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The sidewalks of Rosenthaler Strasse are rainswept and empty. It's a particularly dreary day—the kind that leaves you despairing about life in any European capital, when a curtain of misty drizzle falls over the city and the streets are Sunday-bare. Neoclassical houses nestled side by side are reduced to shuttered displays, grey lattices over the glossy storefronts. Suddenly, a lone open store appears, a low-ceilinged cavernous affair in a 1960s concrete bunker building. Its orange display glows, crammed with pilot helmets made of cheap pleather, sequined belly-dancer costumes, and orange candles in the shape of the Berlin TV Tower. In the corner, Technicolor rooster-shaped egg-holders jostle each other next to plastic radios and floral dinnerware jumbled together in a colorful smorgasbord of retro kitsch. Iconography spills over countertops—hammer and sickle badges, Sandmännchen and Pittiplatsch themed kitchenware, once prized by East German children as they wolfed down dinner above their animated bedtime heroes. Each item in this store is just a bit out of the ordinary: the objects more folkloric in their brightness, the plastic more brittle around its edges, the pleather unabashedly declaring itself the best—and the only—luxury material of the time.

This is Wahnsinn Berlin, one of many stores that carries gently used, mostly East German goods from the 1970s, a  repository of ostcool. Wahnsinn's various offerings are artifacts of a badly remembered past, items both highly prized and ordinary that once uncomplainingly inhabited some East German's lace-curtained, walnut-bookshelved, state-issued apartment. Though they are still the cheerful debris of that partially forgotten era, laden with nostalgia, today they also clamor for re-adoption by young post-reunification Berliners. They are quintessential symbols of Ostalgie, a sense of cultural nostalgia and longing for the German Democratic Republic.

Popular German culture is still struggling to understand the historical legacy of the GDR in the context of reunified Germany. Contemporary, Western-dominated rhetoric portrays life in East Germany as primitive and totalitarian. Former East German citizens are framed as helpless, repressed victims of a socialist state, with an infrastructure crippled by reparations East Germany made to the Soviets. How can one reclaim personal memory of a place whose political, cultural, and geographic markers have been almost completely eradicated? Former East Germans often struggle with the fact that they no longer have a territory to call their own or a shared material touchstone to help them re-imagine their past.

Enter Ostalgie, this compelling sense of nostalgia for the East. It softens the contours of memory under actually existing socialism and provides an alternate way to read and recollect  this history In the last 10 years, there has been an explosion of ostalgic products, stories, and movies in Germany. It is a deeply problematic form of recollection, however, one that runs the danger of sentimentalizing or trivializing hardships and injustices of life in an undeniably repressive East German state—from the politicized kindergarten education to the constant surveillance and supervision by neighbors, friends, and bosses. Ostalgie has evolved into a curious combination of memory politics, identity exploration, and consumerism that endorses an alternative, retro-cool subculture. 

I. Photographs for Osaka

A camera shutter immortalizes two boys running beside a bus, hands outstretched, greedily grasping, faces apparently distorted by hunger pangs, mouths agape with suffocated yells. The bus drives on as tourists press their faces against the smeared windows, as they loop through East Berlin and finally back over the border again.

Western tourists, horrified by the scarce conditions behind the iron curtain, hand around the Polaroids they’ve taken of scenes like this to relatives in Osaka, Pittsburgh, or Barcelona, commenting on them with the helpless sadness of the shocked but disinterested tourist. Look at those children, they sigh. This is what socialism has reduced them to. In the mean time, the boys have run away laughing, back to their rooms where they smoke and listen to Exile on Main Street in the lazy glare of the afternoon sun. Mario and Micha, who have lives surprisingly similar to those of their West German counterparts, are the protagonists of Thomas Brussig's novel Sonnenallee, which focuses on the process of coming of age in East Germany and satirizes the interaction between East and West.

Brussig is a poster-child for Ostalgie: Sonnenallee, written in 1999 and made into a movie in the same year, was the first mainstream German film to engage with GDR nostalgia, as well as one of the highest-grossing hits of that year. Brussig's novel, a comic account of teenage life behind the wall that veers from blatant slapstick to dark humor, washing a gentle sepia tone over the difficult memory of a socialist past. Micha and Mario’s first love affairs and discoveries of existentialism are dramatic events, while the socialist governance appears only in silly tangential episodes:  Micha's mother insists on calling him “Mischa” to get him just one step closer to the elite Russian prep school she dreams of, and his petrified West German uncle smuggles suits and chocolates (all legal) over the border.