‘Ostalgie doesn’t fit!’: Individual Interpretations of and Interaction with Ostalgie

Abstract

Since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, processes of remembering the GDR have been widely discussed in unified Germany and the idea of Ostalgie has become a key strand in these debates. Broadly understood as a form of nostalgia for the GDR, the idea has often been interpreted as a romanticisation of the socialist past and an attempt to underplay, or even overlook, the oppressive nature of the authoritarian state. The importance of these memory debates in understanding post-unification eastern identities should not be underestimated; as Patricia Hogwood explains in Chapter 2, exploring memories of the past helps to make sense of patterns of contemporary behaviour. This chapter explores how easterners interact with and negotiate the term Ostalgie when constructing east German identities. It draws on a series of in-depth interviews which were carried out between November 2009 and December 2010 with easterners who were born in the GDR in the 1970s and now live in Berlin. The findings are part of a doctoral project which explored how these individuals constructed their own and others’ eastern identities, and how they engaged with and negotiated dominant discourses in this process. The interviews were designed to be largely participant-led, which ensured that participants expressed their own perceptions, as well as their understandings of the discourse about Ostalgie, without any prompting. Ostalgie emerged as a key idea in the ways that they made sense of themselves and of other easterners.