Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany
There was a time, not so long ago, when the former East Germany seemed ripe for so many futures. Sometimes giddy, sometimes anxious discussions sketched the potential of the East to grow in several different directions in the wake of German unification: perhaps into an extension of the political and social order of the West, perhaps into a more humanitarian socialism, perhaps into the embodiment of some third way ideal. At the same time, from the forums of public culture to the practice of everyday life, eastern Germany was experienced by native and visitor alike as a space of dizzying revolution, of abundant presence, of rapid becoming ( Boyer 2001a). Like the rattling of construction equipment that filled the air, the future seemed to vibrate in every moment, always begging the question: What will come next?
What is striking to me about eastern Germany today is not only how this sense of futurity has been dampened but how it has, in fact, been turned inside out. In political and cultural discussions of the East, talk of transformation and futurity has been rendered into tropes of stasis and pastness. In January 2004, for example, New York Times journalist Richard Bernstein described the “strange mood of nostalgia” in eastern Germany: “People wear ‘born-in-the G.D.R.’ T-shirts, or they collect Trabants, the rattling two-cylinder cars that East Germans waited years to buy, or they go online to be contestants on the ‘Ossi-Quiz,’ all questions relating to East German pop culture” (2004; also see Williamson 2003). Perhaps spurred on by such news features, or by a viewing of the recent film Goodbye Lenin! (2003), people unfamiliar with Germany always ask the same questions upon learning that I work in the East. They want to know about the Ostalgie phenomenon: this nostalgia they have heard East Germans now feel for the GDR (German Democratic Republic). There is something equally comic and unsettling for them in the fact that Stalinist totalitarianism now seems preferable to West German social democracy for people who have experienced both. This mix of sentiments (humor, irony, concern, schadenfreude) is immediately reminiscent of Slavoj Žižek’s recent discussion of “postmodern ‘radical’ politics” fascination with totalitarianism — a symptom, he says, of what has been repressed by “global capitalist multiculturalist tolerance” (2001: 244).
I can only agree that Ostalgie is a symptom, but in my opinion it is not — as it is most often interpreted to be — the symptom of an eastern longing for a return to the GDR or for the jouissance of authoritarian rule. The work of this essay is to offer an alternative analysis of Ostalgie, one that takes neither its easternness nor its pastness (nor, for that matter, its status as phenomenon) at face value. Instead, this essay locates the discourse and identification of Ostalgie within an ethnological politics of memory and an allochronic politics of the future, whose conjuncture produces the effect of the past-fixation of East Germans. In a word, my strategy is to use Ostalgie as a lens through which to examine the problem of the future in eastern Germany, a future that has by no means been dampened beyond recognition. Rather, a certain social knowledge of eastern pastness has become its medium.
The essay has three parts. In the first, I explore the term nostalgia itself and note how this seventeenth-century German medical neologism — intended to be roughly synonymous with, if technically superior to, the vernacular term Heimweh (homesickness) — originally signaled a malady of spatial and national displacement. The term nostalgia, as has often been observed, is a compound of two Greek words, nostos (the return home) and algos (grief, pain, or sorrow). One may recall that the Algea of Greek myth were the children of Eris (strife) and the siblings of Lethe (oblivion), Limos (starvation), Ponos (toil), and many other misfortunes. I focus my comments on the historicity and sociology of the neologism, arguing ultimately that nostalgia represents an important moment in the embodiment of nation. I also argue that the relationship of algos to nation is the key dynamic we must decipher in thinking through the presence of nostalgia in contemporary Germany.
The second part of the essay develops historical and psychoanalytic framings for nostalgia in postwar Germany. Here I focus on the grief and pain of the memory of the Third Reich, a grief that has codified history — and pastness more generally — in postwar Germany as burden (Belastung), fabricating it as a powerful ethnological inheritance and presence that calls into question any German future. In analyzing the burden of Germanness, I observe how the externally imposed division and occupation of Germany from 1945 to 1990 became a rather providential means for deferring confrontation with the ethnology of the Holocaust. This deferral was accomplished in both Germanys by claiming that the “more German Germans” lived on the other side of the Berlin Wall. But the fragility of this strategy of dealing with history was revealed in the events of 1989. After 1990 there is again the one Germany, the one history, the one burden. But East/West distinction remains a powerful axis of social imagination, a residue of the Cold War politics of memory and identity. This, I argue, is the context within which we must understand contemporary East-West relations in Germany and the everyday dispositions that have been codified as Ostalgie.
The third part of the essay explores, in an admittedly selective and partial way, the cultural terrain and political logic of Ostalgie in Germany today. Looking at widely publicized Ostalgie phenomena like the mass-market magazine Super Illu and the movie Goodbye Lenin! alongside the less well-known but more important (from an East German perspective) work of the journalist and novelist Alexander Osang, I pay special attention here to the semiotics of East German pastness in cultural representation. I argue, in essence, that Ostalgie is not what it seems to be — it is a symptom less of East German nostalgia than of West German utopia. I mean utopia in the sense that it is a naturalizing fantasy that creates an irrealis space, literally a “no-place,” in which East Germans’ neurotic entanglement with authoritarian pastness allows those Germans gendered western to claim a future free from the burden of history. The very powerful and diverse Ostalgie industry of unified Germany reflects the desire of its West German owners and operators to achieve an unburdened future via the repetitive signaling of the pastobsession of East Germans. But this incessant signaling is itself symptomatic of West Germans’ own past-orientation. In the end, the therapy of East/West distinction cannot really resolve or dissolve what Freud might have termed the pathogenic nucleus of the Holocaust in all postwar German memory. Nevertheless such therapy exerts tremendous effects upon the lives and self-knowledge of eastern German citizens.
Nostalgia and Nation
Nostalgia, it has widely been noted, was a term coined by a medical student, Johannes Hofer, in his dissertation for the University of Basel in 1688. Hofer’s dissertation is a remarkable text, one that is often cited but rarely explored in its nuances, so I would like to linger on it. The text begins with the timeless dissertational ritual of effusive thanks to the academic powers that be. Thereafter Hofer moves immediately to offering and defining the curious term nostalgia. He is almost apologetic at burdening the reader with this neologism, given that the term das Heimweh (homesickness) is already so well known in the vernacular. But Hofer explains that Heimweh lacks the medical specificity and seriousness to describe adequately some of the fatal and near-fatal cases of homesickness that he documents in his dissertation.
Hofer emphasizes that he is not wedded to the particular term nostalgia. The more important point for him is that the affliction be recognized as a truly physiological disorder. Hofer writes:
Nor in truth, deliberating on a name, did a more suitable one occur to me, defining the thing to be explained, more concisely than the word Nostalgias, Greek in origin and indeed composed of two sounds, the one of which is Nostos, return to the native land; the other Algos, signifies suffering or grief; so that thus far it is possible from the force of the sound Nostalgia to define the sad mood originating from the desire to return to one’s native land. (1934: 380 – 81)
Interestingly, Hofer also offers two alternative neologisms, neither of which history has treated quite so kindly as nostalgia. “If nostomania or the name philopatridomania is more pleasing to anyone,” Hofer writes, “in truth denoting a spirit perturbed against holding fast to their native land from any cause whatsoever (denoting) return, it will be entirely approved by me” (381).
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