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Brief thoughts on Ostalgie

I heard a number of excellent and useful definitions of Ostalgie at the German Culture Panels of the Popular Culture Association conference this weekend. Sebastian Heiduschke suggested that Ostalgie was a means of laying claim to a collective memory--and pointed out that the term was already appearing in 1991 (huh; the earliest reference I'd found was in 1996). Perhaps the best-developed interpretation was that presented by Joe Jozwiak and Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak, which applied post-colonial theory to Sonnenallee and Goodbye, Lenin. Someone made the excellent point that if we think of unification as a type of colonialization, and former East Germans as a marginalized group within German society, we can use postcolonial theory to understand the possibilities of multiple viewpoints.
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Another very keen observation by the same person (unfortunately I never learned this woman's name) was that if Ostalgie is recalling a past that never was quite as it is remembered, a model for understanding it might be the Heimat movement of the 1950s. This, I think, was the most striking observation for me.
Both Anne Hector (who spoke on Christoph Hein's Willenbrock and Jana Hensel's Zonenkinder) and I found ourselves pushing an Anti-Ostalgie, a term which cropped up in a few other papers, as well. I'm still not sure what this is, but I think that for me, it involves a multivalent perspective on the GDR. This might be something between collective memory and biography or personal experience. At times I feel that outside observers, like myself, can compile statistical information and perhaps even interpret historical documents in factual terms, but that no one can tell the East Germans what happened to them. The "GDR" (i.e., not the state but the larger phenomenon) is too bound up in life experience, in the subjectivity of the people who lived there/then and now live somewhere/time else.

Posted by Heather at April 11, 2004 09:52 PM