Jeannette Prochnow
"...and then we said, man, it can't be true that it´s all over!" An ethnography of communication of the community of former East German COMECON pipeline labourers. (Working title)
In June 1974, delegates of former COMECON member states signed the general agreement on economic collaboration to tap natural gas resources near Orenburg in the then Soviet Union. The introduced case study is concerned with current communicative practices of former DDR contract workers and delegates of the FDJ , who were involved in the construction of a transnational pipeline in the former Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. For many years two Trassenvereine (pipeline commemorative associations) founded by former pipeline workers have developed cultural practices leading to a shared group identity. Inside the communicative infrastructure of the group, a variety of topics are addressed such as career paths after the breakdown of socialism, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, transformations in East Germany after the "Wende", and their work and life in the Soviet Union to name only a random selection.
Building upon the ethnography of communication the project raises the question of which technical, biographical, socio-cultural and political features and circumstances have had an impact on the formation, maintenance and segmentation of the community of former GDR pipeline labourers since the mid 1990s. The study centres on social and cultural practices, for instance network building, to manage the process of social change and to establish meaningful linkages between the socialist past and the transforming respectively transformed East-German society.
