While I haven't yet had time to collect them, I am about to choose some of the better (read: more frustrating) responses people have had to the news that someone wanted to build an GDR theme park in Berlin. Apparently this was the news story that got a lot of non-Germans thinking about Ostalgie.
Every response registers disbelief that people could be nostalgic for a repressive system, which the GDR most certainly was. But I doubt that it's the state apparatus that people are longing for. There were ways of living in that system, types of community or support networks that were somehow unique to it. Those who felt they belonged to that community are really missing it now. I don't just mean the fact that everyone had a job, or that childcare was easily available or other positive aspects of the socialist system (with the necessary caveats concerning the drawbacks of such state-sponsored social programs). I mean a sense of belonging, perhaps springing especially out of that particular type of adversity, which in the "integrated" Germany is totally lacking.
Comments
Yes, I heard about this longing for a lost sense of community often when I lived in Mecklenburg in 1995-1996--"we didn't have fancy clothes/ nice cars then, but we had close friends," etc.
But I was also wondering, Heather, have you heard or run across any forms or articulations of Westalgie? I picked up a book last year (alas, two years ago) about West Berlin--interviews with activists, actors, writers, politicians, etc. sort of about the good old days when West Berlin was an island for the leftists.
Posted by: Marike at October 20, 2003 07:42 PM