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Abstract
In former Eastern Bloc nations, nostalgia is often seen as a dangerous pining for days under totalitarian regimes in the face of rocky transitions to democratization. This paper questions these judgments and instead proposes that the complexities of waxing nostalgic in post-communism will help us understand these transitions better. East German culture, in particular, has been at the forefront of post-communist nostalgia through its ostalgie movement. Wolfgang Becker's film Good Bye Lenin! has been touted as the most representative example of ostalgie, and is used here as a text to examine the complex questions about looking back on everyday life during communism's fall. Through its use of nostalgic themes, the film simultaneously embraces and derides the Western values that became an indelible part of the post-1989 landscape, and thus serves as a reminder that a distinct East German identity may still exist.
Acknowledgements
He would like to thank Dr. Trevor Parry-Giles for his tireless work and excellent advice on endless drafts of this essay. He also appreciates Dr. Benjamin Bates’ constructive comments on an earlier draft of this essay at the annual convention of the Eastern Communication Association in 2007. Finally, the author would like to thank Dr. John M. Sloop and the two anonymous reviewers at CCCS, who all provided invaluable feedback and encouragement.
Notes
1. Zala Volcic, “Yugo-Nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 1 (March 2007): 25.
2. See: Volcic, “Yugo-Nostalgia,” 25; Frederic Jameson, “Nostalgia for the Present,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. 2 (1989): 536; Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 170.
3. James A. Janack, “The Future's Foundation in a Contested Past: Nostalgia and Dystalgia in the 1996 Russian Presidential Campaign,” Southern Communication Journal 65, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 45.
4. Serguei Alex. Oushakine, “‘We're Nostalgic But We're Not Crazy’: Retrofitting the Past in Russia,” The Russian Review 66 (July 2007): 452.
5. Stuart Tannock, “Nostalgia Critique,” Cultural Studies 9, no. 3 (1995): 461.
6. Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (June 1995): 220.
7. Zelizer, “The Shape of Memory Studies,” 218–21; Marouf Hasian, Jr. and Helene A. Shugart, “Melancholic Nostalgia, Collective Memories, and the Cinematic Representations of Nationalistic Identities in Indochine,” Communication Quarterly 49, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 332.
8. Kimberly K. Smith, “Mere Nostalgia: Notes on a Progressive Paratheory,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3, no. 4 (2000): 522.
9. Vaclav Havel, “New Year's Address to the Nation: Prague, January 1, 1990,” in The Art of the Impossible, trans., ed. Paul Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 9.
10. Joakim Ekman and Jonas Linde, “Communist Nostalgia and the Consolidation of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 21, no. 3 (September 2005): 354–74; See also: Paul Cooke, Representing East Germany Since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 104.
11. Good Bye Lenin!, DVD, directed by Wolfgang Becker (2002; Berlin, Germany: Sony Pictures, 2004).
12. Daphne Berdahl, “‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things,” Ethnos 64, no. 2 (1999): 193.
13. Joe Moran, “November in Berlin: The End of Everyday,” History Workshop Journal 57 (2004): 228.
14. Chris Salter, “The Kulturstaat in the Time of Empire: Notes on Germany Thirteen Years After,” Performing Arts Journal 77 (2004): 12.
15. Anke Finger, “Hello Willy, Good Bye Lenin!: Transitions of an East German Family,” South Central Review 22, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 39–58; Nick Hodgin, “Berlin is in Germany and Good Bye Lenin!: Taking Leave of the GDR?” Debatte 12, no. 1 (2004): 25–45.
16. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xvi.
17. Stephen P. Depoe, “Requiem for Liberalism: The Therapeutic and Deliberative Functions of Nostalgic Appeals in Edward Kennedy's Address to the 1980 Democratic National Convention,” Southern Communication Journal 55 (Winter 1990): 175.
18. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xiv.
19. Tannock, “Nostalgia Critique,” 454.
20. Shawn Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles, “Collective Memory, Political Nostalgia, and the Rhetorical Presidency: Bill Clinton's Commemoration of the March on Washington, August 28, 1998,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86, no. 4 (November 2000): 420–21, 428.
21. David Lowenthal, “Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn't,” in Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, ed. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989), 21–22.
22. Fred Davis, “Nostalgia, Identity, and the Current Nostalgia Wave,” Journal of Popular Culture 11, no. 2 (Fall 1977): 418.
23. David Lowenthal, “Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn't,” in Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, ed. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989), 21–22.1 Fred Davis, “Nostalgia, Identity, and the Current Nostalgia Wave,” Journal of Popular Culture 11, no. 2 (Fall 1977)., 415.
24. Tannock, “Nostalgia Critique,” 456.
25. Tannock, “Nostalgia Critique,”., 456–57.
26. See Greg Dickinson, “Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83, no. 1 (February 1997): 1–27; Greg Dickinson, “The Pleasantville Effect: Nostalgia and the Visual Framing of (White) Suburbia,” Western Journal of Communication 70, no. 3 (July 2006): 212–33.
27. Guglielmo Bellelli and Mirella A.C. Amatulli, “Nostalgia, Immigration, and Collective Memory,” in Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives, ed. James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez, and Bernard Rime (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 209–20.
28. Eugene B. Daniels, “Nostalgia and Hidden Meaning,” American Imago 42, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 379.
29. Janelle L. Wilson, “‘Remember When…:’ A Consideration of the Concept of Nostalgia,” ETC (Fall 1999): 303.
30. Daniels, “Nostalgia and Hidden Meaning,” 381–82.
31. Lowenthal, “Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn't,” 30.
32. Wendy Wheeler, “Nostalgia Isn't Nasty – The Postmodernising of Parliamentary Democracy,” in Altered States: Postmodernism, Politics, Culture, ed. Mark Perryman (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1994), 98.
33. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 58.
34. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia., 49.
35. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia., 41; 49–50.
36. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia., 43.
37. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia., 49–50.
38. Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism (New York: Random House, 1995), 264.
39. Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR 1949–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5.
40. Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR 1949–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 129–30.
41. Ernest D. Plock, East German-West German Relations and the Fall of the GDR (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 2.
42. Paul Betts, “Remembrance of Things Past: Nostalgia in West and East Germany, 1980–2000,” in Pain and Prosperity: Reconsidering Twentieth-Century German History, ed. Paul Betts and Greg Eghigian (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 180.
43. Jane Kramer, The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (New York: Random House, 1996), 108.
44. Betts, “Remembrance of Things Past,” 181.
45. Betts, “Remembrance of Things Past,” 181.
46. Moran, “November in Berlin,” 217–18.
47. Moran, “November in Berlin,”., 218.
48. Cooke, Representing East Germany, 7.
49. Moran, “November in Berlin,” 223.
50. Corey Ross, The East German Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of the GDR (London: Arnold Publishers, 2002), 130.
51. Charity Scribner, “Tender Rejection: The German Democratic Republic Goes to the Museum,” European Journal of English Studies 4, no. 2 (2000): 176.
52. Moran, “November in Berlin,” 226.
53. Milena Veenis, “Consumption in East Germany: The Seduction and Betrayal of Things,” Journal of Material Culture 4, no. 1 (1999): 81.
54. Veenis, “Consumption in East Germany,” 86.
55. William Outhwaite and Larry Ray, Social Theory and Postcommunism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 178.
56. William Outhwaite and Larry Ray, Social Theory and Postcommunism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 178; 195–96.
57. See: Outhwaite and Ray, Social Theory and Postcommunism, 191–95; Janack, “The Future's Foundation in a Contested Past,” 34–48; Andrew Roberts, “The Politics and Anti-Politics of Nostalgia,” East European Politics and Societies 16, no. 3 (2003): 764–809; Joakim Ekman and Jonas Linde, “Communist Nostalgia,” 354–74.
58. Salter, “Kulturstaat,” 12–13.
59. Paul Betts, “The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture,” The Journal of Modern History 72 (September 2000): 734.
60. See: Scribner, “Tender Rejection,” 173; Rosenberg, The Haunted Land, 289.
61. Scribner, “Tender Rejection,” 174.
62. Berdahl, “‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the Present,” 202.
63. Berdahl, “‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the Present,”., 199.
64. Betts, “Twilight of the Idols,” 746.
65. For explorations of other treatments of nostalgia in Eastern German films, see: Leonie Naughton, That Was the Wild East: Film Culture, Unification, and the ‘New’ Germany, Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany Series (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 93–124; Paul Cooke, “Performing ‘Ostalgie’: Leander Haussmann's Sonnenallee,” German Life and Letters 56, no. 2 (April 2003): 156–67.
66. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 54–55.
67. Edward Casey's typology of four different forms of memory proves instructive here. Casey defines one of his four as “public memory,” which serves as an “encircling horizon,” where “discussion with others is possible,” and “where one is exposed and vulnerable, where one's limitations and fallibilities are all too apparent.” Casey's version of public memory is composed largely around his other three types of memory—individual, social, and collective. Individual memory and social memory are interlocked—individual reflections and memories are created and perpetuated by virtue of being reminded, recognized, or by reminiscing with others. Social memory, then, works in memories shared discursively by those we already have relationships with. Collective memory, by contrast, represents the circumstance by which different people, often unknown to each other, recall the same events, but each in their own way. See: Edward Casey, “Public Memory in Place and Time,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004), 21–22, 25.
68. For more examples of the repackaging of old GDR brands in the 1990s and their approach to advertising showing solidarity with the Eastern identity, see: Rainer Gries, “‘Hurrah! I'm Still Alive!” East German Products Demonstrating East German Identities,” in Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures Through an East-West Gaze, ed. Sibelan Forrester, Magdalena J. Zaborowska, and Elena Gapova (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 186–91.
69. Gries, “Hurrah! I'm Still Alive,” 200.
70. Scribner, “Tender Rejection,” 186.
71. David Denby, “Women and the System; Good Bye Lenin! and Osama” New Yorker, March 8, 2004, 92.
72. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 60.
73. Denby, “Women and the System,” 92.
74. Hodgin, “Taking Leave of the GDR?,” 35.
75. Hodgin, “Taking Leave of the GDR?,”., 26.