| Abstract | In this article the author has accounted for the positive memories now associated with nearly fifty years of dictatorship. He has drawn on documentary sources and his own experiences in Germany to try and answer a primary question that whether the selective memory and fantasy prefers a divided Germany or not. Here he focuses on the nostalgia in the public for the years of communism in eastern Germany. On visit to Berlin, he encountered dozens of sidewalk peddlers doing a brisk business in souvenirs of the old regime. German citizens were buying up obsolete brands of soap, wine, foodstuffs, and apparel: most of them characterized by cheap ingredients or shoddy workmanship. Later he went to a music store where hundreds of CDs featuring the music of old communist state were on display. He later learned that this retail trade was just the tip of the iceberg. In what seemed to be the ironic twist par excellence, there was enormous longing for the German past that existed before reunification in 1990. Ten years after the fact the nostalgia is stronger than ever, and in the western part of the country as well as in the east.
|
