Jugendpolitik in der DDR

As studies to date have shown, the aims and key aspects of the GDR’s youth policy and its practical consequenc-es have not yielded satisfactory results. Steffi Lehmann’s study is the first to contextualise the SED’s ideological demands as well as the real consequences of its youth policy and treatment of – supposedly – oppositional young people between 1945 and 1989/90. In her study, which outlines four time periods, she examines the aims of the GDR’s official youth policy, its socialist doctrine of education and the function of the FDJ on the one hand, and the real conditions in the country, i.e. attitudes towards the FDJ, general conduct in the private sphere and recreational activities, and the pressure to conform and nonconformism on the other. Her conclusion is that most adolescents internalised the speech and behaviour prescribed by the SED and adopted them in public, e.g. at school or at work, but not in their private lives and leisure time.