Post-communist Nostalgia

Published by Berghahn Books 2010

Post-communist Nostalgia

Edited by: Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781845458348

Overview
Contents

About this book

Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people’s lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scholars from multiple disciplines explore the various fascinating aspects of this nostalgic turn by analyzing the impact of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender differences, and political orientation. They argue persuasively that this nostalgia should not be seen as a wish to restore the past, as it has otherwise been understood, but instead it should be recognized as part of a more complex healing process and an attempt to come to terms both with the communist era as well as the new inequalities of the post-communist era.

Author / Editor information

Maria Todorova is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria’s National Hero (2006), Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (2004), Imagining the Balkans (1997), Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria (1993).

Zsuzsa Gille is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Post-Socialist Hungary (2007), and co-author of Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (2000).

Maria Todorova is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria’s National Hero (2006), Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (2004), Imagining the Balkans (1997), Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria (1993).

Reviews

“…the term ‘post-communist nostalgia’ will continue to be used, abused, and debated. However, this illuminating book shows that the term evokes multiple phenomena that have arisen, and will continue to arise.” • Pol-Int

“This book serves an invaluable function by capturing the rich complexity of nostalgia and marking a moment when questions of postmodern historiography can be applied to a past, the recent Communist one, for which the pressures toward absolute evaluations are immense. [It] summarizes some of the scholarship that one might include with the "contemporary history" of the region…This volume should have broad general appeal across a market for post-Communist cultural studies and the study of memory.” • H-Habsburg

“Overall, this an impressive set of essays that makes a weighty contribution to the study of nostalgia in the European East after socialism. It adds significantly to the burgeoning literature on the infinitely complex and fascinating subject of social remembrance… Scholars and students interested in how memory works (and fails) will find much to appreciate in Post-Communist Nostalgia.” • Anthropology of East Europe Review

“The volume is refreshingly iconoclastic… its overall character is kaleidoscopic but all the more fascinating and insightful.” • Südosteuropa

“This volume nicely illustrates that nostalgia talk is symptomatic of ongoing struggles over the ‘truths’ of postsocialist history… [It]makes an important ethnographic and theoretical contribution to memory, history, and identity studies in the region and beyond. By exploring the complex and often unpredictable social life of socialism in the realm of memory (Berdahl), it illustrates that sometimes, as Todorova claims, it can be very hard to predict what our pasts are going to be.” • Slavic Review

“These lively essays make for the rare collection that is greater than the sum of its parts. Bookended by a substantive Foreword and Afterword, they upend the standard ‘diagnosis of nostalgia’ found across the former Soviet bloc, refuting the popular conception that Eastern Europeans are somehow haunted by the past, and illustrating the repertoire of contemporary post-socialist cultural politics at its most sophisticated.” • Bruce Grant, New York University

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
FIGURES Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction FROM UTOPIA TO PROPAGANDA AND BACK Maria Todorova Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I RUPTURE AND THE ECONOMIES OF NOSTALGIA
1 FROM ALGOS TO AUTONOMOS Nostalgic Eastern Europe as Postimperial Mania Dominic Boyer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
2 STRANGE BEDFELLOWS Socialist Nostalgia and Neoliberalism in Bulgaria Gerald W. Creed Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	29
3 TODAY’S UNSEEN ENTHUSIASM Communist Nostalgia for Communism in the Socialist Humanist Brigadier Movement Cristofer Scarboro Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	46
4 NOSTALGIA FOR THE JNA? Remembering the Army in the Former Yugoslavia Tanja Petrović Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	61
5 DIGNITY IN TRANSITION History, Teachers, and the Nation-State in Post-1989 Bulgaria Tim Pilbrow Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	82
6 INVISIBLE—INAUDIBLE Albanian Memories of Socialism after the War in Kosovo Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	96
7 “LET’S ALL FREEZE UP UNTIL 2100 OR SO” Nostalgic Directions in Post-Communist Romania Oana Popescu-Sandu Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	113
PART II NOSTALGIC REALMS IN WORD, SOUND, AND SCREEN
8 SONIC NOSTALGIA Music, Memory, and Mythology in Bulgaria, 1990–2005 Donna A. Buchanan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	129
9 “CEAUS¸ESCU HASN’T DIED” Irony as Countermemory in Post-Socialist Romania Diana Georgescu Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
10 GOOD BYE, LENIN! AUFWIEDERSEHEN GDR On the Social Life of Socialism Daphne Berdahl Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	177
11 “BUT IT’S OURS” Nostalgia and the Politics of Authenticity in Post-Socialist Hungary Maya Nadkarni Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	190
12 LOOKING BACK TO THE BRIGHT FUTURE Aleksandr Melikhov’s Red Zion Harriet Murav Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
13 DWELLING ON THE RUINS OF SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA Being Bosnian by Remembering Tito Fedja Burić Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
14 THE VELVET PRISON IN HINDSIGHT Artistic Discourse in Hungary in the 1990s Anna Szemere Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	244
15 VACANT HISTORY, EMPTY SCREENS Post-Communist German Films of the 1990s Anke Pinkert Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	263
POSTSCRIPT Zsuzsa Gille Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	278
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	290
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	295

Language: English
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 310
Keywords: History: 20th Century to Present; Memory Studies

eBook

Published: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 9781845458348