‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the present: Memory, longing, and East German things

Abstract

The last several years have witnessed the birth and boom of a nostalgia industry in the former East Germany that has entailed the recuperation, (re)production, marketing, and merchandising of GDR products as well as the ‘museumification’ of GDR everyday life. This paper interrogates a distinction between ‘mere’ nostalgia and socially sanctioned commemorative practices by tracing the social lives of East German things, including their paths, diversions, and recuperations, in the context of eastern Germany's transition to a late industrial society. I seek to elucidate not only the social, political, and economic conditions that have produced the recent explosion of ‘Ostalgie’ (nostalgia for the East) in the former GDR, but an interplay between hegemonic and oppositional memories as well. In flaming resistance to western German hegemony in terms of product choices and mass merchandising, I argue, practices and products of ‘Ostalgie’ both contest and affirm the new order.