Children on Display: Children’s History, Socialism, and Photography

• Published in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 2019-04, Vol.67 (1), p.3-10
• Main Author: Winkler, Martina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Armed forces; Child soldiers; Childhood; Children; Children & youth; Common ground; EDITORIAL; English language; Families & family life; Historians; Ideology; JGO 2019, 3; Literary translation; Methodology; Multiculturalism & pluralism; Photography; Political history; Politics; Propaganda; Socialism; Socialist societies; Space; Television; Topic and comment; Translation methods and strategies; Visual culture; Visual history
• ISSN: 0021-4019; 2366-2891
• DOI: 10.25162/JGO-2019-0001

Rather, new research explores the complexities of political strategies, social mechanisms and cultural representations which included a broad range of historical agents: instead of postulating a simple dichotomy between 'the regime' and 'the people', the latest studies recognize how diverse players on all levels of the party, in political administration and in institutions such as schools, healthcare or science come to the fore.4 Another important aspect became apparent when historians began to understand the significance of social spaces - public and private spaces as well as escapist spaces - which all contributed in their own ways to the stability of the system.5 Finally, a fresh interest in late socialist societies and their post-ideological, seemingly stable, even permanent structures6 supports such an approach and enables a detailed and unagitated perspective on what we refer to, perhaps a little hastily and in generalizing fashion, by using the umbrella term "socialism". Extensive and controversial debates on the very concept of childhood, on child labor and child soldiers or the value ascribed to children have demonstrated the significance of an explicitly historical approach to the topic that enables a pluralistic and non-normative perspective.13 By historicizing the highly charged modern concept of 'the best interest of the child', researchers learn about the culturally changing fields of children's agency and the diverse perceptions of what childhood was (and is) supposed to look like.14 Within this fresh pluralism, our understanding of socialist childhoods is about to find a new place: a place that escapes its traditional position within the general frame of East-versus-West (and more often than not black-andwhite) dualism.15 This new place is in the process of being defined by a whole range of questions touching upon the very meaning of childhood as a cultural symbol within the world of socialist utopias, the relationship between children and politics, and children's agendas and agency. Inspiring studies from a historian's point of view, with a focus on socialist societies, are for instance vowinckel (ed.) Fotografie in Diktaturen; Campbell Agitating Images; james Common Ground; Kiss Verhandelte Bilder; see also murav (ed.) The Afterlife of Photographs. 3 SABROW Socialism as Sinnwelt. 4 kolář Der Poststalinismus; Fürst (ed.) Late Stalinist Russia. 5 Crowley (ed.) Socialist Spaces. 6 yurchak Everything was Forever; pullmann Konec experimentu. 7