The politics of Ostalgie:
post-socialist nostalgia in recent
German ﬁlm
ANTHONY ENNS
The word Ostalgie – a combination of the German words for ‘nostalgia’
and ‘east’ – has emerged in Germany over the last few years to describe
a new and widespread cultural fascination with the former German
Democratic Republic. Critics often dismiss or simply overlook the
signiﬁcance of Ostalgie due to the fact that this term is normally
associated with popular culture and ludicrous products such as ‘The DDR
in a box’, a novelty item that includes mundane souvenirs from the
former GDR such as worthless currency or plastic egg cups, and sells for
roughly twenty euros. Travel agencies have also begun to offer Ostalgie
tours, and an Ostalgie theme park has been proposed for the Berlin
suburb of Ko¨penick. Instead of representing a renewed interest in, or
even a mournful sympathy for, socialism, Ostalgie more often appears to
be nothing more than a passing fad or a means of commercializing and
commodifying the last remnants of an anticapitalist regime.
Thomas Elsaesser points out that the Ostalgie phenomenon is also
frequently associated with television, which shows how the former GDR
has become a ‘media construction’ following the dissolution of the
country:
It is also to television that one has to turn if one wants to know what
has happened to the ex-GDR and its cinema. At ﬁrst glance it looks as
if it has disappeared without much of a trace. . . . But in another sense it
is perhaps precisely the black hole into which the representations and
representatives of the GDR have disappeared that obliges one to take a
‘
475 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007
&The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1093/screen/hjm049
somewhat different approach to the whole issue of German cinema/
national cinema. . . . If ex-DEFA directors have found a livelihood on
television, they have also inherited a task: to provide a kind of ‘shelter’
for their audiences’ own sense of difference (from the West Germans).
Which is why it is possible to speak of a new cultural artifact in the
making: the former GDR as a ‘nostalgic’ media construction. The
regional TV channels set up in the so-called Neue Bundesla¨nder to
present the ex-GDR citizens to themselves, often via in-jokes and selfmockery,
are helping to preserve the memory of certain gestures and
familiar objects, habits and locations, brand-names and household
goods from Communist times. As social and psychic dislocation
continues after nearly a decade of uniﬁcation, the need for these
constructions appears to become greater rather than to diminish.1
The close connection between the emergence of Ostalgie and the rise of
new television programming in the former GDR is perhaps one of the
primary reasons why this phenomenon has not been taken seriously.
When Katarina Witt became the host of RTL’s The DDR Show, for
example, her appearance in a young pioneers’ uniform (the youth
division of the socialist party) conﬁrmed the show as an apolitical
celebration of the innocent face of the GDR. Rather than offering a
serious political critique of the ways in which the GDR has been
historicized, in other words, these programmes simply seem to revel in
communist kitsch.
Because it is most often associated with popular culture and
commercial products, Ostalgie would appear to provide a perfect
illustration of what critics such as Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon
have described as nostalgia’s inherent failure to engage with history.
Jameson argues, for example, that nostalgia represents ‘an elaborate
symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of
experiencing history in some active way’.2
Hutcheon also suggests that
nostalgia prevents people from engaging with history because it idealizes
the past:
Nostalgia, in fact, may depend precisely on the irrecoverable nature of
the past for its emotional impact and appeal. It is the very pastness of
the past, its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a large part of
nostalgia’s power. . . . This is rarely the past as actually experienced, of
course; it is the past as imagined, as idealized through memory and
desire.3
Hutcheon thus concludes that ‘nostalgia is less about the past than about
the present’ because ‘the ideal that is not being lived now is projected
into the past’.4
Although Hutcheon’s argument ultimately suggests that
irony might provide the intellectual distance ‘necessary for reﬂective
thought about the present as well as the past’,5
Jameson and Hutcheon
both condemn nostalgia itself as essentially regressive and naive, as a
failure to engage with the actual, lived experience of history. Ostalgie
1 Thomas Elsaesser, The BFI
Companion to German Cinema
(London: British Film Institute,
1999), p. 14.
2 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism,
or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991), p. 21.
3 Linda Hutcheon, ‘Irony, nostalgia,
and the postmodern’, in Raymond
Vervliet and Annemarie Estor
(eds), Methods for the Study of
Literature as Cultural Memory
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000),
p. 195.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
476 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
could similarly be interpreted as a sentimental whitewashing of the harsh
realities of living under a totalitarian regime or, following Jameson, it
may represent nothing more than Germany’s inability to ‘identify its own
present’.
What these critics fail to acknowledge, however, is that despite the fact
that nostalgia does not provide any critical distance from the past, it still
retains the potential to foster a critical distance from the present. Indeed,
this argument is already implicit in Hutcheon’s own characterization of
nostalgia as the projection of an idealized past that reveals a profound
disappointment with the present:
Simultaneously distancing and proximating, nostalgia exiles us from
the present as it brings the imagined past near. The simple, pure,
ordered, easy, beautiful, or harmonious past is constructed . . . in
conjunction with the present – which, in turn, is constructed as
complicated, contaminated, anarchic, difﬁcult, ugly, and
confrontational. Nostalgic distancing sanitizes as it selects, making the
past feel complete, stable, coherent, safe . . . in other words, making it
so very unlike the present. The aesthetics of nostalgia might, therefore,
be less a matter of simple memory than of complex projection; the
invocation of a partial, idealized history merges with a dissatisfaction
with the present.6
At the same time that nostalgia brings ‘the imagined past near’, therefore,
it also ‘exiles us from the present’, thus creating the kind of critical
distance necessary to reﬂect on current conditions. It is this critique of the
present, according to Hutcheon, that turns nostalgia into a force for
imagining new social possibilities, as ‘nostalgic and utopian impulses
share a common rejection of the here and now’.7
Hutcheon’s argument echoes the work of several other critics and
theorists, such as James G. Hart, who similarly claims that nostalgia
represents ‘an imaginative re-constitution of the past’,8
in which ‘the
hopes of the past as well as those of the actual present ﬁnd a form of
realization’.9
Like Hutcheon, Hart also concludes that the nostalgic
impulse ‘presupposes a hope with respect to the present future’,10
and it is
‘Precisely because the nostalgic world is the fulﬁllment of our present
hopes’ that ‘we return and undergo its unique suffering’.11
In her book
The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym similarly describes the potential
threat that nostalgia poses to critical thinking:
It is the promise to rebuild the ideal home that lies at the core of many
powerful ideologies today, tempting us to relinquish critical thinking
for emotional bonding. The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to
confuse the actual home and the imaginary one. In extreme cases it can
create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or
kill. Unreﬂected nostalgia breeds monsters.12
Yet Bohm also describes an alternative type of nostalgia called
‘reﬂective nostalgia’, which ‘reveals that longing and critical thinking
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., p. 204.
8 James G. Hart, ‘Toward a
phenomenology of nostalgia’,
Man and World, vol. 6, no. 4
(1973), p. 402.
9 Ibid., p. 404.
10 Ibid., p. 410.
11 Ibid., p. 408.
12 Svetlana Boym, The Future of
Nostalgia (New York, NY: Basic
Books, 2001), p. xvi.
477 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one
from compassion, judgment or critical reﬂection’.13
Boym also argues
that ‘reﬂective nostalgia . . . has some connection to the loss of collective
frameworks of memory’, and it is thus ‘a form of deep mourning that
performs a labor of grief both through pondering pain and through play
that points to the future’.14
Unlike ‘restorative’ or ‘regressive’ nostalgia,
in other words, ‘reﬂective nostalgia’ stresses the importance of critical
thinking and is fundamentally oriented towards the future.
Boym’s concept of ‘reﬂective nostalgia’ provides an ideal description
of East German Ostalgie. Despite its association with communist kitsch,
this phenomenon also represents a form of mourning for what has been
lost in the past and an implicit desire for political change in the present.
In Elsaesser’s words, Ostalgie represents a genuine response to the
‘social and psychic dislocation’ experienced by many East Germans,15
and Boym even discusses the struggles of East Germans to preserve their
trafﬁc lights, or Ampelma¨nnchen, as a primary example of ‘reﬂective
nostalgia’. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the government of the newly
uniﬁed city attempted to replace these lights with new, western-style
trafﬁc lights. Although these lights possessed little to no signiﬁcance
prior to reuniﬁcation, they have since become the single most
recognizable icon of GDR culture: ‘In exile or in historic transition, the
signposts from the former homeland themselves acquire emotional
signiﬁcance. . . . Nobody paid much attention to Ampelmann before, but
once he vanished from the street signs, he suddenly became a beloved of
the whole nation.’16
While such icons are often commodiﬁed in the form
of kitsch (there are even stores in the former GDR that exclusively sell
Ampelma¨nnchen clothing and accessories), they continue to represent a
very real need among a large segment of the German population to keep
the history of the GDR alive. Rather than dehistoricizing and
depoliticizing the GDR’s past, therefore, the Ostalgie phenomenon
seems to employ nostalgia more often as a critical tool to promote and
enable an active engagement with the present.
Contemporary debates concerning the nature and function of nostalgia
often focus on ﬁlmic representations. Jameson’s argument, for example,
was largely based on his critique of ‘nostalgia ﬁlms’, which represent the
past as a chain of empty stereotypes. According to Jameson, these ‘ﬁlms
can be read as dual symptoms: they show a collective unconscious in the
process of trying to identify its own present at the same time that they
illuminate the failure of this attempt, which seems to reduce itself to the
recombination of various stereotypes of the past’.17
This claim was
highly inﬂuential among critics of the British ‘heritage’ ﬁlms in the
1990s, as these ﬁlms also seemed to represent a false sense of national
identity based on stereotypes of the past. Andrew Higson argues, for
example, that these ﬁlms display the past ‘as visually spectacular
pastiche, inviting a nostalgic gaze that resists the ironies and social
critiques so often suggested narratively by these ﬁlms’.18
While Higson
admits that ‘the nostalgic perspective always involves a dialogue
13 Ibid., pp. 49–50.
14 Ibid., p. 55.
15 Elsaesser, The BFI Companion to
German Cinema, p. 14.
16 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia,
p. 54.
17 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 296.
18 Andrew Higson, ‘Re-presenting
the national past: nostalgia and
pastiche in the heritage ﬁlm’, in
Lester Friedman (ed.), Fires Were
Started: British Cinema and
Thatcherism (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press,
1993), p. 109.
478 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
between the imagined past and a vision of the present’,19
he dismisses the
possibility that these ﬁlms might be capable of social commentary
because ‘The strength of the pastiche in effect imprisons the qualities of
the past, holding them in place as something to be gazed at from a
reverential distance, and refusing the possibility of a dialogue or
confrontation with the present’.20
These ﬁlms were also championed,
however, precisely because they raised important political issues
concerning class, gender and sexuality. Claire Monk argues, for example,
that these ﬁlms are ‘spaces in which identities (whether those of
characters and nations within the ﬁlm or the spectators viewing it) are
shifting, ﬂuid and heterogeneous’,21
and Pam Cook argues that the
popularity of costume romances in general ‘implies that the formation of
class, gender and nation should be perceived in terms of a constant
process of oscillation between identities rather than the achievement of
coherence, unity and settlement’.22
Higson himself later revised his own
argument by adding that
several of the bourgeois heritage ﬁlms of the 1980s and 1990s can be
read as liberal-humanist critiques of the Thatcherite and postThatcherite
present. Not ﬂights from the present, but a return to a
version of the past in order to comment on the present, to contrast the
individualist and materialist values of Thatcherism with the values of
the liberal consensus, making connections across social boundaries of
class, gender, sexuality, nationality, etc.23
Subsequent critics have similarly begun to revisit American nostalgia
ﬁlms as potential sites of resistance. Vera Dika argues, for example, that
American Grafﬁti (George Lucas, 1973) may appear to be nothing more
than a nostalgic fantasy of what life was like in the 1960s, but it actually
employs obvious stereotypes in order ‘to reference the effects of the
Vietnam War on a generation, with the enforced gaiety of the ﬁlm set
against this historical loss’.24
Amelia DeFalco similarly points out that
the ‘self-conscious simulacral qualities’ of Far From Heaven (Todd
Haynes, 2002) ‘eschew representations of verisimilitude and disperse
textuality, casting doubt on any possibility of “real” history outside the
ﬁlm world’, and the ﬁlm thus presents ‘a seemingly contradictory
nostalgia, a double-edged longing that realizes and embraces the illusion
of its own object’.25
This essay will employ a similar approach by arguing that recent
German Ostalgie ﬁlms show how even a seemingly pure, naive nostalgia
might also function as a valuable device for critiquing the present. If the
GDR has indeed become a ‘media construction’, as Elsaesser claims,
then its representation in contemporary ﬁlms can be seen as a privileged
site where the legacy of the former country is actively contested.
Although these ﬁlms are not so much composed of a pastiche of ﬁlmic
stereotypes or genres, they remain very similar to the British ‘heritage’
ﬁlms in that they present an impossibly nostalgic image of a national
identity that perhaps never truly existed, what Boym calls a ‘phantom
19 Ibid., p. 118.
20 Ibid., p. 119.
21 Claire Monk, ‘The British “heritage
ﬁlm” and its critics’, Critical
Survey, vol. 7, no. 2 (1995), p. 122.
22 Pam Cook, ‘Neither here nor there:
national identity and
Gainsborough costume drama’, in
Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving
Views: Key Writings on British
Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996),
p. 65.
23 Andrew Higson, ‘The heritage ﬁlm
and British cinema’, in Higson
(ed.), Dissolving Views: Key
Writings on British Cinema
(London: Cassell, 1996),
pp. 238–9.
24 Vera Dika, Recycled Culture in
Contemporary Art and Film: the
Uses of Nostalgia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003),
p. 94.
25 Amelia DeFalco, ‘A double-edged
longing: nostalgia, melodrama,
and Todd Haynes’s Far From
Heaven’, Iowa Journal of Cultural
Studies, no. 5 (2004), p. 27.
479 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
homeland’. Instead of interpreting these nostalgic representations as
politically regressive and conservative, however, I will argue that these
ﬁlms also incorporate a form of ‘reﬂexive’ or ‘critical’ nostalgia by
addressing and critiquing cultural stereotypes associated with the history
of the GDR and East Germans more generally, and they thus offer a valid
criticism of contemporary attitudes towards the GDR and its often
neglected socialist past. Rather than interpreting these ﬁlms as evidence
of a widespread failure among contemporary German ﬁlmmakers to
identify and understand their own present moment, in other words, I will
argue for a more productive reading of these ﬁlms as a potential critique
of the socioeconomic-political situation in Germany today. It is certainly
more than coincidental, for example, that the Ostalgie phenomenon has
emerged at a time when Germany is experiencing an economic crisis that
has resulted in record-breaking unemployment rates and massive cuts in
healthcare and education. This crisis is perhaps partly due to the
tremendous cost of revitalizing the economy of the former GDR, yet in
recent years the economic disparity between the east and the west has
only increased. Seen within this context, Ostalgie becomes nothing less
than a reexamination – sometimes playful, sometimes serious – of the
utopian hopes and expectations surrounding German reuniﬁcation, as
well as their subsequent failure and the resulting disillusionment. The
nostalgia for the east expressed in recent German ﬁlms thus implies the
moral bankruptcy of a capitalist system that has failed adequately to
address current economic and cultural challenges, and it often reﬂects a
more widespread desire to reevaluate the current state of a country that is
still in ﬂux more than ﬁfteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The ﬁrst ﬁlm to depict life in the GDR in a nostalgic way was
Sonnenallee/Sun Alley (Leander Haußmann, 1999), which was based on
Thomas Brussig’s novel Am Ende der Sonnenallee (1999). Set in East
Berlin in the 1970s, the ﬁlm tells the story of seventeen-year-old Micha
(played by Alexander Scheer), a teenager with two driving obsessions:
his passion for rock and roll and his crush on a girl named Miriam. Both
of these interests entail considerable challenges. The music he covets is
banned in the GDR, forcing Micha and his friends to discover creative
ways of purchasing illegal records by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, T. Rex,
and so on. Miriam remains similarly out of reach, and her relationship
with a cocky Casanova from West Berlin is a painful reminder to Micha
that he is way out of her league. Haußmann purposefully constructs this
ﬁlm as a universal tale of adolescent growing pains, not unlike American
Grafﬁti. Micha eventually overcomes his teen angst and wins Miriam
after she snubs her glamorous, wealthy western boyfriend. Micha’s
neighbours, who include Stasi informers, black marketeers, party
administrators, young pioneers and rebellious youth, are also able to
overcome their personal and political differences. By the end of the ﬁlm
the entire neighbourhood is miraculously uniﬁed through the power of
rock and roll, and the climactic scene shows them dancing together in the
480 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
street, their movements perfectly choreographed to the pop hit The
Letter.
Rather than providing an accurate depiction of life in the GDR,
therefore, this light-hearted story represents a pointed attempt to
characterize the former GDR in a sunnier fashion. In other words, this is
not the way the GDR really was, but rather the way it has been
transformed through the narrator’s own nostalgic memories of youth. As
Immanuel Kant argues in Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht
(1798), nostalgia does not represent the desire to return to the place
where a person spent his childhood, but rather represents the desire to
recapture childhood itself.26
This is clearly emphasized in Sonnenallee
by the voiceover at the end of the ﬁlm, presented by the now presumably
middle-aged Micha, who characterizes this time, long ago, as the best of
his life because ‘I was young and in love’. This framing device reminds
the audience that Micha’s story is being told from the perspective of the
present, and the ﬁlm’s levity is clearly licensed by the fact that the
political system it describes no longer exists and is thus no longer in need
of critique. This is certainly a risky strategy, and it would indeed be easy
to accuse the ﬁlm of promoting a kind of historical amnesia, of failing to
make the audience more politically aware by ignoring the harsh realities
of life in the GDR. For example, Haußmann’s humorous approach
deﬂects the seriousness of Micha’s mother’s attempts to abandon her
family and escape to the west – a very serious issue faced by many East
Germans. The problem of smuggling is similarly treated in a comical
manner by depicting the regime’s control as completely innocuous and
ineffectual. For example, Micha’s eccentric uncle from West Berlin
regularly smuggles western products across the border, such as
pantyhose and underwear, yet he appears to be engaged in such illegal
activity simply for the thrill of getting away with it. And when Micha’s
forbidden recording of Wonderland’s song Moscow is conﬁscated, it
merely serves to highlight the incompetence of the police, who mistake
the song for an authentic Soviet release. The quirky neighbourhood guard
(played by Detlev Buck) endures a constant, comical dance of being
promoted and demoted in rank from ‘Herr Meister’ to ‘Herr
Obermeister’, thus mocking the title-obsessed and multi-tiered
bureaucracy of the GDR. All of these examples clearly illustrate the
director’s own assertion that the private moments of peoples’ lives are far
more important than the political moments they experience.27
Several reviewers criticized the ﬁlm for precisely this reason, arguing
that Sonnenallee presented life behind the wall as a virtual ‘petting zoo’,
and that the young protagonists were not in touch with the realities of
everyday life in the GDR.28
It was this reality that Brussig so effectively
exposed and ridiculed in his novel Helden wie wir (1995), which tells the
story of a young man growing up in the GDR who becomes a model
citizen by joining the young pioneers, spying on his neighbours and
eventually joining the Stasi. Like Sonnenallee, this novel similarly
employs absurdist humour, yet its criticism of the state could not be more
26 Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in
pragmatischer Hinsicht, Volume I
(Ko¨nigsberg: Nicolovius, 1798),
p. xxxii.
27 This comment is taken from an
interview with the director
featured on the German DVD
release of Herr Lehmann.
28 Rayk Einax, ‘Aufguss’, frame 25,
no. 5 (1999), p. 19.
481 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
overt; Brussig even describes the fall of the Berlin Wall as simply
another example of the East German propensity to conform – a herd
mentality that was instilled in them by the state itself. The levity of
Sonnenallee seems to suggest that Brussig’s second novel lacks the
political dimension of Helden wie wir, or that its use of nostalgia
essentially negates any underlying political message, yet other critics
have argued that the very notion of representing life in the GDR as
‘normal’ is in itself political. As Elke de Wit points out, Sonnenallee
‘pleads for recognition from West Germans that life for young East
Germans was just as valid’.29
Haußmann’s personal background would
seem to strengthen this argument. Since he was born in 1959 in the
eastern city of Quedlinburg, the ﬁlm also seems to be informed by his
own ﬁrsthand experience as a teenager growing up in the GDR during the
1970s.
There is certainly some truth to the argument that even the mere
depiction of everyday life in the GDR serves a political purpose, as such
depictions are indeed quite rare and many East Germans increasingly feel
that their experiences are being erased from Germany’s collective
cultural memory, yet such arguments often ignore or simply overlook
more obvious political readings of the ﬁlm. There is a marked satirical
tone in the ﬁlm, for example, which exposes and criticizes westerners’
stereotypes of East Germans and of the former GDR as a whole.
Haußmann is particularly drawn to this cut-off section of Sonnenallee,
for instance, because it lay directly on the border between East and West
Berlin, and westerners could observe the eastern section of Sonnenallee
from observation platforms that were set up on the western side. This
neighbourhood was thus constantly under the microscope of western
surveillance, and there are several moments in the ﬁlm when western tour
groups come to gaze upon the street’s supposedly unfortunate
inhabitants. Prompted by jeers from West German adolescents, Micha
and his friends at one point angrily play to their stereotypes by
threatening the onlookers with violent words and gestures. Micha and his
friends also exaggerate the presumed cliches held by western visitors
when they run after a tour bus with pleading, outstretched arms. One of
the naive western tourists exclaims: ‘Look at those boys. They’re just
like those people we saw in Africa.’ ‘It’s so sad’, responds another. This
satirical commentary, as well as the sharp contrast between Sonnenallee
and earlier depictions of life in the GDR, suggests that the roots of
Ostalgie are not as frivolous or kitschy as they might at ﬁrst appear.
The ﬁlm also illustrates aspects of life in the former GDR that make
this country actually appear better than contemporary Germany, which
further suggests that the ﬁlm’s nostalgia might represent something more
complex and potentially more political than Micha’s simple recollections
of youth. Throughout the narrative Micha not only describes his own
experiences but also the GDR itself as a thriving environment where
employment rates were high and everyone could afford housing and
food. In the closing shot of the ﬁlm, the camera tracks down the empty
29 Elke de Wit, ‘The sunnier side of
East Germany’, Central European
Review, vol. 2, no. 9 (2000). URL:
http://www.ce-review.org/00/
9/kinoeye9_dewit.html [accessed
27 September 2007].
482 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
street and crosses the former border between East and West Berlin,
which is now gone. By shifting from colour to black-and-white and
eliminating all signs of life, this shot clearly suggests that the sun has
ﬁnally set on Sonnenallee, and the uncertain future that lies ahead will be
nothing more than a bleak and lonely night. This reference to
reuniﬁcation does not carry with it the promise of a better tomorrow,
therefore, but rather the ﬁlm’s retrospective look at life in the GDR is
clearly informed by the subsequent failure of reuniﬁcation to meet the
nation’s hopes and expectations. This failure points to a deeper void in
the present, and the reality is that life on Sonnenallee is far bleaker today
than it was prior to reuniﬁcation. As Susanne Rost points out,
unemployment and crime have only increased in this part of the city since
the fall of the Berlin Wall.30
Unlike Haußmann’s ﬁlm, which implicitly criticizes the present by
explicitly treating the past in a nostalgic way, ﬁlms like Berlin is in
Germany (Hannes Sto¨hr, 2001) and Goodbye, Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker,
2003) address similar issues by examining the dramatic changes that
have taken place in Berlin since reuniﬁcation and the ways in which the
past has irrevocably altered present socio-political conditions. Berlin is
in Germany tells the story of Martin Schulz (played by Jo¨rg Schu¨ttauf),
who is released from prison eleven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It is revealed at the end of the ﬁlm that his crime was actually an accident,
and thus his imprisonment clearly illustrates the ﬂaws of the GDR’s legal
system. His prison sentence also seems to function as a metaphor for the
GDR itself, as the fall of the Wall effectively allowed easterners to be ‘set
free’. But the ﬁlm’s main focus is on Berlin and the radical changes that
have occurred in that city over the course of the previous decade. Not
only have massive construction projects changed the face of the city, but
even the streets have been reorganized and renamed. The elimination of
places like Stalinallee and Leninplatz, for example, provide obvious
illustrations of the ways in which the history of the city has been
rewritten to eliminate any trace of its socialist past, and the disorienting
effect of these changes is emphasized when Martin applies for a taxi
licence and realizes he can no longer navigate his own hometown. Martin
is thus forced to study the layout of the new Berlin, but due to his
criminal record he is ultimately sacked before he even has a chance to
take his ﬁnal examination. The ﬁlm thus builds on the prison metaphor of
the GDR by suggesting that former East Germans are like ex-cons who
are now living in a society where they are treated as second-class
citizens, often unable to ﬁnd work in a free-market economy for which
their training and education is considered substandard, even useless. The
changes that have taken place in the country also parallel changes in
Martin’s own family, as his wife now has a new boyfriend and his son
Rokko no longer recognizes him. Although these problems are all
resolved by the end of the ﬁlm, viewers are left to ponder the ﬁlm’s more
disturbing social and political implications. The ﬁlm’s English title, for
example, comes from one of Rokko’s homework assignments, which
30 Susanne Rost, ‘Straße ohne
Sonne’, Berliner Zeitung, 30 April
2003, p. 24.
483 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
illustrates a shift in curriculum from Russian to English as the primary
foreign language taught in the German public school system. This change
is not only disorienting for Martin, as it crystallizes the new generation
gap between parents and children, but also emphasizes the feeling that he
is a foreigner in his own country. While Martin is happy to be out of
prison and reunited with his family, the ﬁlm ultimately suggests that the
changes caused by reuniﬁcation were far greater than anticipated and that
they were not necessarily changes for the better, which resulted in the
alienation and isolation of many easterners.
The notion that some easterners were disillusioned after reuniﬁcation
is also explored in Goodbye, Lenin!, which similarly employs a Rip van
Winkle device to emphasize the sudden and overwhelming changes that
took place in Berlin following the fall of the Wall. The ﬁlm begins just
prior to this moment, as a loyal GDR citizen named Christiane Kerne
(played by Katrin Sass) witnesses her son Alex (played by Daniel Bru¨hl)
being beaten by East German police during a demonstration, after which
she falls into a coma. She wakes up eight months later, but the doctor
informs her son that the slightest shock may kill her. Knowing that his
mother would indeed be horribly shocked to discover that the GDR has
collapsed, Alex attempts to prevent his mother from learning the truth,
and he resurrects the family’s old GDR furniture in order to transform his
mother’s bedroom back to the way it was prior to reuniﬁcation. As most
of the food products manufactured in the GDR are no longer available,
Alex also searches for old containers, which he then ﬁlls with newly
imported foods. This search provides some of the most humorous
moments in the ﬁlm – moments that may be lost on foreign audiences –
as the most mundane aspects of daily life in the GDR suddenly take on
tremendous signiﬁcance. In this way, it could be argued that Goodbye,
Lenin! reﬂects and even contributes to the current fascination for GDR
popular culture, as it reminds people about products like Mocca Fix
Gold coffee and Spreewald pickles. Because the fall of the Wall also
resulted in an enormous shift in fashion, as easterners quickly discarded
their old clothes in favour of new western imports, Alex must search for
old clothing for his family to wear. This also becomes a source of
humour, as the family ends up modelling some of the most hysterically
appalling outﬁts from the former GDR. Although the ﬁlm takes place
only eight months after reuniﬁcation, the outdated fashion of these
clothes seems to recall a much more distant past. Alex’s sister Ariane
(played by Maria Simon) expresses disbelief that she ever wore such
clothing, even though her current clothes would not have been available
in the GDR less than a year earlier. The ﬁlm thus repeatedly illustrates
the differences between east and west as a confrontation between the
former GDR and Germany’s post-reuniﬁcation present, and Alex
becomes a kind of archeologist sifting through the detritus of a vanished
culture and transforming his family home into a kind of time capsule or
living museum.
484 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
In order to create the illusion that the GDR is still functioning as
normal, Alex hires local children to wear young pioneer uniforms and
sing traditional songs for his mother, who used to conduct a young
pioneer choir. Because the current television news would be too shocking
for his mother, Alex also produces his own fake news broadcasts with the
help of his friend Denis (played by Florian Lukas). When an
advertisement for Coca-Cola goes up directly outside his mother’s
window, Alex even accommodates this potentially shocking change by
faking a news report that claims Coca-Cola was actually invented in the
GDR. Alex’s broadcasts thus allow him to reinvent the country’s history,
and as the ﬁlm goes on this reinvention increasingly diverges from
reality. For example, after Christiane unexpectedly leaves the conﬁnes of
her controlled environment and takes a walk outside, during which she
witnesses a large number of westerners living in her neighbourhood,
Alex creates another news story, claiming that Erich Honecker has
agreed to take in West German refugees disillusioned with capitalism.
Through this conscious play of simulation and representation, Alex’s
idealized depiction of life in the former GDR gradually becomes
completely removed from actual, lived reality, and Alex himself begins
to realize that he is not recreating the GDR as it was, but rather as he
would have liked it to be. By editing the history of the GDR, in other
words, Alex is effectively editing his own country’s cultural memory,
and the sanitized version of the GDR that ﬁnally emerges on his
television screen represents a pure product of his own nostalgia. At the
end of the ﬁlm, he even reedits the footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall
such that the collapse of the GDR represents the ultimate achievement of
socialism rather than its last great failure.
By refusing to address the more serious and disturbing aspects of the
GDR, however, Becker’s ﬁlm has been frequently criticized for its
apparently apolitical stance. Anna Funder argues, for example, that the
ﬁlm obscures the fact that the GDR was a totalitarian regime employing
the most sinister methods of surveillance to control and manipulate its
citizens.31
Becker justiﬁes this oversight by focusing on the universal
appeal of the ﬁlm rather than its speciﬁc social and political context,
claiming that the ﬁlm can be ‘totally separated from this speciﬁc past’.32
Becker also rejects the idea that this ﬁlm has anything to do with Ostalgie
because it is equally as popular in the west as in the east. Katrin Sass, a
veteran of the East German DEFA ﬁlm studio, also claims that ‘it is not a
ﬁlm about the fall of the Wall. . . . It’s about a mother and a son, a family.
It’s a story the audience should be able to relate to with or without the
historical background.’33
This interpretation has also been reinforced in
the international press, whose reviewers often seem to be both unfamiliar
with the ﬁlm’s historical background and oblivious to the Ostalgie
phenomenon in general. In his review of Goodbye, Lenin! in the Chicago
Sun-Times, for example, Roger Ebert writes: ‘Goodbye, Lenin! . . . never
quite addresses the self-deception which causes Christiane to support the
communist regime in the ﬁrst place. Many people backed it through fear,
31 Anna Funder, Review of Goodbye,
Lenin!, Prospect, vol. 89 (2003).
URL: http://www.prospect-
magazine.co.uk/
article_details.php?search_term=
anna+funder&id=5680 [accessed
27 September 2007].
32 Dina Iordanova, ‘East of Eden’,
Sight and Sound, vol. 13, no. 8
(2003), p. 28.
33 Ibid.
485 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
ambition or prudence, but did anyone actually love it and believe in it?
. . . Imagine a ﬁlm named Goodbye, Hitler! in which a loving son tries to
protect his cherished mother from news of the fall of the Third Reich.’34
Ebert’s inability to understand that there were indeed many aspects of
life in the GDR that its citizens loved and believed in reveals a profound
lack of attention to the ﬁlm’s speciﬁc cultural context, yet he ultimately
rescues the ﬁlm from its allegedly misguided politics by stressing instead
its exploration of universal themes concerning parent–child
relationships: ‘The underlying poignancy in this comedy is perhaps
psychological more than political. How many of us lie to our parents,
pretending a world still exists that they believe in but we have long since
moved away from?’35
It is certainly understandable that the ﬁlmmakers would want to
distance this ﬁlm from the more gimmicky overtones of Ostalgie. The
characterization of the ﬁlm as the product of pure nostalgia could easily
reduce it to nothing more than an empty stereotype of East German
culture or leave it open to criticism for being politically irresponsible. By
representing young pioneers, Stasi informers and bureaucrats as
harmlessly comic and largely ineffectual members of a now defunct state
apparatus, the ﬁlm clearly runs the risk of transforming the former GDR
into a safe commodity much like ‘The DDR in a box’. The reading of
these ﬁlms as simply family melodramas with universal appeal thus
allows ﬁlmmakers and critics to dehistoricize, decontextualize and
depoliticize the ﬁlm, yet this strategy fails to address more complicated
questions about the political function of nostalgia itself. For example,
Alex’s recreation of the GDR does not simply represent a conservative
restoration of the past, but rather it also represents an idealized version of
that past. In other words, Alex is also explicitly reassessing the country’s
guiding principles and questioning what the GDR could have been had it
had the opportunity to be critiqued and improved. Goodbye, Lenin! thus
clearly illustrates how Ostalgie also functions as a form of political
engagement, as it integrates a critical or ‘reﬂective’ nostalgia with the
utopian desire to imagine new social possibilities.
This can be most clearly seen in Alex’s fake news reports, which
explicitly acknowledge the ways in which the former GDR has been
transformed into a media construction. While the news effectively
illustrates national identity as a composite of media representations, it
simultaneously exposes the malleability of such representations, and the
end result is a self-consciously nostalgic version of GDR history that is
not actually true but nevertheless speaks to the problems and issues faced
by East Germans after reuniﬁcation. These news reports also provide a
perfect example of what Boym calls ‘countermemory’, a phenomenon
that emerged in Eastern Europe prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Boym describes it as ‘a prototype of a public sphere that already had
emerged under the Communist regime’, in which an ‘alternative vision of
the past, present and future . . . was communicated through half words,
jokes and doublespeak’.36
This process involved ‘ﬁnding blemishes in
34 Roger Ebert, Review of Goodbye,
Lenin!, Chicago Sun-Times, 26
March 2004. URL: http://
www.rogerebert.suntimes.com/
apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID¼/
20040326/REVIEWS/
403260304/1023 [accessed 27
September 2007].
35 Ibid.
36 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia,
p. 61.
486 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
the ofﬁcial narrative of history’37
as well as deconstructing the dominant
political rhetoric. Countermemory is ‘not merely a collection of
alternative facts and texts but also an alternative way of reading by using
ambiguity, irony, doublespeak, private intonation that challenged the
ofﬁcial bureaucratic and political discourse’.38
Countermemory thus
recognizes that history itself consists of nothing more than
representations, and it provides people with a humorous and lighthearted
way of deconstructing ofﬁcial versions of national identity while
simultaneously constructing alternative versions that are more closely
connected to their own lived experiences. When Alex realizes that he is
constructing an alternative version of GDR history that more closely
matches his own personal sense of national identity, as well as that of his
immediate community, his light-hearted and well-intentioned prank
similarly becomes a countermemory that retains a far greater political
signiﬁcance. By restaging the circumstances surrounding the fall of the
Berlin Wall, for example, Alex’s ﬁnal news broadcast clearly illustrates a
desire to resurrect useful aspects of socialism that have since been buried
under the weight of history.
The latest ﬁlm that represents the GDR in a more positive light is
Kleinruppin Forever (Carsten Fiebeler, 2004), which takes place in 1985
and tells the story of twins who grew up on opposite sides of the Wall.
Tim, who lives in the western city of Bremen, is an afﬂuent tennis star on
the verge of going pro and his twin brother Ronnie, who lives in the
ﬁctitious eastern city of Kleinruppin, is a poor factory worker dreaming
in vain of one day studying architecture (both characters are played by
Tobias Schenke). The two brothers ﬁnally meet when Tim’s high school
goes on a ﬁeld trip to the GDR and Ronnie’s curiosity about the west
leads him forcefully to assume Tim’s identity and return in his place. The
rest of the ﬁlm chronicles Tim’s attempts to return home and his eventual
realization that his new life in the east is more complete and meaningful
than the empty life he led in the west. While Tim remains critical of the
GDR’s political and economic systems, the ﬁlm describes this gradual
conversion as the valuing of personal relationships over political
allegiances, much like Haußmann’s privileging of the personal over the
political. While many of the negative aspects of life in the GDR are
represented in this ﬁlm, such as the Stasi agents who constantly spy on
Tim and his family or the blatant corruption he witnesses at work, the
ﬁlm focuses more on the positive bonds Tim develops with his new
community. Tim’s father in the west, for example, is a cold, self-serving
and insensitive businessman, who mocks Tim’s tennis ambitions and
urges him instead to join the family ﬁrm, yet Ronnie’s father Erwin
(played by Michael Gwisdek) is a kind, warm-hearted man, who quickly
becomes the caring father Tim never had. Tim’s girlfriends conform to
the same model. While his girlfriend in the west is depicted as wealthy,
superﬁcial and unemotional, his new eastern girlfriend Jana (played by
Anna Bru¨ggemann) eventually teaches him the true meaning of love.
These personal bonds also have political connotations, as they illustrate
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., p. 62.
487 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
the ways in which interpersonal relationships in the west were created
through materialism and the acquisition of capital, while those in the east
were strengthened through mutual struggle and interdependence. The
importance of personal bonds that override professional and ﬁnancial
security is also the basis for Tim’s ultimate decision to reject his tennis
scholarship and stay in the GDR instead.
Like Haußmann, director Carsten Fiebeler grew up in the former GDR,
and he clearly set out to make a ﬁlm that would inspire viewers to wish
that they too could live in the GDR. His ﬁrst ﬁlm, Die Datsche/Home
Truths (2002), was a far more brutal depiction of the hardships suffered
by East Germans after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It tells the story of an
eastern couple who are forced to give up their cabin in the country – their
most prized possession – and are subsequently robbed during their last
night there, in an allegorical representation of the theft of eastern culture
following reuniﬁcation. The fact that Fiebeler’s second ﬁlm is far more
light-hearted has encouraged reviewers like Jan Brachmann to conclude
that ‘according to Fiebeler, the time for licking wounds has passed, and
he strives instead to claim the right to view the east in a positive way’.39
Brachmann also points out, however, that the story is told from a western
perspective, which suggests that East German ﬁlmmakers are
increasingly being deprived of their own voice: ‘When a young director
can only view the country in which he was born and raised in a partially
loving way by adopting a western perspective, it is a sign of . . .
dispossession’.40
This argument certainly has merit, and the nostalgia in
this ﬁlm is tempered to some degree by the fact that it focuses primarily
on Tim rather than Ronnie, yet Fiebeler ultimately subverts this western
perspective by repeatedly switching back and forth between the east and
the west, thus providing a detailed analysis of the many differences
between these two cultures. While the GDR functions as an object of
critical scrutiny at the beginning of the ﬁlm, for example, the same can
also be said of West Germany at the end of the ﬁlm, as its negative
aspects are similarly exaggerated and contrasted with the GDR’s socialist
alternatives. This is particularly evident when Tim manages to escape
from the GDR and return to his previous home. The presence of his twin
brother Ronnie, who has since happily assimilated into Tim’s former life,
serves as a virtual mirror that allows Tim to see more clearly what he
once was. The extremely gaudy and extravagant lifestyles of the
westerners – the clothes, the swimming pools and the overabundance of
fruity cocktails – now appear as strange and foreign to him as the GDR
did when he ﬁrst arrived. Perhaps the most radical aspect of the ﬁlm is
that this shift in perspective is so subtle and convincing: while Tim’s
character ostensibly represents an initial point of identiﬁcation for
western viewers, these same viewers are gradually led to identify with an
eastern perspective, and by the end of the ﬁlm they are even asked to
view themselves as easterners view them.
Like many of the other ﬁlms discussed in this paper, therefore,
Kleinruppin Forever illustrates a direct confrontation between two
39 Jan Brachmann, ‘Buddelt euch
ein!’, Berliner Zeitung, 9
September 2004, p. 30.
40 Ibid.
488 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
opposing ways of life, and it employs nostalgia as a critical tool for
evaluating contemporary German society and identifying potentially
positive aspects of life in the former GDR that seem to have disappeared
since reuniﬁcation. It seems that this strategy was designed to speak
directly to a particular historical moment, as the release of this ﬁlm
coincided with the ﬁfteenth anniversary of the fall of the Wall, an event
that generated considerable public debate in Germany about the impact
of reuniﬁcation. This debate allowed many former East Germans to
express their dissatisfaction with the western model that had been
imposed upon them, which was seen as the solution for all of the GDR’s
problems but which has only increased the economic disparity between
the east and the west. By allowing eastern voices to be heard and
explicitly criticizing the effects of reuniﬁcation, ﬁlms like Kleinruppin
Forever clearly employ nostalgia both as a form of mourning for what
has been lost and as a means for effecting political change.
It remains unclear, however, whether such utopian hopes will ever be
realized or even whether such ﬁlms will continue to be made. The recent
success of Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel
von Donnersmarck, 2006), for example, suggests that western audiences
are far more interested in the darker aspects of the GDR. This ﬁlm depicts
the Stasi’s surveillance of a ﬁctional playwright named Georg Dreyman
(played by Sebastian Koch). Not that Dreyman is a dissident, but the
Cultural Minister Bruno Hempf (played by Thomas Thieme) is in love
with Dreyman’s girlfriend and is looking for an excuse to place him in
prison. At the end of the ﬁlm, shortly after the collapse of the GDR,
Hempf meets Dreyman at the theatre and notes that Dreyman has not
been able to write since the fall of the Wall. He concludes that the GDR
was not such a bad country, as the suffering endured by artists and
intellectuals also served as a source of inspiration by giving them an
opponent to ﬁght against: ‘What is there to write about in this new
Germany? Nothing to believe in, nothing to rebel against. Life was good
in our little republic. Many realize that only now.’ By allowing the villain
of the ﬁlm to be the only character who voices any nostalgia for the
former GDR, and by making it clear that the reasons for his nostalgia are
obviously contemptible, Donnersmarck’s ﬁlm clearly represents an overt
critique of Ostalgie itself. Reviews of the ﬁlm frequently address this
subtext. Reinhard Mohr, for example, claims that ‘Das Leben der
Anderen is the ﬁrst German motion picture to seriously tackle the GDR
without expressing nostalgia for Trabis or Spreewaldgurken’,41
and
Holger Lodahl similarly claims that ‘after the GDR has been all dressed
up and nostalgically represented in successful ﬁlm comedies, Das Leben
der Anderen ﬁnally shows the other side of the GDR. This ﬁlm begins to
ﬁll the historical gap left behind by Goodbye, Lenin! and Sonnenallee.’42
Tobias Vetter nicely sums up this viewpoint by describing the ﬁlm as ‘an
antidote to the Ostalgie overdose’.43
Such reviews would seem to
indicate that Das Leben der Anderen represents more than simply
41 Reinhard Mohr, ‘Stasi ohne
Spreewaldgurke’, Spiegel Online,
15 March 2006. URL: http://
www.spiegel.de/kultur/kino/
0,1518,406092,00.html [accessed
27 September 2007].
42 Holger Lodahl, ‘Das Leben der
Anderen: Das na¨chste große
Ding?’, kino-zeit. URL: http://
www.kino-zeit.de/ﬁlme/artikel/
4463_das-leben-der-anderen.html
[accessed 27 September 2007].
43 Tobias Vetter, ‘Das Leben der
Anderen’, ﬁlmrezension, 21 March
2006. URL: http://
www.ﬁlmrezension.de/+
frame.shtml?/ﬁlme/
das_leben_der_anderen.shtml
[accessed 27 September 2007].
489 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
another version of GDR history, but instead points to a more widespread
cultural backlash against the Ostalgie phenomenon as a whole.
Evelyn Finger notes, however, that Donnersmarck’s ﬁlm is not a work
of realism but rather a work of ‘metaphorical hyperrealism’ because it
‘plays with our cliche´s [and] depicts images of late-socialist melancholy
that seem to come straight from picture books: grey-brown ofﬁces, bluegrey
interrogation rooms, artist apartments with creaking ﬂoorboards and
worn out sofas’.44
Donnersmarck conducted extensive research for the
ﬁlm, and he also cast several famous East German actors, such as Ulrich
Mu¨he, who was previously under Stasi surveillance himself. He was
therefore concerned that the story be as authentic as possible. However,
in an interview conducted at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, where the
ﬁlm received its North American premiere, Donnersmarck also discussed
the colour scheme he employed in the ﬁlm, which was designed to
highlight and emphasize certain colours that people most often associate
with the GDR. His goal was to capture the way the GDR exists in
people’s memory rather than the way it was in real life, yet he also added
that this nostalgic memory of the GDR is more ‘true’ than the GDR itself:
We created a GDR that is in a way truer than the true thing. When
Ulrich and I traveled through the former GDR and presented the ﬁlm
there before it was released, people would come up to us and say,
‘Wow, it’s incredible. It’s exactly how it was, and you have so much
managed to recreate that time.’ And that’s because in our memories
things become stronger than they were and so if there was a dominance
of certain colours, those other colours we almost forget about. And so
in a way we’ve created a GDR that is truer than the real thing, that is
realer than the actual GDR, and I hope more beautiful.45
It would be wrong to conclude, therefore, that Donnersmarck’s
representation of the GDR is more real or authentic than the
representations in Ostalgie ﬁlms; rather, Donnersmarck’s comments
seem to complicate the very notion of ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity’ in
relation to ﬁlmic representations. While Donnersmarck’s ﬁlm does not
express a nostalgic vision of GDR culture, in other words, the power of
its representations are similarly derived from its ability to appeal to both
the memory and the imagination of viewers. The very basis of
Donnersmarck’s conclusion that ﬁlms function as imaginative
reconstructions of reality would thus seem to strengthen the notion of
nostalgia as a potential tool for imagining new social possibilities: just as
Donnersmarck’s ﬁlm presents a ‘hyperreal’ space, in which certain
elements of the former GDR are emphasized and others remain forgotten
or left out, nostalgic depictions of the GDR similarly exclude or
reimagine the more negative aspects of the culture in order to highlight
potentially positive social changes that might be introduced in the
present. While Donnersmarck’s ﬁlm could be read as a reminder of the
dangers of totalitarianism and the critical importance of privacy laws, for
example, Ostalgie ﬁlms might also be read as a warning about the
44 Evelyn Finger, ‘Die Bekehrung’,
Die Zeit, 23 March 2006. URL:
http://www.zeit.de/2006/13/
Leben_der_anderen [accessed 27
September 2007].
45 This comment is taken from an
interview with the director
featured on the North American
DVD release of Das Leben der
Anderen.
490 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
dangers of completely ignoring the more humane aspects of socialism.
Debates about the Ostalgie phenomenon must therefore move beyond the
simple question of whose representation of the GDR is more valid or
authentic and try instead to accept a plurality of different versions that
speak to the hopes and fears of all East Germans, both those who felt
oppressed under the old regime and those who continue to feel
disenfranchised today.
491 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 . Anthony Enns . The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German ﬁlm
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