Memories in Dialogue: Transnational Stories About Socialist Childhoods

The chapter is an auto-duo-ethnographic exercise carried out by two scholars of life-writing, who grew up in the late 1970s and 1980s in Hungary and Romania. They draw on life-writing scholarship and memory studies in order to engage with the post-socialist representations of childhood, as well as the methodological challenges that accompany such narratives. Their personal narratives allow paradoxes to coexist, and cast into doubt the inherited paradigms of the “communist child” as an icon of socialist utopia, or a traumatized victim of the repressive regime. The chapter also investigates the role of autobiographical narratives in the process of witnessing and suggests that their co-construction of each other as witnesses can never be about confirmation, but only about the articulation of their mutual co-exposure.