Post-communist Nostalgia

Maria Todorova, Zsuzsa Gille, Maria Todorova, Zsuzsa Gille

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781845458348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa orientale

Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people's lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scholars from multiple disciplines explore the various fascinating aspects of this nostalgic turn by analyzing the impact of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender differences, and political orientation. They argue persuasively that this nostalgia should not be seen as a wish to restore the past, as it has otherwise been understood, but instead it should be recognized as part of a more complex healing process and an attempt to come to terms both with the communist era as well as the new inequalities of the post-communist era.

PART I

RUPTURE AND THE ECONOMIES
OF NOSTALGIA

1

FROM ALGOS TO AUTONOMOS

Nostalgic Eastern Europe as Postimperial Mania

Dominic Boyer

Grief or Obsession?

What distinguishes nostalgia in Eastern Europe today? For one thing, that so many people agree that it exists, not only in individuals, in individual countries, but rather also as a regional phenomenon. One finds a curious agreement between external observers and the internal afflicted. Eastern Europe is nostalgic; it yearns.

But, why and for what is Eastern Europe yearning? Popular and scholarly representations may diverge in their particulars but they usually sketch what amounts to a standard history of the cultural effects of post-Socialist transformation. Here is how the narrative unfolds: Eastern Europe suffered a mighty cultural displacement in the aftermath of the events of 1989–1990. On the one hand, its borders and horizons opened. Yet, its internal lifeworlds were shaken and in some cases shattered, its populations unsettled in all senses of the term. Then, in the ensuing fifteen years, forces of change stormed across the region, moving, as weather mostly does, from West to East. Although it is difficult to plot the vectors of a tempest, the dominant historical forces at play in post-Socialist Eastern Europe have nevertheless been assembled under rubrics like: (neo)liberalism, late capitalism, globalization, marketization, Europeanization, technocratic governmentality, even, in my colleague Jakob Rigi’s arresting phrase, a “chaotic mode of domination” (Nazpary 2001). A certain market-centered modernity, a modernity that state socialism had been straining to resist for decades, hit Eastern Europe fast and hard in the 1990s. And this was only the half of it. The other, not unrelated blow was the precipitous expansion of Western European sociopolitical imaginations and institutions into Eastern Europe, largely for economic and security reasons, although proceeding always under the banner of civilizational union and redemption.

Staggered, reeling under this double confrontation, observers found Eastern Europeans reaching backward, seeking to balance themselves. In the words of West German media entrepreneur Hubert Burda, “Looking for some support and stability in politically, culturally, and economically new worlds, these people [East Germans] demand emotional bridges to their own past.” Only in memory, then, could Eastern Europeans retrieve the senses of security and autonomy otherwise denied them as new market and governmental forms of sociality innocently filled the social and historical “vacuum” created by the collapse of totalitarian states. Thus, Eastern Europeans naturally tethered themselves to recalled, also always fantasied aspects of life before 1989 that seemed better—warmer, more human, safer, more moral—than the chaos and devolution of life today.

Enter the epidemiology of nostalgia. In his remarkable 1688 medical dissertation for the University of Basel, Johannes Hofer coined the term nostalgia by combining two Greek terms—nostos (the return home) and algos (grief)—to identify a pathological variant of the common condition known to his contemporaries simply as Heimweh (homesickness). To validate his neologism, Hofer explained that Heimweh itself was not lexically adequate to the task of medical diagnosis. But then, almost apologetically, Hofer offered the less-celebrated terms, nostomania and philopatridomania, obsession with the return home or with love of the fatherland, as equivalents for those dissatisfied with his first choice (1934: 380–81). Hofer’s diagnosis, gathered under the term nostalgia, thus signals both grief and obsession with a return to the place of origin. Nostalgia concerns the autophagous desire to deny the truth of the present by returning to a source. For Hofer, this source was explicitly Heimat (home) and nation—his medical analysis of nostalgia was humoral and climatological and centered on the aggravation of mental spirits and fibers acclimated to a certain territory when the afflicted undertook extended travel (note that “extended” travel in Hofer’s life-world could mean 50 km or even less). The afflicted, meanwhile, could only be cured by returning to their native climate.

In the postmedical era of nostalgia, however, we confront a less corporeal notion of grief and obsession. Also, a less territorialized one—today, nostalgia most often appears discursively not as a search for a place, a home or nation, but as a sociotemporal yearning for a different stage or quality of life (as Kant put it, for our youth). In this respect, post-Socialist nostalgia is most often interpreted not literally as a desire to return to state socialism per se. Instead, it is understood as a desire to recapture what life was at that time, whether innocent, euphoric, secure, intelligible. In other words, such nostalgia is understood as a psychological or emotional prop, a “coping behavior,” what sympathetic West Germans in my experience described to me as a “completely understandable” defense mechanism for people who lived half their lives in a state-imposed stasis only to have all those certainties, true and false, swept away in the second half of their lives by the uncomfortable forces and, of course, “realities,” of life in a market-centered society.

The standard history closes with the prosthesis of memory stabilizing the shaken Eastern European, a figure whose past trauma casts into doubt his/her capacity to function effectively as a historical actor in the future. The narrative has a decidedly liberalist tinge to it, but one must admit that it is not a bad description of the facts in some respects. Perhaps its chief virtue beyond descriptive accuracy is that it is so intuitively familiar, both because it has been well publicized as a mode of legitimating projects of external intervention into Eastern Europe and because it taps into long-standing narratives of Eastern European past-orientation and backwardness that have exercised powerful historical influence over social identities in Eastern Europe, particularly regarding their relationship to the West (Boyer 2006; Glaeser 2000). Let me offer a few necessary corrections to this story that could help us to sharpen our attention to the phenomenon in sentiment and discourse we have come to know as Eastern European nostalgia, or better yet, “nostomania,” which, I think, better captures the obsessional essence of Hofer’s initial diagnosis.

Five Theses on Eastern European Nostalgia (Nostomania)

Nostalgia Is Heteroglossic

To borrow Bakhtin’s terms, upon close analysis it becomes clear that nostalgia is by no means the kind of “unitary language” or stable and internally consistent discourse that is often described, for example, in international news journalism (1981: 270–71). All of us who have lived or worked in post-Socialist Eastern Europe are familiar with talk of “how life once was” uttered in distinction to some judgment on the present. Here are just three brief examples selected from among countless similar dialogues during my research in the former GDR between 1996 and 2002. My friend Albert tells me, speaking of journalism, “You know, although there was enormous surveillance of our work back then, at least it had a purpose. In this system you have a formal freedom but nothing ever goes anywhere.” On another occasion, a former GDR satirist tells me that you can judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable members: “The strong will find their way in any society, but socialism did a much better job of caring for the weak than this Leistungsgesellschaft (performance-based society) does. One should judge a society by how it cares for its weakest members.” Finally, my friend Karl, ruminating glumly upon the successes and failures of his professional life, says, “You know, some day, as this society gets harder and harder, the West Germans are going to realize that the values, the Menschlichkeit (humanity), we had the in the GDR was good.”

So, no one can dispute that the discourse phenomenon exists. But I think it is mistaken to assume that such talk transparently signals a grief for, or obsession with, the past, even when speakers themselves gloss their talk as “nostalgic” in character. Beneath the surface of speech, we should work to recognize and represent the dialogical gossamer of idiosyncratic references, interests, and affects that are channeled through nostalgic discourse. There are speech situations, of course, when such talk may represent precisely a grief for a faded past. But there are other times when it is deployed, for example in political rhetoric, to mobilize a present- or future-oriented project of identification and belonging. And, still other cases when such talk is less about transacting meaning and more about coordinating or cultivating intimacy through shared expression, a part of speech used to signal and bind “us-ness,” as in the case of two friends commiserating over the trials of life over coffee or beer. At the level of sign and discourse alone, one should be suspicious at talk of the ubiquity and uniformity of nostalgic expression in Eastern Europe without even raising the more vexing issue as to whether the “sentiments” of nostalgia such discourse is assumed to represent are uniform as well. Finally, we must understand the gesture to define nostalgia as a unitary language as an interested and therefore political speech act in its own right that seeks to dampen down nostalgia’s actual heteroglossic character and to give it the appearance of a shared discourse and consciousness that typifies Eastern Europe as a cultural unity.

Nostalgia Is Indexical

It is common enough to consider nostalgia as a descriptive, evaluative or, even analytical practice; in other words, as a way of grappling with the presence of the (external) world through a past-oriented medium of expression. But nostalgia is also an indexical practice, a mode of inhabiting the lived world through defining oneself situationally and positionally in it. And, therefore, as a kind of discourse that is evoked to create and maintain social distinctions between groups and between persons, it can never be entirely separated from ongoing politics of identification and belonging both inside and outside Eastern Europe. In these politics, accusations and embraces of nostalgia are never value neutral. Consider, for example, the small castes of social elites across Eastern Europe who quite willingly identified themselves with the external business, professional, and political interests that moved into the region in the 1990s. These are also the eastern citizens—owing to their acceptance of a particular future orientation desired by the arriving powers—who are normally exempted from association with nostalgia. If anything, they are the ones who claim legitimacy as social elites based precisely on their ability and desire to extricate their fellow citizens from their endemic past-orientation and backwardness. In a place like Eastern Germany, many of the most vociferous publicists and critics of so-called East German nostalgia (Ostalgie) are not West Germans, but rather the liberal wing of the former GDR civil rights movement, who count among their membership the current Chancellor Angela Merkel. Parenthetically, I participated recently in a podium discussion for Berlin public radio on East German nostalgia where another speaker was Marianne Birthler, the current special representative of the German government charged with managing the enormous archive of Stasi files. Herself born and raised in the GDR, Birthler drew a sharp distinction between the East German citizen of the future and the nostalgic Ossi. She said that she had “no sympathy” for people who clung to the past so desperately that they were willing to glorify a “perverse” and “oppressive” regime. She offered instead a number of exemplary tales of East Germans who had rightly chosen to put that past behind them and to embrace the “new possibilities” of a democratic state. Such discourse on East German nostalgia from GDR-born elites, heavily seasoned as it is with the public Western liberalism of individual choice, rights, and accountabilities, both legitimates their position as spokespersons of a “more healthy” East German identity and performs work on behalf of the dominant interests in West German political culture to delegitimate as “nostalgic” those East German voices that seek greater discussion of inequalities and legacies of the unification process or that, once upon a time, even sought alternatives to the West German colonial status quo.

Nostalgia Is Allochronic

Anyone who has read Larry Wolff’s (1994) wonderful history of the constitution of “Eastern Europe” as an object within the social imagination of the Enlightenment should realize that contemporary nostalgia talk participates in a civilizational discourse of the longue durée that offers the solid lump of Eastern European pastness as the base point from which Western Europe charts its lightness, its futurity, indeed its very “Europeanness.” We should thus recognize that the facticity of Eastern European nostalgia is every bit as vital for Western European sociopolitical imagination as it might be for local or individual senses of belonging in Russia, Poland, or Romania. The idea that nostalgia “belongs” somehow exclusively or even especially to Eastern Europe is pernicious, an aspect of the persistent allochronization (that is, temporal displacement) of Eastern Europe into the imagined margins of the urban, industrial, and scientific centers of Western European modernity. According to these centers, how could Eastern Europe be anything else other than past-fixated? For one thing, its pastness is genetically constitutive of Western futures. For another, if the polities of Eastern Europe were capable of generating and governing their own futurity, what would that say about the legitimacy of the long historical project of Western Europe to colonize and civilize the territories and polities lying between it and its perpetual civilizational nemesis, China? Paraphrasing the anxiety at slavery and social domination simmering within the kettle of European Enlightenment, Montesquieu once mused, “It is impossible for us to assume that these people [Negroes] are men, because if we assumed they were men, one would begin to believe that we ourselves were not Christians” (1989[1748]: 250). Eastern Europe’s humanity poses a similar problem for Western Europe’s humanism. We must therefore recognize that a West...