Successful icons of failed time: Rethinking post-communist nostalgia Author(s): Dominik Bartmanski Source: Acta Sociologica, Vol. 54, No. 3 (September 2011), pp. 213-231 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41330479 Accessed: 08-01-2020 22:32 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
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214 But if the motivations and magnitude of change were palpable, the directions and prospects opened up by the revolution remained opaque for quite some time. It was 'the transition from failed Communism to an amorphous and still-unsettled something else' (Jay, 2003: xvi). 'Post-communism' meant 'enormous uncertainty' (Bunce and Csanadi, 1993: 272). Hence people dwelt on grandiose terms such as 'return to Europe' or 'return to reality' (Hawkes, 1990: 11). Only this much seemed certain: transformation rep- resented macro-liminality, a rite of passage from the profane qualities of 'Eastern' Communism to the sacred values of 'Western' order. This collective sentiment was understandable given the bleak reality of the ossified Soviet bloc, whose societies were comparatively exhausted and craved release from an all too obvious political cul-de-sac. In the GDR, as if to insult an already injured country, Erich Honecker continued to say until the end that 'neither ox nor donkey will stop the progress of socialism' (cited in Hildebrandt, 2003: 88). He was right: his own people would stop it. As the regime imploded and the re-unification of Germany materialized within a year, Germans eagerly 'agreed to consign a failed "socialist experiment" to the dustbin of history' (Cooke, 2005: vii). Poles were committed to do the same. This vision was epitomized by Tadeusz Mazowiecki's insistence that we draw a 'thick line' between the past and the present and 'bring Poland back into the stream of human progress' (Kennedy, 1999: 295). Yet before long, social scientists began to notice the distinctly unrealistic component of this epochal (McDonald, 1993: 203) and democracy, whose natural link to the free market was assumed (Streissler, 'return to reality'. They discerned 'heavily Utopian' tendencies, especially with regard to capitalism 1991: 200). As the first years of transformation passed, it was becoming clear that 'impossibly high hopes [were] placed in free market economies' (Streissler 1991: 201). 'The citizens of the New Europe nursed many illusions after the breakthrough of 1989' (Lesniakowska, 2008: 31). Like every Utopian belief, this one was prone to transmogrify into disenchanted chagrin when confronted with mundane, protracted birth pangs of the new order it aspired to. Given the extraordinary pragmatism of the 'velvet' revolutions, the coming of various Utopian moods may have appeared unlikely. Yet such moods were neither illogical nor unparalleled. They certainly would not astonish scholars well-versed in history and cultural anthropology. As some of the most prominent among them noted, 'every revolution needs social energies, which only broadly exaggerated expectations can mobilize, and in every revolution these hopes must be disproportionately great in relation to the outcome; every revolution thus creates a great mass of disappointments' (Kolakowski, 1990: 222). The revolutions of 1989 were no different. The transformations they instigated were bound to be arduous. 'The road to rediscovering liberalism' quickly turned out to be 'bumpy' (Kovacs, 1991: 2). In fact, to some they turned out so derailing that they informed conspicuous efforts to resignify the rev- olutionary distribution of the sacred and profane that seemed taken for granted only a few years earlier. This condition was understood by historians as 'succumbing to the anomie that is always attributed to those suffering from the early stages of harsh capitalism' (Stern, 2006: 479). As early as the winter of 1991 some economists warned: 'Perceived failure in achievement is near certainty because aspiration levels are excessive ... It is more than likely that the next wave of sentiment will be a wave of massive disappointment' (Streissler, 1991 : 201). In the GDR the process of growing scepticism toward new con- ditions was further exacerbated by what many described as the 'colonization' of the East by the West. The division of Germany created a comparative context from which, upon the Fall of the Wall, the East emerged as the impoverished 'loser' (Hensel, 2004: 71). The transitional unification presented it as the unequivocal and thus disconcerting or even 'humiliating' fact (Stern, 2006: 470). In other countries of the region that precise dynamic was obviously missing, but its cultural equiva- lents existed there too. In all of them, the first phases of transformation were more like cleaning Augean stables than anything else. They meant being confronted not only with the first temples of Western capit- alism but also with pervasive 'Leninist legacies', as well as with the fact that these legacies could not simply be wished away in one fell swoop (Jowitt, 1992). They were 'part and parcel of the existential experience and determined memories, affinities, loyalties and identities' (Tismaneanu, 1999: 231). Not realizing this on the part of some reformers and citizens was yet another symptom of post-revolutionary utopianism. As the post-revolutionary disenchantment settled in, the worry about distinct psychological This content downloaded from 86.124.171.214 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 22:32:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Bartmanski : Successful Icons of Failed Time 2 1 5 issues was thematized. Historians noted the possibility that the East Germans might 'harbor a sense of loss and resentment' when confronted with transformations, regardless of economic performance (Stern, 2006: 470). All these apprehensions proved prescient. Collective feelings of disappointment, loss or even resent- ment surfaced and took on a life of their own. By the mid-1990s such countries as Poland or Hungary saw the former communists enter parliaments in democratic elections. In the GDR the communists managed to retain support of some constituencies in Berlin and elsewhere. These political tendencies were coeval with what appeared to be a rising tide of reminiscing about the communist reality jettisoned only several years earlier. One may have felt entitled to connect all these phenomena and conclude: Within only a few years disillusionment was replacing high expectations . . . The first signs of what was called Ostalgie appeared - nostalgia for familiar, shabby GDR. The older generation began to cleanse its memory of the oppressive aspects of the GDR and remember gratefully the parochial privacy, slowness and predictability of its 'socialist' life. (Stern, 2006: 479) In short, a link was being established between capitalist transitional hardships and communist nostalgic commitments. Just as the loathing of Communism occasioned Utopian infatuation with free society, so the subsequent dispelling of some liberal theories in transitional practice seemed to inspire the rise of nostalgia. In the GDR the very playfulness of the word Ostalgie , the German portmanteau that literally means 'nostalgia for the east', could stand for the phenomenon's authenticity and strength. Its iconic representations contributed to the making of 'post-communism' as a distinct 'cultural condi- tion' (Erjavec, 2003), a kind of genuine cultural 'post-condition' (Marcus and Fischer, 1999: xxvi). It quickly expanded semantically and was thematized in civil campaigns, commemoration practices, conspicuous movies, oft-visited websites, best-selling books and TV shows that attracted millions of viewers (Cooke, 2005: 141). Yet, foregrounding the link between nostalgia and the hardships of trans- formation is not sociologically sufficient. To be sure, the link is plausible. But it is not causally exclu- sive. The socio-economic situation must not be credited with being the singular or most important determinant of various phenomena covered by the term 'post-communist nostalgia'. For one thing, such a perspective is unable to solve the underlying paradox, that is, why would people respond to perceived transitional failures by longing for the failed reality they had just fled from. The post-communist nostalgia is not merely a private emotion or political reaction. It is a collective feeling in the Durkheimian sense. It has totemic manifestations ensconced in the material fabric of society, especially in cities. Because the majority of scientific explanations are insensitive to cultural codes of icons and cities that have their own logic (Low, 2008), they fail to recognize the multiple exis- tential meanings of post-communist nostalgia that comprise its paradoxical nature (Berdahl et al., 2003: 1). Within these traditional frameworks the economic and the symbolic tend to get conflated, and so does the life-world with the system. The present study seeks to amend the confusion. There is no denying at all that the perceived socio-economic adversities informed people's visions of a communist past, a transitional present and a capitalist future in relation to one another. Yet these aspects do not exhaust the meaning of systemic social change. The dominant focus on post-communist politics can neither gauge regional variability nor plumb the symbolic depth of non-rational cultural phenomena such as utopianism or nos- talgia. Thus, when it comes to the latter, a need for an 'anthropology of post-socialism' becomes pressing (Berdahl et al., 2003), as well as the necessity to 'redirect our focus outside the institutional boundaries of the state' (Özyürek 2006: 22). Alas, these pleas have not been systematically heeded. Even if social scientists preoccupied with transition shun reductionism and admit contingency, they still tend to conduct their research along the frequently travelled road of the so-called 'social origins of political memorial landscapes' (Jordan, 2006: 1). The problem is that neither the commemorative nor the political thoroughly covers a given collec- tivity's relation with the past. The two are easier to gauge sociologically and more amenable to ideolo- gical deconstruction because their intentionality seems plain. But what about other, less readily This content downloaded from 86.124.171.214 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 22:32:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
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