There is the issue of nostalgia culture’s place in the constitution of social identities and groups, and, by implication, the question of the ‘politics of nostalgia’: the question, that is, of the meanings and significance of the view(s) of the past offered by nostalgia culture. What [Radstone's] survey [of critical 'nostalgia' literature] does reveal is that debates concerning the politics of nostalgia require analyses of nostalgia culture that differentiate between its varieties, and that attend to the specificities of nostalgia culture’s representations of the past, its strategies of address and its appeal.- Susannah Radstone, The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory, 2007, p129. Emphasis mine.
Radstone names here one of the fundamental impulses in my work: to draw apart this simplistic 'ostalgie' concept, to name its parts, to precisely call it by different names, to notice different species, different attenuations, different imperatives. The journalistic variety of 'ostalgie' - wherein Good Bye Lenin! is posited as being the same as Trabant fan clubs or a post-unification justification of the Berlin Wall - pays little attention to these qualitative differences. The reportage does, of course, vary from the "oh, look at this backward whimsy" to the "hark! Communists among us!" varieties, but greater subtlety than this seems a lost hope.
(Until the emergence of my dissertation, when all will be right again in the world.)
(Pic via DHM)
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