The OKV's understanding of historical developments can best be distilled by analyzing how individual narrators situate their own life histories in the contexts of the GDR and of unified Germany. In this chapter we will look at the way in which several of the tropes on the GDR past are woven into the life accounts of OKV members and sympathizers, on the basis of interviews I conducted during several research trips from 2012 to 2015. These people share what political scientist David Patton, in his book on the history of PDS/Die Linke after 1989, calls “distinctly Eastern biographies”. Patton argues that in the biographies of former GDR functionaries we find a shared commitment to the GDR, which was coupled with careers as party and state functionaries. After 1990, these “distinctly Eastern” careers set them aside as people implicated with the former socialist state, making it difficult for them to find work in the newly unified Germany.

While Patton uses the term for a narrow group of people, I suggest that the category of distinctly Eastern biographies is applicable to all persons who strongly identified with the GDR and its politics through their biographies, whether state functionaries or not. As the chapter will show, all persons interviewed adhere to what can be called the “OKV view on the GDR”. This view is not only a conscious expression of their ideological preferences, but it also reflects the way in which they understand their life histories in relation to GDR modes of interpreting political events and developments.