Abstract:

“Childhood (…) is media-childhood” (Charlton/Neumann-Braun 1992) – and it has been in the past and will be in the future. Based on the concept of the mediatization of media-scientist Friedrich Krotz (2009) this paper tries to focus on an “artistic” perspective about current media development within different “media cultures” of society (Hepp 2010).
After a brief introduction of the concept of mediatization, the present paper will examine how the idea of media culture links remembered childhood and children's literature. The research question was, in how far children's literature influences identity modeling and how readers their self may reflect this influence after significant political and cultural changes of their childhood society. It thereby draws the attention to the impact of a childhood reading education as part of cultural identity building - which seems to be relevant mainly in present migrant and multicultural societies.
The study is based on a corpus of altogether more than 15.000 reading biographies, collected as part of New Zealand’s artist Joanne Moar's art-project “Becoming German”.
The Artist began her project 2005 as an act of her own immigrant desire of "becoming German" – a process that according to Moar, needed a "German reading childhood." So - more than a decade after the fall of the Berlin wall - she first interviewed East- and West-German people on the street – followed up by an Internet database that can be used individually to "spend" or "receive" a biography.
As part of our research, utilizing content analysis (Mayring 2003; Kuckartz 2016) of experts' interviews (Gläser/Laudel 2010), we analyzed a adjusted set of data covering 4.112 biographies of former East- and West Germans and their statements about their beloved books out of a childhood between 1950 and 1990.
Analyzing the corpus of titles as well as statements about the personal impact of the specific texts and their values we focused on the overall effect of children's literature on the quest for identity.
Supposing the impact of writing as a vehicle for a political ideology or at least cultural identity we were wondering how people remembered their reading biography after the fall of the Berlin wall. Of course, they construct and recall their childhood based on different cultural circumstances. The question was whether children's literature thereby functioned as a sustainable authority for socialization. The results lead to the conclusion, that identity construction seems to be more related to the respectively actual cultural circumstances than to those of the childhood. Whereas nearly all of the interviewed East- and West-German readers remembered the international canon, hardly any of the highly promoted socialist's authors and titles were still present in the communicated memories.
The paper presents findings based on a current research program of the Research Center of Youth - Media - Education at the Technical University of Dortmund and the Ludwigsburg University of Education (both Germany).

Keywords:

Media education, children's literature, identity, cultural heteronomy, mediatization.