Awful food, commie cars and the bad old days
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, November 26, 2009 - 2 Comments
German consumers are hearkening back to a simpler time, a time before capitalism. Sound familiar to anyone?
Travelling through Eastern Europe a few years ago, my companion and I took a tour of Nova Huta, the Krakow suburb that had been designed by Stalin as the ideal proletarian city. Our guide was Mike, an excitable 30-year-old in camo pants and a flat-top who had ditched his law career when he realized the old ladies selling potatoes in the market made more than he would.
Mike drove us around Nova Huta in a rickety old Trabant, pointing out various totalitarian sites, then took us to his rented apartment, which he had tricked out with all manner of Soviet-era furnishings, artwork and appliances. It was all very authentic. It was all very crappy.
This was my first experience with Ostalgie, a neologism that is a mash-up of the German words for east and nostalgia, meaning nostalgia for life in the GDR and the other countries of the former Soviet bloc. Ostalgie is a phenomenon driven by the conviction that while socialism was often difficult, life was in many ways better. Fear and suspicion may have been the background radiation of daily life, this view goes, but the old Communist societies were more egalitarian and had a greater sense of solidarity and common purpose.
-
Authenticity Watch: Ostalgie
By Andrew Potter - Saturday, November 15, 2008 at 7:54 PM - 0 Comments
In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History”
One of the more fascinating examples of that nostalgia is the “Ostalgie” – the longing for the order and security (for some!) of the old Soviet empire. From Good Bye Lenin! to Trabi tours of Nova Huta to Grutas Park (or “Stalin World”) in Lithuania, it’s a phenomenon that isn’t going away anytime soon.
As a sick sort of side dish to Grutas Park, the Lithuanians have opened “1984: Išgyvenimo Drama,” otherwise known as Survival Drama in a Soviet Bunker:
Experiences include watching TV programs from 1984, wearing gas masks, learning the Soviet anthem under duress, eating typical Soviet food (with genuine Soviet tableware) and even undergoing a concentration-camp-style interrogation and medical check.
The Soviet Bunker is not a theme park for the faint-hearted; all of the actors involved in the project were originally in the Soviet army and some were authentic interrogators, however there are performances tailored specifically for school groups so they know when to cool it, too.
Meanwhile, over in Berlin the former hockey team of the Stasi is helping bridge some old divides.
