"Spring Breeeeeak! Yeah!" - Milhouse
I am facing a "week off." This of course means that I don't have any time off, but I do have a little more time to focus on some of the things that I desperately need to finish. The first of these will be the paper I'm giving on Kunst in der DDR on a panel about Ostalgie at the Conference of the Popular Culture Association next month.
When I proposed the paper, we were in the thick of the most recent Ostalgie craze, and I was a little annoyed to see the Berlin Nationalgalerie's exhibition mentioned in conjunction with the sensationalizing tv shows and even Good Bye Lenin, because I saw KidDDR as an anomaly within the rest of the nostalgic reminiscence that was going on. Now the challenge is to articulate why (if indeed) it was different.
I remember reading sometime around January, in places I can no longer find, that the wave of nostalgia for the GDR was over. Seemed unlikely to me at the time, and now as I look around to see what people are saying about it at the moment, I see that the general consensus is that Ostalgie is still with us.
Seriously: Andreas Krause at the Berliner Zeitung:
Kritiker dieser Kuschel-DDR fürchten die Verharmlosung der untergegangenen Diktatur. Das ist ja gerade der Zweck des ganzen Zaubers. Man kann von der Popkultur kaum verlangen, in schöner Ausgewogenheit die Ergebnisse historischer Forschung unter die Leute zu bringen. Zumal es bei der Ostalgie nicht um die DDR, sondern um das Verhältnis der Deutschen zu sich selbst fast 15 Jahre nach der Wende geht.
And less seriously: A report on the furniture store Möbel Höffner, which is selling mugs bearing the emblem of the GDR (or an alternate design with a Trabi). The director of the Stasi-Memorial in Hohenschönhausen protests that this is a "slap in the face" for victims of the regime. (Here's the Berliner Zeitung's extremely unimpressed reaction to the same thing.) This was all a few weeks ago, though; might be water under the bridge now.
[update: Ah, yes; one of the places I had read about the end of Ostalgie was here, at a trustworthy source.]
Posted by Heather at March 12, 2004 11:27 AM
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