Nostalgia for West Germany

On Westalgie and a nation's yearning for stability

Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard in 1965. Img: CDU, Peter Bouserath, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, CC BY-SA 3.0 de.

‘Just how nostalgic are East Germans today about the GDR?’ I was asked by a journalist this week. It was all I could do not to roll my eyes. It wasn’t her fault. It’s a standard question. Almost obligatory. The concept of ‘Ostalgie’ (nostalgia for East Germany) appears even in the most positive reviews of Beyond the Wall.

This week, it was the French newspaper Le Figaro that began its review of Au-delà du mur with the question: ‘How could one feel nostalgia for life in one of the world's most fearsome police states?’ It then went on to praise the book as ‘remarkable’ and acknowledged that I managed to write it ‘without hiding anything about the oppressive nature of the regime.’ But raising the spectre of Ostalgie appears to be obligatory.

Even East Germans themselves, who remember lives lived before 1989, do so in a way that is far more complex than the loaded term ‘nostalgia’ implies, as a wealth of recent studies have shown. This complexity is not always granted to East Germans. West Germans, on the other hand, rarely get admonished for simplistic re-imaginations of the Federal Republic’s post-war history.

This divided German memory culture has been particularly exposed in recent months. Following an intensely acrimonious debate about East Germany, public attention has shifted to the general election held on 23 February. The political, economic and social tensions overshadowing it have caused many West German public figures to look to what they call the ‘old Federal Republic’, i.e. West Germany 1949-1990, for inspiration.

So perhaps now is a good time to talk about Westalgie?