Alexey Vladimirovich Vlasov,
Graduate Student, Saratov National Research State University, Saratov, Russia, e‑mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Search for One’s Own Identity: Communicative and Cultural Memory in the Memoirs of Employees of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2022-1-16
This article presents an analysis of the peculiarities of articulation of the identity of employees of the Soviet military Administration in Germany within the framework of communicative and cultural memory. This study was conducted on the basis of personal sources (memoirs, diaries and interviews) created by the employees themselves after their service or work in the administration. The results of the process of creating these sources are also presented as an example of transformation of communicative memory into cultural memory. The methodology of the research was based on the concept of communicative and cultural memory by Jan Assman. In the course of the study, it was possible to identify such features of articulation of identity as the representation of oneself as “neo-Decembrists”, involvement in the creation of the GDR, the opposition of the “socialist” and “capitalist”, etc. The complexity of the study of identity and its articulation is described using the categorical “plurality” of the individual aspect of “I-identity” or the multivariate “I-identity” of the Soviet person. The functioning of the communicative memory of the administration staff was complicated by the socio-political processes in the USSR in the 1940s and 1950s, the small number of this socio-territorial community, its dispersion across the country, etc. All these circumstances led to an accelerated transformation of communicative memory of the post-war experience of service and work in East Germany into cultural memory, recorded, among other things, in the memoirs of employees. Articulation of one’s own identity within this framework of memory was accompanied by a gradual and inevitable disappearance.
Publishing: 28/02/2022
The article has been received by the editor on 07.11.2021
How to cite: Vlasov A.V. The Search for One’s Own Identity: Communicative and Cultural Memory in the Memoirs of Employees of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany // Historical Courier, 2022, No. 1 (21), pp. 172–183. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2022/ISTKURIER-2022-1-16.pdf]
Links: Issue 1 2022
Keywords: Soviet military administration in Germany, cultural memory, communicative memory, identity, East Germany, USSR, post-war time, memory studies