On Roots and Wings: Celebrating Jugendweihe as Coming-of-Age in Peri-Urban Eastern Germany

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article uses the secular coming-of-age ritual Jugendweihe as a case study to argue that any analysis of a life-cycle ritual requires attention not only to the public ceremony but also to the family celebration to understand its social significance. Jugendweihe is closely associated with the former East German state, which employed it as a means of secularisation and of creating ‘socialist personalities’. Empirical studies on Jugendweihe therefore largely focus on the public ceremony, reinforcing the view that in modern state societies the state (public/political) and kinship (private/domestic) are two distinct domains, in which ‘the family’ is believed to be unimportant to the public domain. By contrast, I analyse the Jugendweihe family celebration as providing initiates with both ‘roots’ and ‘wings’: re-creating ties to kin and regional home (roots) and socially acknowledging the initiate’s end of childhood (wings).