Post-Cold War Narratives of Nostalgia

Abstract

There is more memory than remembrance. We do not reign over the past. It contains as many secrets as thefuture. Adam Zagajewski, Der Verrat iV Since the momentous changes of 1989 in Eastern Europe, developments in each of the former East Bloc countries have been uneven. Those countries situated at the greatest distance from the geopoUtical center of Europe—in the east and southeast—are also furthest removed from the goals ofWestern-style democracy and market economy. In countries like Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia, which had initially started down what the West has labeled the path of nostalgia, postcommunist rule is only now, in the late 1990s, declining. East Bloc countries closer to Europe's center—the former East Ger- many, Poland, Hungary, and the former Czechoslovakia—seem to have moved further in their Westernization efforts. But even this group is marked by major differences in the history of their transitions, in the makeup ofthe poUtical and business eUtes after 1989, as well as in cur- rent government structures and the development of a civil society. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have made enough progess toward a market economy and democracy to have been invited to join NATO by 1999 and to have been promised membership in the European Union. (Unification with West Germany has already brought the former East Germany into both organizations.) And yet, with the exception of the Czech RepubUc,2 aU these countries witnessed in the late 1990s the emergence of narratives ofnostalgia for the socialist past. This nostalgia for the East in Hungary, Poland, and East Germany, which I wul label by re-appropriating a primarUy derogative term coined in Germany, has resulted in the election ofpostcommunists in 1993-1995.3 The importance ofthese new narratives has so far been overlooked or dismissed in the West. In Germany, Ostalgie is predomin- antly seen as a useless sentiment for an irretrievable temporality or, at its worst, as the longing to return to a totalitarian past. Alternatively, Ostalgie has been characterized as a waU in the heads ofeast Germans4 who have not yet managed to assimilate. In his short story entitled Die vier Werkzeugmacher (The Four Toolmakers), the east German writer Volker Braun describes how this typical view of Ostalgie characterizes east Germans as being glued to something theywere always indifferent to and from which they now have to become unglued violently (36). TheAmerican researcher Richard S. Ebenshade has caUed East-Cen- tral European nostalgia another variation ofever more powerful forget- ting (84). His view of Ostalgie reiterates a common assumption among