Ostalgie

A German portmanteau that describes nostalgia for East Germany.

As the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches, the term ostalgie is increasingly in the news. Reporting from Berlin, The Times’s Denny Lee noted:

Clunky Trabants belching car exhaust along Karl-Marx-Allee. Red-and-yellow East German flags fluttering from storefronts. Retro-chic bars that resemble cold-war bomb shelters. The Berlin Wall may have fallen 20 years ago next month, but in certain pockets of this pulsating German capital, it seems to be going back up – at least for those too young to recall what life was like in the German Democratic Republic. From stylish hotels that resemble 1970s Soviet housing to boutiques that elevate kitschy East German goods to high design, Berlin is still divided – on whether the Iron Curtain was cool. There’s even a German word for it, “ostalgie,” a combination of the words “ost” (east) and “nostalgie” (nostalgia).

Writing for Time in September, Simon Horsford commented on an ostalgiefueled “ironic love for old East German aesthetics” and observed:

Rather less flippantly, the current recession has prompted mostly elderly diehards to recall the days of secure employment and income equality with fondness. Richard Stratenschulte of Dresden’s Stadtmuseum says that some of the older generation occasionally look to the past because “they don’t want their lives to be underestimated. It’s hard to reconcile the past with the present.”