Ostalgie

A new museum has opened in Berlin to chronicle life in the former East Germany. If the concept for the GDR Museum sounds familiar, it's because it seems largely an institutional expression of the themes of nostalgia and remembrance from Wolfgang Becker's brilliant film, Goodbye, Lenin!

Of course, you might not pick up on the Ostalgie so clearly from the NYT's story, which is more preoccupied with the mock-up of Stasi wiretapping and surveillance capabilities.

Yes, East Germans -- in Tina Rosenberg's estimate -- were the most spied-upon people in human history. Something like a third of all GDR citizens were listed as Stasi informers at some time or other, though such records and their real significance are much murkier than the statistics allow.

But the phenomenon of longing for a seemingly awful regime and social and political system is much more interesting. Precisely because it's so difficult for Westerners like the Times correspondent to wrap their heads around it. Awful as we might think the GDR and communism were, East Germans are bound to have a sentimental attachment to it simply from having come of age and lived under it for forty years. And let's not act like pining for a Trabbi or getting sentimental over a red telephone are so peculiar. Baby boomers and other Americans are just as bad about getting nostalgic for old Chevrolet ads or long-outmoded consumer products like Jiffy Pop. They're probably worse when it comes to such stuff because they blow billions of dollars collecting it or buying remake retro editions of these products.

Still, this sort of consumerist communist kitsch fascinates the hell out of me, and I'm sure to check out the GDR Museum the next time I'm in Berlin. I just hope it's a little more thorough and probing of such issues than I found the Museum of Communism in Prague to be. Of course, the Museum of Communism is the work of an American expat (the owner of Bohemia Bagel, no less), and it reflects his caricatured view of what life surely was like under communism. I'm not trying to suggest it was paradise, just that it was always quite so miserable and dreary.

Spreewald Gherkin, anyone?