This article provides readers with first insights into historical documents that comprise recently revealed letter serials having been written by graduates of a teacher pre-service training. On the basis of these documents, I will present a methodological approach for reconstructing the teachers’ professional and educational biographies. From this vantage point, the following questions come to the fore: How did the ‘actors’ develop specific strategies of action that would help them to make their (professional) living? How did they in hindsight reveal and reflect on the historical processing of their lifetime before and after World War II? How did they try to shape their memories, build an identity of their own, and with that find concepts and explanations for their life stories? In order to answer these questions, I will take advantage of a praxeological cultural studies heuristic that aims at the connection of analyses on the micro-level with data on the macro-level, i.e. a micro-analysis of the situation-bound constitution of individual meaning potentials in the historical processing of the teacher careers with a macro-analysis of the institutional, organisational and cultural frames. The findings are supposed to run into a middle-range theory that systematically combines an ‘interpretive understanding’ with ‘causal explanations’.