Ostalgie: Using nostalgia to cope with our past
I was talking to my friend the other day about our shared experience of being raised Catholic, and whether there is a permanent loss of autonomy in developing your own sense of right and wrong when you are entrenched in a lifestyle that is based on morals and beliefs. As I listened to Ina talking about her upbringing in the DDR, particularly how the school system sought to indoctrinate students, it reminded me of this conversation. With education in the DDR incorporating communist ideology on many fronts, it is difficult to see how one could ever be completely divorced from what they had learned. Even in class, someone asked how long it would have taken people who went to school and lived in the DDR to unlearn everything they had ever known. A thought I had was whether someone needed to do so–could all of what they had absorbed been bad? I look back to my own education before Oxy–fourteen years of Catholic schooling. When I was there, submersed in one ideology with no competing views represented, I did not think twice about whether what I was being taught, and how I was being taught, was biased. To some extent throughout high school, and definitely when I got to Oxy, I began to reckon with things that made me question what I had known to be true and right my whole life. One memory I have is of sitting in a mandatory school-wide assembly about abortion, and why it was bad. The speaker went so far as to explain abortion as objectively bad, in the same way Nazis were objectively bad, whereas the best ice cream flavor is subjective. In talking with my closest friends that day, we all acknowledged how abhorrent the event was, how gross the comparisons were, and how it stigmatized people who seek abortions. The way we reacted to the strict social beliefs upheld in Catholicism was by being overwhelmingly resistant to it in the end. This is all to highlight that we aren’t necessarily the product of our environment, because while different factors can influence us, we are not always the victims of our experiences. It is not impossible to become radically different from a space you were once a part of; one of my best friends from high school is now co-president of the Planned Parenthood chapter at her college.
Ina referenced Ostalgie in her fondness for products from the DDR that were no longer available after reunification, as well in terms of the way she remembers her childhood living on a farm warmly. I think it is important to acknowledge that we can have negative experiences, but simultaneously it is fruitful to allow yourself to remember the positive aspects with nostalgia. How would people ever move on from the end of communism in Germany, or any other change in lifestyle, without also taking the good memories with them? The routines of everyday life can be a refuge from looming issues, so someone feeling nostalgic for the milk they drank or the chocolate they ate as a child is only natural. As you age and your responsibilities grow, do you not also miss things from when life was much simpler? Furthermore, the manifestation of Ostalgie as a reverence for something like the Trabbant can be a way for East Germans to regain a sense of pride after the fall of the DDR was ridden with shame. Similar to my own experience, of course, I have great memories from my life before college, and this doesn’t negate my ability to acknowledge the things that were wrong with what we were taught. Ostalgie can be a healthy way to deal with change, while there is a validity to avoiding the shift from nostalgia for aspects of the DDR to romanticism, which is a very different thing.
