Sophie Duvernoy

Joseph P. wanders through the *Salle des Pas Perdus*—the room of lost steps. People pace back and forth; it is a place to wait. Train stations, government buildings, edifices of the law: all force those who enter to surrender themselves to their own irrelevance. You must abide, they command.



The gray zone of indeterminacy stretches out in front of P. Though he has done his share of waiting in life, he feels this entrance hall extend infinitely above and around him, a grand zone of lostness beyond his comprehension. The marble does not take heed of his footsteps; it refuses to bear any trace of his passage. Above, gray figures walk hurriedly down a corridor P. cannot reach, barely registering his presence. A constant murmuring reverberates round the hall, yet P. does not see anyone speaking. People keep a strange, wide distance between each other, silently glowering at the forests of Corinthian columns rising impassively to the sky.



P. has entered the Palais de Justice. His fate rises, suspended above him. He is before the law.



 



*



 



The Palais de Justice is a monolithic monstrosity at the center of Brussels. W. G. Sebald called it “the largest accumulation of stone blocks in Europe”; with a surface area of 26,000 square meters, it is larger than Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. In fact, the Palais was the biggest monument built in the nineteenth century; today it is second in size only to Bucharest’s Palace of the Parliament in Europe. It occupies an overbuilt square that connects two main transportation arteries in the center of Brussels by means of a large, blue-lit traffic island, and hovers above the city in the midst of Brussels’ leaden sky: a sight impossible to escape from almost any perspective. Built on the *Galgenberg*, where convicted criminals were hanged in the Middle Ages, it looks down from the higher, wealthy area of the city onto the Marolles, the historically poor neighborhood of Brussels, an ominous reminder of Justice and the Upright Life.



Despite its grandeur, the Palais has been under renovation for the better part of twenty years. Its golden dome is permanently surrounded by bleak gray scaffolding; shrubs shoot up through the roof. Though it has been the seat of the Supreme Court of Belgium for 130 years, its maintenance costs have become simply too much to bear for the government, which has decided to evacuate the building for the time being. Its future is up for debate: the city of Brussels is currently holding a competition to determine its use, with the winning proposal to be unveiled in 2011.



For now, the Palais de Justice confounds those who confront it, standing as an emptied monument, a hollowed symbol that refers to nothing except perhaps its own bizarre existence. One remembers, upon seeing it, that Brussels is a city prone not just to monumental spectacle, but also to eccentric and self-conscious myth-making. René Magritte and surrealist art both called Brussels home. The Palais, a supposedly rational temple to law, is an unlikely combination of the monumental and the mythical: entering it means surrendering yourself to the fact that you have entered a land where justice has ceded to myth, where ritual takes over from rational proceedings, and where bureaucracy has achieved hitherto unknown heights of refinement intended to eternally confound.





*



 



Joseph Poelaert, one of Belgium’s most famous *fin de siècle *architects—harboring a reputation for slight insanity—worked on the plans for the Palais ten years before the city even decided to build one. When in 1860, an international competition to build Brussels’ new Palais de Justice was ordered by royal decree, Poelaert had already spent the better part of a decade hunched over his drawing board, sketching out a monumental map of his thoughts. It was to be his magnum opus, the eighth wonder of the world; the competition was the chance for his Palais, a symbol for greatness elaborately wrought in his mind, to be turned at last into a reality of massive stone.



The plans Poelaert submitted for his Palais to the municipal council in 1862 were as vague and uncertain as the myth of the building itself. The scale of the building was unclear from his designs, and the cost of its construction was a total mystery. Jules Anspach, the mayor of Brussels at the time, simply declared, “I want the expenditure to be the largest possible!” Anspach’s wish was fulfilled. The building, which had a projected budget of 4 million francs, ended up costing 50 million, completely emptying the coffers of Brussels and almost driving the city to ruin. Its construction would take an entire seventeen years to complete. Poelaert never saw the end result: he died in 1879, four years before its completion. The building was inaugurated in 1883, the largest public governmental building of the century: boasting 24 large courtrooms, 236 smaller rooms for diverse uses—including prison cells to detain criminals waiting to be convicted—and a further realm of mysterious, shadowy rooms whose locations and uses were obscure from the beginning.



Though it was designed to command quiet, dignified respect, the Palais de Justice was overrun by a rioting mob on October 15, 1883, the day of its inauguration. In the government’s blind desire to create a monument that would testify to the power of Belgium, an entire section of the Marolles was razed to make space for the edifice. At that period, urban development in Brussels mainly focused on beautifying the richer areas of the city, while the poorer ones were left to stagnate. However, with this particular assertion of might, the government had gone too far for the people. An angry mass stormed the entrance hall, pushing over furniture, slitting the covers of leather seats with razors, breaking mirrors, tearing down tapestries and paintings, shitting and pissing in the corners to fully desecrate the building. It was pillaged, ravaged, and abandoned in disgrace. For the angry Marolliens, the Palais de Justice was a symbol of might, not justice. They cursed Poelaert as a *skieven architek*, or crooked architect: thus inventing one of the most creative—and condemnatory—Brusseleer insults in existence today.



Another brutal scene occurred in June 2009, when a man sitting in the audience of a court case pulled out a gun and fatally shot a magistrate and her clerk. Later, the apprehended perpetrator claimed to have acted out of vengeance “toward Justice in general, and the magistrate in particular,” despite the fact that he had nothing to do with the case that had just been deliberated. Violence and madness, part of the dark underbelly of Justice, suddenly revealed themselves in the marble halls that ordinarily served to deny their existence.



 



*



 



The Palais de Justice was built to create, not reflect, myths. It is a symbolist hodgepodge built in the Neoclassical style common to many European public monuments: a mysterious mix of Greek, Egyptian and Byzantine elements decorate each of the four distinctly-designed façades. Winged lions, Greek gods, and Masonic signs cover the halls, seemingly holding the elusive key to the law. The massive marble stairs that lead from the Salle des Pas Perdus to the upper gallery are flanked by statues of Greek and Roman senators, orators, and jurors. Shadows fall on their faces and ripple over their stone togas—they stand as silent guardians to the symbols hidden in the shadows of porticoes, forgotten but for the odd scholarly text collecting dust in the public archives of the Brussels library.



When the Palais was built during Leopold II’s reign, Belgium was a world power. The country was rich with the spoils of the Congo, and longed to prove this to the outside world. This edifice, dedicated to justice, was really a symbol of ill-gained wealth, a testament to imperialism and colonialism. More than that, it was intended to stand for the glory of the country: relatively new (it was founded in 1830), Belgium yearned for its own national myths which would create cultural memory and reflect a unified identity. As Belgium declined in importance again, hit hard by the Great Depression of the ’30s and the Second World War, the Palais became a world unto itself, dissociated from a larger social context.



Even taken on its own terms as a symbol of Poelaert’s madness, the Palais exceeds all attempts at comprehension. It is so easy, even inevitable, to become hopelessly lost in its vast system of lugubrious corridors. It is its own country; though it began as a map to Poelart’s own cavernous and convoluted mind, it slowly took on a grotesque life and topography of its own. Edmond Picard, a Belgian jurist and writer, said of his time working in the Palais, “For more than forty years, I have been traveling and living in the country of the law.” It is an enclosed system from which the traveler cannot escape, much in the same way that Kafka’s Joseph K. is trapped in the series of interminable corridors and constantly shifting rooms that populate his court. It comes as no surprise that Orson Welles initially planned on filming his adaptation of *The Trial* here: one can easily imagine a bird’s eye view of Joseph K., walking interminably around the sixteen-point star embedded in the center of the marble floor in the *Salle des Pas Perdus*, helplessly waiting for his trial to begin.



In *The Trial,* Joseph K. is told a parable titled “Before the Law.” A man from the country journeys to find the Law, and tries to gain access through a doorway which will lead him directly to it. However, this door is guarded by a doorkeeper, who tells the man that he cannot go through at this time. The man waits, at first patiently, then with increasing impatience as his waiting stretches from days into years. He begs the doorkeeper incessantly to let him in; he tries first to reason with him, and then to bribe him, to no avail. The man grows old; his eyesight begins to fail; he waits for so long that he befriends the fleas that live on the collar of the doorkeeper’s uniform. Just before his death, it occurs to him that there is one question he has not asked the doorkeeper. “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “So how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” As he dies, the doorkeeper bends over him, and shouts to the deaf old man: “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. Now I’m going to close it.”



Like this door to the Law, the Palais de Justice carries the promise of capturing an ever-receding opportunity for transcendence, knowledge, or even salvation. Entering it means accepting the myth of the Law, complete with its slow, Belgian bureaucratic mechanisms, shuffling paperwork, endless waits, interminable deliberations. Yet at the end of this, hidden in the catacombs of the basement, the vaults of the unreachable attic, the obscure carvings hidden in the shadows of porticoes, lies a glimpse of what is secret, unrepresentable, unspoken: the true meaning of this massive symbol.



But first one must find it. People emerge from the Palais telling stories of endless corridors that make the visitor walk compulsively, passing the same halls over and over again despite never changing direction. Some speak of courtrooms filled with ghost-like figures glimpsed when walking past, who have vanished on the way back. Disused wooden stairs branch off from main corridors, yet end abruptly in the air, hanging in a void, their ends blocked off by a dusty stockpile of bureaus, chairs, and filing cabinets. Gaping marble halls are scattered throughout the building, hushed like disused ballrooms at night. Other stories tell of people who set up shop in forgotten, crumbling rooms in the basement: a tobacconist’s, bookie’s, a barber shop, and a bar may all have flourished in its subterranean regions for brief periods, inexplicably vanishing overnight. The Palais also carries legends of more mystical architectural properties. In his haunting description of a visit, Sebald writes, “Austerlitz went on to tell me that he himself, looking for a labyrinth used in the initiation ceremonies of the Freemasons, which he had heard was either in the basement or the attic story of the palace, had wandered for hours through this mountain range of stone, through forests of columns, past colossal statues, upstairs and downstairs, and no one ever asked him what he wanted.” People still search for this labyrinth; the promise of secret, subversive knowledge in a palace of justice is almost impossible to resist, even if one must risk eternal lostness.



 



*



 



According to Georg Simmel, all buildings contain the potential of their own ruin. The Palais de Justice may not yet be physically run-down, but with every further hollowing out of its symbolic potential, it has been inwardly collapsing since its construction. Walter Benjamin remarks that with Kafka, “there is no longer any talk of wisdom. Only the products of its decomposition are left.” One could extend the sentiment to the Palais de Justice itself.



Soon the Palais will be completely transformed. Suggestions for its future include turning it into a monumental art museum or luxury shopping-mall. A more outlandish proposal put forward by Franco Dragone, director for the Cirque du Soleil, involves turning the building into a giant souk and transforming it into a microcosm of the entire city of Brussels: a hectic, nonsensical crossroads of culture.



Most people, however, are still attached to the Palais as an edifice of the Law, the symbol of a particularly Belgian, surrealist bureaucracy that continually propagates its own mystique. To rob its halls of their impenetrability, bringing it into light and time again, would be the greatest injustice of all.

Reinhold Messner and his brother Günther reached the summit of Nanga Parbat in June 1970. They were the third mountaineering team ever to do so. Nanga Parbat, located in Northern Pakistan, is the ninth-highest mountain in the world, and the deadliest after Annapurna. On their ascent, the brothers climbed up the Rupal face, one of the highest mountain faces on earth. It rises 4,600 meters above its base, and its peak fades into cold, distant clouds. Reinhold Messner later wrote a novel about their fateful ascent, which he called *The Naked Mountain*. The title is a literal translation of Nanga Parbat, but it resonates on other levels, too—the climber is always defenseless, at the mercy of 8,000 meters. 



Nanga Parbat wasn’t merciful to the two brothers. Reinhold and Günther’s climb was tough and rushed. *The Naked Mountain* is taut, like traditional climbing narratives, but with one difference. Messner’s story ends with the loss of his brother.



Messner would go on to become one of the world’s most prolific climbers—arguably, the best climber of all time. In 1978, he was the first man to successfully reach Mount Everest’s summit without bottled oxygen. By 1986, he had scaled all of the world’s eight-thousanders. He is an advocate of climbing “by fair means,” that is, using minimal tools and equipment on extraordinarily dangerous climbs. This also means that Messner frequently faces death, yet has somehow emerged with only a few lost toes (six, frostbitten during his delirious descent of Nanga Parbat). 



Many years after climbing Nanga Parbat, Messner became friends with an Austrian named Christoph Ransmayr, and they began traveling and climbing together. Also an adventurer, Ransmayr harbors an inexplicable fascination for ice. He organizes expeditions to the Arctic Circle, as a leader for a company called Poseidon Arctic Voyages.  He is also one of Austria’s greatest living writers. Our path not only leads into foreign territory, but into the interior of the world itself, in a language that knows both the real *and *the possible, he writes. Storytelling is much like exploring. Ransmayr and Messner make a good team. They inhabit the realms of the real and the possible at once—Messner through climbing, Ransmayr through writing. They find foreign territory, then claim and change it through their journey.



 



Being from Austria means a couple of things—you are in a country so close to the Alps that mountains are inevitably on your mind. But Austria is also a nexus of European culture, a country marked by Enlightenment thinking and still pining for its lost empire. Ransmayr writes about the two side by side—what happens when exploration and conquest merge. Messner, who is from South Tyrol (technically a part of Italy), is a cultural Austrian. He climbs and conquers intuitively.



The two men recognize that mountaineering is a blatantly symbolic act. The ascent to the summit is a sign of triumph over the impassive world through reason and will. Alexander von Humboldt, the Enlightenment explorer who founded the field of biogeography, thought that “other laws of a more mysterious nature rule the higher spheres of the organic world. A physical delineation of nature terminates at the point where the sphere of intellect begins, and a new world of mind is opened to our view.” Mountain climbers struggle against nature, not for the sake of a world of mind, but to create a world of will. Yet this is not always a process of rational conquest. As the mountaineer climbs higher, moving away from the topography of the mountain and into his inner landscape, something surreal and indefinable happens to human and world. The climber passes into an intermediate space—neither wholly real nor imagined—in which man and nature are no longer at each other’s mercy. Each suspends the other in order to examine it, and in doing so, the boundaries of mind and world extend beyond the real, into the poetic. 



 



This poetic process is something Ransmayr intuitively grasps—he doesn’t put much stock in understanding the world through Enlightenment rationality. When Alexander von Humboldt traveled through South America, he did not expect to fully explain the world he was discovering, but allowed himself to be overwhelmed by forests, meteor showers, electric eels. Nature has to be given the opportunity to unfold to the explorer on its own terms. 



Messner believes in giving nature its due. In 1971, he wrote a manifesto on bare climbing entitled “The Murder of the Impossible.” In it, he rails against people who rely completely on their equipment to climb by drilling holes and rigging hooks into the mountainside. He flippantly writes, “‘Impossible’: it doesn’t exist anymore. The dragon is dead, poisoned, and the hero Siegfried is unemployed.” Others have killed the mythology of the mountain through technology—it is Messner’s job to return the impossible to the mountain. 



Yet because Messner believes that he alone can shoulder this task, he denies nature its necessary autonomy. He has instead distorted a philosophy into an ego-driven project of conquest. The moments of poetry that unfold in *The Naked Mountain* happen in spite of his intentions, not because of them. And there is no humanism in Messner’s thought. His brother Günther becomes a figure who trudges doggedly behind him, suffering from fever and delirium. When they reach the summit, the two men are stranded, and huddle together at the top of the mountain for the night. Messner does not speak to his brother, but retreats further into himself.



In his manifesto, Messner angrily writes, “the courage of those who still climb ‘free’ is derided as a manifestation of lack of conscientiousness.” These words come a few months after he has lost Günther to an avalanche, during their unplanned descent of Nanga Parbat without tools or rope.



 



Ransmayr must have heard the story of Günther’s death from Messner several times—maybe even while climbing the Himalayas with him. He probably read *The Naked Mountain*. Messner’s novel is an attempt to settle accounts with the leader of the expedition, Karl Maria Herrligkoffer. Herrligkoffer accused Reinhold of causing his brother’s death by attempting a climb that was foolhardy and dangerous, acting against explicit orders. But Herrligkoffer’s story is one of many different stories surrounding the Messners’ climb.



The narratives tend to splinter around one central event: the rocket flare that Herrligkoffer sent up from base camp. Messner and Herrligkoffer had come to a tacit understanding that Messner would be the first to reach the peak. The rocket was the signal to start the climb. It was to indicate the weather forecast—red for bad, blue for good. Messner was to set out immediately if a storm was approaching, for fear of wasting time. Herrligkoffer received the weather report, and ordered a blue flare to be sent up. Someone grabbed a flare wrapped in blue cloth and set it off, but it was red. Messner saw the signal, and knew that the time had come for him to begin the final push to the top. There were no more blue flares at base camp that could signal the mistake—according to Herrligkoffer, at least—so Messner set out on his own with minimal equipment, early in the morning. He crunched through the snow quickly, spiking the mountain’s side with his crampons. Günther followed him around midday, also without rope—he didn’t want his brother to attempt the climb alone.



Messner claims that this was how he and Günther found themselves on the summit with no means of climbing down the crevasse they had scaled on their ascent. Instead, they were forced into descending on the Diamir face—a route which they had memorized but were unprepared to take. Günther and Messner climbed down, their paths separating farther and farther, until they lost sight of each other. Günther never reappeared. 



Ransmayr added his story, “The Flying Mountain,” to the collection of tales about the Messners. But it is a completely fictional retelling of their climb of Nanga Parbat. Liam and Pàdraic are two Irish brothers who set out to climb a mountain in Tibet known as Phur-Ri. Messner, the stronger brother who lived, becomes Liam, the determined climber who dies. Pàdraic writes the novel as a prose poem that chronicles their journey to the summit, into blank space and suffocating whiteness. Ransmayr, who does not share Messner’s extreme drive or ego, realized that exploring demands humanism. And so his account of their climb is not a chronicle of challenging crevasses and strategies, but a story about the brothers themselves. When Liam and Pàdraic climb Nanga Parbat, they choose to climb with each other and in each other’s company. In this way, Ransmayr humanized Messner’s story, tempered and redeemed it through his writing. 



***



Liam and Pàdraic are quite close to the top. But Pàdraic has been feeling sick since the afternoon. They pitch their small tent in their final encampment and curl up for the night. But snow comes with darkness. Sheets of white pile themselves around the tent, on its roof, over its sides. Pàdraic is delirious, dizzy from the thin air and weak with fever. Liam makes him tea and sprinkles white powder into it. His brother daydreams until dusk, lulled by the opium. At night, he curls up, mistakes Liam for his Tibetan lover, and reaches towards his brother for an embrace. Liam pulls away, giggling sleepily. Pàdraic is embarrassed—he turns away, fervently hoping that Liam is still asleep. The two brothers stay in the tent for several days. Pàdraic moves in and out of delirium. Sometimes shapes become clearer in his mind, only to blur again. The snow continues to fall gently, trapping them in their fragile nylon canopy.



 



The two brothers have made it to Nanga Parbat’s summit. They have conquered the mountain, and are awash in triumph. But now, Reinhold and Günther can’t find their way downward. They can’t climb down the crevasse they scaled on their way up—it’s too dangerous to attempt without rope. It’s getting dark quickly—the sky is bleeding into a deep, ink-stained indigo. 



Reinhold finds a sheltered hollow in which they can rest overnight. The two men’s limbs are already bloodless and stiff. They take off their shoes. Reinhold unfolds a length of silver astronaut foil. It crinkles with the false promise of insulation. He wraps it around their aching, frozen feet. They huddle together on the ice shelf, immobile. They pick up the ends of the foil and wrap their entire bodies in it, spinning together a thin cocoon of silver. It reflects the stars back at the sky, small silver pinpricks on a fragile blanket. It is too cold to think now. The two brothers hug each other. They can feel their bodies freezing to death. They are together, but this does nothing to prevent them from slipping into hallucinations. Their heads poke out of the astronaut foil, exposed to the wind. They don’t speak, don’t move, simply endure. They wait for the grey of the morning sky. 



 



Günther and Reinhold have no choice but to take the Diamir face downward. They are weak. At least they know the topography of the area—they can map out its terrain in their minds. They are at the top of an enormous flank of ice and rock, and must move towards a ground they can’t see. The two brothers have almost no equipment with them apart from a few crampons, hooks and grips. They need to make their way mostly using bare hands and frozen feet.



They move towards an invisible abyss, flattening themselves against the snowy mountainside. As they descend, they look downwards at dark, seething clouds crackling with electricity. The clouds writhe, spitting out light that illuminates the path to the still-invisible ground.



It suddenly begins to hail. Bullets of ice pelt the brothers. The hail falls further into the turmoil of the thunderstorm. Reinhold looks up. The sky above him has thickened and grown as black as the roiling clouds below. He can barely see his hands and feet. Günther is close behind him, a presence in the dark. They move onward, hands and feet moving in tandem.



 



They climb downward, tracing a zigzag track on the shimmering blue slope. Reinhold leads, Günther follows. The rock they grip is barely visible beneath a thick layer of cloud. They trek onward wearily, signaling to each other. The air is very thin. Reinhold suddenly becomes aware of a third climber who is right next to him. The third climber is climbing alongside Reinhold, following his every move. He hears the ice crack beside him, feels certain that there is someone next to him. He later describes it as a ghost, or a palpable presence. “Its being is a returning of my being,” he writes.



 



This is another account of the climb—both Messner and Ransmayr’s, and yet neither. It seems to belong to the mountain, but it doesn’t. It belongs to the climb itself, which demands poeticism and expansiveness of its explorers. 



Towards the end of this account, Pàdraic is lying on the ground, surrounded by shallow snow-banks. His body carves out an icy hollow in the tightly packed ground. He can’t move, and feels incredibly tired. He wants nothing but to drift away in sleep and separate his fuzzy mind from the frozen, immobile body that traps it. A shape moves above him. He hears a murmur, a sound, finally a voice coming from the pale oval floating over his head. It’s Liam. He reels off a list of names, places, people they have traveled with, reciting their entire journey back at Pàdraic. 



“Try to remember! What do you remember? Remember the truck in China that drove us to Tibet? Remember the pass we just crossed?”



His story hangs in the frozen air like a thread that pulls Pàdraic back towards consciousness. Names summon up faces that had been submerged in the crystallizing webs of his mind. He opens his eyes again, and shapes suddenly sharpen—he can see Liam’s face now.



Then, he feels something fall from the sky. Many things. They hit his breast and spring apart. Liam stares upward. “They’re butterflies! Frozen butterflies.” Butterflies had been caught in a storm cloud during their flight over the mountain, and had frozen solid in mid-flight. They rain down on the brothers in a fragile shower of brilliant white wings encased in ice. Pàdraic feels sensation return to his limbs with every tap of a fresh butterfly shattering on his own body.

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.



*Sonnenallee* may have been wildly successful, but it endured a wave of harsh criticism in its wake—wasn't Brussig simply trivializing the totalitarian past? The threat of creating what Anna Saunders terms a 'Kuschel-DDR', or cuddly GDR, is justified. The film version of *Sonnenallee* was even subject to a lawsuit by *Help e.V.*, an organization for victims of political violence, which claimed that the film was offensive to political dissidents and others who had suffered at the hands of the East German state.



To deny that part of GDR history would simply be wrong. Instead, Ostalgie is always highly anecdotal and personal in its attempt to get away from the myth of the Stasi-state; it declares that individualism is not just part of a Western framework. However, its alternatedepictions are invariably of a happy socialist childhood. When memory narratives become programmatic, the line between personal remembrance and mass cultural consciousness is blurred, the promise of individuality betrayed.



II. Stasi Tapes and Summer Camp



Staged photographs, Western video footage, Stasi supervision tapes—private images are overlaid with public ones in a memory palimpsest. When my mother looks back on the dissolution of the GDR, she has difficulty discerning the boundary between her personal memories and those created by endless hours of video footage documenting the political breakdown. Recollections dissolved with the country, to be restored physically in the form of video projections or frozen, full-page newspaper pictures. Media images, usually western, crystallized memories of the GDR that fit neatly within its Stasi-state mythology. These pictures provoked crises of faith in individual testimony and massive memory gaps for some East Germans.



*Zonenkinder*, Jana Hensel's popular autobiography chronicling her post-wall identity crisis, charts the disappearance of her personal memory in generalized recollections. Instead of showing visiting Western friends the landmarks of her childhood and her everyday life, she takes them to the Secret Police Museum and the St. Nicholas Church where the Monday night demonstrations took place in 1989, pointing out surveillance towers, monitors, and cameras. Her friends are happy to have witnessed real GDR landmarks, whose pictures they had until then only seen on TV. But Hensel’s own memories have in turn become “a series of strange, larger-than-life anecdotes that didn’t really have anything to do with what our lives had been like.”



At dinner with her West German boyfriend and his family, Hensel is unable defend her past circumstances when faced with the father’s gentle but firm condemnations of GDR's repression, surveillance systems, and weak infrastructure. The conversation about her former home ends as she weakly smiles and nods. Every one of her memories has been co-opted into an alternate framework in which she was once a naïve victim of political circumstances. How could she compete with the cultural capital of the fashionable West German girls, who still put a premium on bourgeois family heritage and learned French instead of Russian? Outdone in every arena—political, cultural, and historical—the only way Hensel can cope with her sudden memory loss is to rebuild her personal history from the ground up, and critically examine her childhood to rediscover the positive aspects of her East German past.



Maybe this is also why my mother used to tell me detailed stories from her childhood, rather than her student days in East Berlin. She skipped over how she learned to speak Russian or shoot a rifle. I recently found a languishing, yellowed invitation embossed with officially-endorsed socialist vocabulary, flowering over the page in ceremonial cursive. It's the invitation to her socialist coming-of-age ceremony, or *Jugendweihe*. She doesn't mention this much either; it's a banal, common artifact, and the ceremony was probably equally forgettable. But these are the sort of relics that many Germans now cling to in order to remember the GDR, relics that are unequivocally emblematic of the happy socialist childhood.



Despite this, though, all former East Germans (ostalgic or not) must concede that their recollections are never universal, but clearly tinged with the neat order of a socialist system. My mother suffered through typical history classes, but she was also shown movies documenting the heroism of the Soviets during World War II. She had school off on national holidays, but would sometimes have to put on a red bandana and parade in the streets with her classmates as part of a mass demonstration for the glory of socialism.



III. Mokkafix Gold



As socialism slowly becomes a more exotic concept in the Western European imagination, Ostalgie develops a dangerous undercurrent—that of commodification. It claims certain consumer objects as its own and imbues them with implicit cultural significance to trigger a stream of lost memories. Mass-produced items, exotic and alternative as they might be today, are weirdly expected to become containers for personal memory, functioning on the most intimate level of recollection.



The unquestioned distinctness of GDR products and brands makes them a comfortable cultural foothold for reconstructing a personal universe of memory. This is satirized in Ostalgie's biggest international hit to date, Wolfgang Becker's 2003 *Goodbye Lenin!*. The film centers on Alex, a teenager whose mother dedicates her life to the socialist party of the GDR and collapses into a coma just before the fall of the Wall. When she wakes up many months later, a doctor tells Alex that his mother has a weak heart and might not be able to stand the further strain of learning about the dissolution of the country. Alex elaborately constructs a pseudo-GDR around his mother, confined to bed rest in her apartment, surrounding her with old Eastern products and television shows until he has cocooned her in a bizarre, patched-together version of her former reality.



This alternate world is inevitably doomed. Ordinary consumer products seem to carry the potential to recreate a believable cultural reality, but cannot fully succeed. After his mother wakes up from her coma, Alex is faced with organizing a birthday party for her, replete with East German presents and traditions. He goes to exorbitant lengths to recreate the now unavailable East German goods, frantically buying up old packages and labels for *Mokkafix* coffee, *Spreewälder* pickles, and *Rotkäppchen* sparkling wine (“the Communist champagne”), and decanting Western products into Eastern packaging. Alex’s mother picks up the gold *Mokkafix* package, face crinkling with delight, and uncorks the *Rotkäppchen*, sweet and bland in its deceptively genteel, cursive-inscribed bottle. Unlike the party’s guests (an alcoholic school director, some slightly decrepit neighbors and two very confused young boys), the objects are reliable, completely trustworthy in their quiet ability to faithfully replicate the past. Throughout the entire sham, Alex’s co-conspirators nestle mutely in the gift basket, material renditions of the cultural illusion he is perpetuating.



Unexpectedly, *Goodbye Lenin! *actually spurred sales of *Spreewälder* and *Rotkäppchen*, brands that have reemerged in the German consumer market. East Germans use old GDR products not just because they are used to them, but because these products form one of the only ways for them to legitimate their memories in the present. For former East Germans, they are a cheap way to validate the past in the present; for younger generations, they are an easy way to buy into an exotic, idiosyncratic past.



IV. Smoked Glass Mirrors



Most public markers of the GDR, like the bronze bust of Lenin that Alex's mother despairingly watches recede from her, have disappeared by now. Lenin, arm grandly outstretched, is at the mercy of the helicopter carrying him off into the sunset, presumably to the dump. Even more significantly, the Palace of the Republic—the GDR's grand political hub and convention center in Berlin—was dismantled two years ago amidst huge protests, one smoked glass window at a time. East Germans are powerless against the literal dismantling of their territory. Jana Hensel writes about the urban redevelopment in her childhood street that left her feeling lost and disoriented, reflecting that “home was a place we only knew for a short time”—culture, history and geography go hand-in-hand, all suffering from a process of simultaneous eradication.



In this environment, the *Ampelmännchen *has emerged, functioning as both a high-profile tourist consumer item and a symbol that resists the complete erasure of GDR markers. He’s the little man on streetlamps, who wears a porkpie hat in East Germany as he walks or stands. After reunification, Western streetlights replaced East German streetlights and signs in order to create a more cohesive and homogenous urban aesthetic. Markus Heckhausen, a West German graphics designer, took up the *Ampelmännchen *in 1995 and created new lamp models that he championed in design magazines and city councils. Slowly, the Ostalgie movement adopted the *Ampelmännchen* as a forgotten cultural symbol of the GDR, and Eastern-style streetlights returned to Berlin, as well as other cities. However, the *Ampelmännchen* is not only infiltrating Germany's streets, but also the international fridge magnet, coffee cup, bag and t-shirt market. He is a commodified symbol of the GDR, endowed with a bizarre cultural capital that he did not originally possess.



Nonetheless, the *Ampelmännchen*, radiating a benign red and green, is one of the only highly visible, and probably last, testaments to a country whose infrastructure and buildings have been completely torn down and rebuilt after reunification. In the same way that Ostalgie mythicizes the happy childhood to construct a communal narrative of identity, the *Ampelmännchen* is a shared symbol that each East German can potentially use to personally evoke the lost arena of his or her past.



V. Communist Champagne



On January first, I wandered through the sleet of frosty Berlin streets and counted the empty 3-euro bottles of *Rotkäppchen* littered in the snow. There were bottles scattered throughout the city, sitting on top of power generators, thrown into backyard bushes, peeking out of overflowing trashcans. Perhaps *Rotkäppchen* is a fetishized, ostalgic drink—or maybe it’s just cheap.



The scattered bottles around Berlin, remnants of the new year's revelry, are part of this tenuous, vacillating web reclaiming cultural memories through everyday life. It becomes a form of idealistic protest for East Germans, a way of repopulating their world with positive memories. “The bakery is gone; the school is gone. It’s all been replaced,” Hensel writes. “The only constant in our lives is something we ourselves constructed: the feeling of belonging to a generation.”