The Early FRG and its Youth (1949-1965). A Historical-Contextual Secondary Evaluation.
This project reconsiders youth surveys of the early FRG (Historical-Contextual Secondary Analysis).
In doing so, the historian should not only focus on the essential recapitulation of social scientific sources. The accurate source-criticism includes the re-analysis of the data material as well as all information about opinion research politics, the origins and aims of youth research and the usage of survey-results.
A historical contextualization requires further types of sources - above all the contemporary debates on youth, which were closely connected to those new methods of empirical social research and which took place in an interdisciplinary field of enormous public effect.
It is necessary to confront those contemporarily interpretations with an own re-analysis of the survey results. This has to be supplemented by incorporation into the general historical framework. (educational system, working conditions, developments in demography, economy, politics, “zeitgeist” etc.)
The analysis will reconsider the controversial images of West German youth constructed by scientific and political communities. It is – alongside science-historical parts - a contribution to the historiography of the youth.
Simultaneous it is also a study of self-, ideal- and nightmare-visions of the West-German-society in general, which had found a meaningful projection surface of itself - especially in connection with discourses about leisure time. Debating youth issues is always - and very acute in the early ("youthful") Federal Republic – constant worry about integration. Moreover it is also a substitutional conflict - where a combination of sources and methods can expose the search for the self-conception and finally the values of that particular historical society.
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