Which means that as much as the Ostalgists might hate this idea, they’re just like us. Today’s Ostalgie has an entirely consumerist agenda, driven by an ironic desire for a shopping experience that harkens back to a simpler, more idyllic time before the arrival of capitalism.
This, of course, is the very essence of Western consumerism, and for decades now we’ve been satisfying our desire for virtue, happiness or rebellion through soap, sneakers and SUVs. The most powerful contemporary version of this is the search for the authentic pre-modern experience in all manner of things local, eco- and organic: we’ve convinced ourselves that stopping off at Whole Foods for green tea on the way back from the yoga studio is a credible way of getting back in touch with our true, pre-civilized self.
There is nothing terribly remarkable about the fact that the citizens of former Communist countries are ambivalent about capitalism. So are we, which is precisely why we feel the need to wrap our consumerist urges in the brandwork of anti-consumerist values.
But Ostalgic behaviour is nothing more than the post-Soviet equivalent of the West’s search for authenticity: both are driven by a desire to return to a place outside of the cash nexus, freed of the jockeying for status and the competitive consumption of the market economy.
There is one difference: at least the Eastern Europeans have an actual social experiment to serve as the imagined object of their nostalgia. That puts them one up on the authenticity-seekers in the West, whose noble-savage aspirations hearken back to a past that never existed, and to which we wouldn’t actually want to return even if we could.
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