Really-Existing Nostalgia? Remembering East Germany in Film (Critical Essay‪)‬

The man. The woman. The adolescent. These three characters are the narrative centres of three films set in the German Democratic Republic (or GDR): The Lives of Others, Good Bye Lenin! and Sonnenallee, respectively. (1) Each of these films reflects and has also, through domestic box office success, played a role in debates around the history and memory of this former communist state. In this sense, these characters each embody circulating ideas of the GDR citizenry: the sullen yet stoic face of bureaucratic repression (the Stasi); the once gleaming and hopeful, now fragile face of communist ideology; the nostalgic dreamer, conflating the political and the personal. Each of these stereotypes embodies what has been a dominant representation of the GDR at some stage over the past two decades--in the past nineteen years, the GDR and its former citizens have been understood in differently emphasised manners. (2) Consequently, what these films afford us is a way into thinking about the uneasy peace between East (Ost) and West Germans--the roughly sutured underbelly of this newly 'imagined community'. In this essay, then, I wish to discuss the topic of East German remembrance, but with an eye to contemporary political conditions. I argue that the East German experience in cinema is part of a discursive production--embedded in a set of ideas about East Germany held by the West--but also one that falls outside the cinematic frame. I choose to discuss three films (3) popular both in Germany and internationally, specifically for their value in ruminating on various doxa about East Germany. All three of these films critically intervene in the broader debate about remembering East Germany--and intervene in the observed and labelled phenomenon of ostalgie (that is, nostalgia for East Germany). (4) I will take the films chronologically--largely because they narrate a series of action-reaction events in Germany. Before I do that, however, I wish to discuss nostalgia, in order to problematise the general concept and its specific attachments to ostalgie.