Tina Kretschmer, who graduates with a DPhil in Psychology, was born in East Germany and is grateful for all the opportunities she has had in being able to travel and study abroad post 1989 – opportunities that were not available to her parents.
Tina, who was nine when the Berlin Wall came down, says: “In essence, the culture of my childhood ceased to exist and was replaced by an overwhelming ‘blanket of West Germany’, which soon seemed to take over and re-order the East.
“Although I doubt that this strategy of complete and rapid change carried out by people from the West and accepted and often celebrated by people in the East was the most successful, the basic experience of being able to grow up in a democracy, to have freedom of speech, not having to fear that my partner or close friend or my uncle is working as an informal spy for the secret police, is something I deeply value.
“My parents grew up in the German East and were as old as I am now when the wall came down. They had not been able to travel and explore the world when they were young but they made sure that I took full advantage of this opportunity. My parents always encouraged and supported me when I went to live abroad and only recently, at the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall last year, did we talk about all the possibilities in life I now have.
“Curiously, my sister chose a very different path and stayed in Germany, where she works as a civil servant. The differences between us were always striking despite being close in age and growing up as best friends. I always found that really fascinating and eventually looked at it in detail in my research.”
Tina, who lived in London and Sweden while studying for her first degree in Berlin, came to Sussex for her DPhil because of the work of developmental psychologist Dr Alison Pike. “While working on my final-year project in Germany I looked at family effects in value development in children and found that, although parents are always discussed as highly important value educators, siblings in one family are not very similar. Alison, with her background in sibling research and her focus on the question of why siblings are so different, was the perfect supervisor.”
Alison says: “Tina was a star. She published several papers during her DPhil and I am very proud of her achievement.”
Tina is now continuing her research at the Institute of Psychiatry. She is analysing data on thousands of adolescents from the Bristol area and trying to identify how pathways of antisocial behaviour are linked to peer and parent-child relationships.