Marike made an interesting comment on the possibility of Westalgie: West German leftists recalling Berlin in the good olde days when it was an island of radicals.
And then Andrew wondered in a later post (which I think I accidentally deleted!) whether there were older instances of Ostalgie: previous examples of longing for the East—maybe not the communist east, but something else far-from-here. Maybe he'd like to restate that original idea in response to this post?
I wonder if you combine the two things—nostalgia on the part of Western Lefties for the good old days, including, for some, the GDR, whether it could be understood using ideas applied to orientalism? I know people have already dealt with the West German leftists' attitude toward the GDR: but something like a division within the West German left, to the effect that some thought the GDR was "das bessere Deutschland" and some thought it was a failed approach to Communism/Socialism, or that neither of those systems were desirable, anyway.
Posted by Heather at October 21, 2003 11:43 AM
Comments
I didn't actually mean generic "Orientalism", I actually meant: to what degree was there a romanticization of the Soviet East by East Germans?
Is there something like genre art going on here with current Ostalgie? A sort of fasicnation with some idea about "daily life"?
Posted by: Andrew at October 21, 2003 12:30 PM
Hum, in painting I can say that there were lots of attempts made to make Soviet daily life interesting, but that was mostly for purposes of emulation. You know, show them how great it is and they'll really want to replicate it here. I have a nice example of this from Ostblog: www.nullserver.net/planetgallery/planetgallery.php?plgallery_nr=2&plgallery_img=38
This is an ad (from 1973?) for a women's mag called "The Soviet Woman." Is that the kind of thing you mean?
Posted by: heather at October 21, 2003 01:01 PM
I forgot to mention that you could follow Westalgie in pop culture by starting with "Was tun wenn's brennt," about the re-radicalization of grown-up Kreuzberg agitators. And, although I haven't seen it, you could add the more recent "Die Ritterinnen," which is about rad women in West Berlin, and the intricacies of that scene...Both films seem rather romantic.
Posted by: heather at October 21, 2003 03:01 PM