The analysis in Chapters 3 and 4 reveals a more detailed picture of the complexities and ambiguities inherent in looking back at childhood under socialist rule through the example of the chosen texts, and in the ways they are received by critics and by readers (in reviews posted online). I demonstrate that, in line with the surrounding memory cultures, questions of how the socialist past should be remembered are a more central concern in the German texts and their reception than in the Russian texts and reception. I show, however, that the nature of the Soviet past is often portrayed indirectly in the Russian texts and I explore how critics and readers respond to these portrayals.