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.