| Abstrakt: |
The article examines the introduction of socialist name giving ceremonies in the GDR in order to pose broader questions about church-state relations and the politicization of everyday life in the late 1950s. Based on extensive archival material, the article focuses on the contingencies often obscured by historical narratives that treat socialist rites of passage as mere substitutes for church rites. An analysis of the deliberations of party officials and state bureaucracies about the name giving ceremony reveals a complex of trial and error and experimentation and a series of unanswered questions about the specific meaning of the new ritual. Unlike the socialist confirmation, the Jugendweihe,which fulfilled a concrete function in the political education of the youth and received continuous state support, the name giving ceremony sheds a different light on the socialist state as an altogether reluctant participant in ritual practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
