CANDICE LANG WROTE IN 1982: “Autobiography is indeed everywhere one cares to find it. […] If the writer is always, in the broadest sense, implicated in the work, any writing may be judged to be autobiographical, depending on how one reads it.” It is in this broad sense that the concept of autobiography will be used for all the texts that will be examined here, because they all contain reflections on the writer's own past in narrative form.

At key turning points in history, the need to record memoirs is particularly great. Personal reflections in the public arena following a major historical event, at a time when people are writing against a similar background, can be interesting because similar patterns of description of actions and attitudes may become apparent, or these reflections can reveal a variety of actions and reactions in the same or similar circumstances. After the fall of the GDR, there was a torrent of autobiographical accounts from East Germans from various sectors of society, and this vast body of material sheds a revealing light on the complex structures of GDR society.

Until now, relatively little attention has been paid to autobiographical texts written by the political elite in analyzing the GDR's past, since they are seen above all as justificatory texts in which life experiences and events have been reinterpreted in the light of hindsight. Values that were propagated in the GDR and internalized by society as a whole as well as by individuals, and that were often the subject of post-Wende discussions, achieve significance once again in the autobiographical texts of the ruling elite, where attempts are often made to defend them. Those values also become a means to an end when people present their past. The historian Jürgen Danyel, who believes that this life writing has barely any significance for researchers, holds that in the process of working through the past of the GDR, the point was precisely to break the monopoly held by the SED (Socialist Unity Party) on interpretation of the social and political reality of GDR society. By contrast, the intention here is to show that under the new conditions of the post-Wende period, the representations of the personal GDR pasts of the functionaries are significant above all in their totality.