IDENTITY WITHIN CULTURAL HETERONOMY: THE INFLUENCE OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE FOR IDENTITY MODELING OF EAST-AND WEST-GERMAN READERS

"Childhood (...) is media-childhood" [1] - and it has been in the past and will be in the future. Based on the concept of the mediatization of the German media-scientist Friedrich Krotz [2] this paper tries to focus on an "artistic" perspective about current media development within different "cultures" of society [3]. After a brief introduction of the concept of mediatization, the present paper will examine how the idea of media culture links remembered childhood and children's literature. The research question was, in how far children's literature influences identity modeling and how readers their self may reflect this influence after significant political and cultural changes of their childhood society. It thereby draws the attention to the impact of a childhood reading education as part of cultural identity building - which seems to be relevant mainly in present migrant and multicultural societies. The study is based on a corpus of altogether more than 15.000 reading biographies, collected as part of New Zealand's artist Joanne Moar's art-project "Becoming German" [4]. The paper presents findings based on a current research program of the Research Center of Youth - Media - Education at the Technical University of Dortmund and the Ludwigsburg University of Education (both Germany).