Overlooked and Undeserving: Older People in Narratives of Return in Post-1989 East Germany

Abstract

The German right-wing populist party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) opposes diverse family lifestyles by promoting the return to a family model of father, mother, and children. This “Narrative of Return” paves the way for the party’s anti-gender, anti-childlessness, and anti-immigration agendas. The article examines how narratives about families as promoted by AfD reflect or address experiences of the post-socialist transformation in East Germany. It turns out that Narratives of Return (NoR) overlook the elderly as acting individuals and disregard the ways they engage with their families, and how they continue to organize their lives autonomously in old age. NoR instead depict older people as an anonymous group of supposedly undeserving retired, who benefit from society and family without having any function in them. However, discourses on care for the family can be traced down to a micro-level that confirms how care for the family is, in fact, care for older people. The article presents two selected life stories of advanced-age East Germans to substantiate this claim. The life stories reveal that older people themselves believe in various notions of family, despite being served with NoR in recent past. Experiences in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) even seem to prevent older people from again falling for totalizing schemes that order and prescribe uniform (family) experience. Consequently, it is not to be expected that NoR will succeed in closing discourses on care for the family easily.