Kontrolle und Repression. Individuelle Erfahrungen in der DDR 1971-1989

In her PhD thesis, Babett Bauer engages with a fairly recent debate among oral historians about the absence of a more solid and theoretical basis in oral history. She constructively criticizes the lack of theoretical underpinning of approaches within the field. The overall objective of her thesis is to portray the confrontation between East Germans and the Stasi (the state security forces) between 1971 and 1989. Bauer aims to explore East Germans’ personal realities and decision-making processes, given the control and repression they lived under in the GDR. As it is her objective to reconstruct the collective conditions which framed subjective experiences, she bases her analysis on thirty life-story interviews. Following the grounded theory approach, which aims to build theoretical evidence from a sample, the interview partners are selected according to certain criteria, which Bauer unfortunately does not clarify. In addition to the interviews, Bauer relies on Stasi documents, which enable her to contextualize the views and positions of her interview partners more broadly.

Field (mathematics) · Grounded theory · Oral history · Political science · Qualitative research · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Underpinning · Anthropology · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European history and politics · Gender Studies · German History and Society

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