East Germany, Nostalgia, and Spreewell Pickles

The plot of the German film, Goodbye Lenin!, revolves around a patriotic East German woman's coma, which takes place in the final days of the Erich Honecker's G.D.R. In a coma, the woman misses her country's dramatic political revolution and transformation into a constituent part of Helmut Kohl's democratic, capitalist version of the German nation. Upon awakening her children, who have seen their mother destroyed by the putative defection of their father to West Germany many years earlier, struggle to protect their mother's fragile health by hiding the changes that overtaken their countrymen.

Just what are those changes? The film invites its viewers to ponder what has actually been gained or lost with the fall of communism. What did communism represent? The son has to think hard about what exactly might tip his invalid mother off about the end of her beloved country. What is first to go? The son, and a rather more reluctant sister, immediately exchange trendy Western fashions for older, shoddier, garments. Did we really used to wear this crap, the girl asks her brother? The children are incredulous, but put on their old clothes. And where exactly did the Che Guevara poster used to hang? And where can we put our new rock albums? The next step is to visit a supermarket to see if they can find any of the old, second-rate food brands their mother will recognize. Does the store still carry the old brand of pickles--Spreewell Pickles to be precise--the son asks? The grocery clerk is appalled: why would we do that when there's been a revolution?

More outlandishly, the son helps to set up fake political news, read monotonously in the style of the old regime. In this apartment, if no where else, communism wins, and events are reversed at the Berlin Wall, which is torn down by exploited Westerners who flood into East Germany in order to seek a better, fairer life. The East German state, now forty years, opens its arms to help its oppressed brethren.

The possibility that socialism might ever defeat capitalism now seems absurd. But how absurd is it? Surely the fact that East Germans publicly shouted in praise of West German currency, or flocked to see West German fast food joints and pornography shops, is not less absurd. What is it about capitalism, after all, that makes its triumph so desirable? Time plays tricks on us. The film reminds us that many ordinary men and women in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe used to imagine the triumph of their civilization, and at least sometimes believed that their governments were on the right side of historical progress. It's easy to forget that there were two sides in the Cold War.

The film has a few surprises. Near the end of the film the mother confesses that her husband did not, in fact, defect without her knowledge. Although her enthusiasm for socialist reform was apparently genuine, she reveals that her husband had been persecuted by the state and had actually asked her to go with him to the West. She feared that even an application to leave the country would lead to the loss of her children, and so she chose to remain in East Germany, devastated by the loss of her husband, but close to her children.

The tragedy of this separated family is emblematic of the tragedy of the nation which was itself bifurcated. What's interesting about the mother's revelation is that the malevolence of the East German State did not necessarily mean that she isn't capable of mourning its absence. This is something we would all do well to remember: we can be deeply nostalgic even about bad personal choices or historical roads that led nowhere.

Red Men

I was talking to a friend the other day about Mad Men (which I watch on DVD because I don't have cable) and I started thinking how cool a parallel series set in the Soviet Union would be. Some of the themes would be the same: the burgeoning of a consumer society (more imagined than real in the USSR), oppressive if thawing gender relations, Cold War threats of annihilation. Instead of advertisers you'd have apparatchiks, instead of the civil rights movement you'd have poet-dissidents, instead of flashbacks to Korea and the Depression you'd have even darker memories of relatives who disappeared in the night.

I wonder how interested Russians are in the 1950s and 60s and if they engage in Cold War nostalgia the way we do. Do they detect subtle changes in greatcoat and fur hat fashions the way we do in suits and ties? And do they link those minor details of dress and furniture to big reified cultural traits, then press them into artificial ten-year chunks that appear to explain everything about everyone of a certain age?

Nabokov: First Phase of Exile

Lolita—book or movie—seems quintessentially American in many ways. It’s about suburbia, modernity, motels, and road trips. But its hero is vaguely European, and its author is precisely Russian. The first of half of the massive Nabokov biography--Brian Boyd's Vladamir Nabokov: the Russian Years--is dedicated to the Russian years, including his early years in Russia as well as exile in the White Russian Diaspora.

The book spends too much time analyzing the long series of Nabokov’s Russian language novels, but the life is exceptional in every respect. The book begins with a description of Nabokov’s wealth, supremely self-confident, courageous father—who became a popular February Revolution politician until the October Revolution forced him to become one of the leaders of the counter-revolutionary Diaspora. In exile, Nabokov Senior was killed defending another politician during an assassination attempt. Nabokov Junior, who worshiped the memory of his father, didn’t take up the political cause. He didn’t follow in his political footsteps. Instead, he became poet and novelist, eventually the equal of Ivan Bunin.

The magic of Nabokov—aside from the art—stems from his acute intelligence, mastery of Russian as well as English, aristocratic inheritance, love of logic and language, and self-confidence. The paradox is that Nabokov carried the cultural legacy of Russia’s old world with him but also epitomized Western modernity. Of course, Russian cultural modernity predated the revolution. And literary modernism is traditionally associated with an obsession with the past, Proust’s Temps Perdu. So Nabokov’s nostalgia was, in the end, perfectly compatible with innovative writing, modernism, and perhaps even post-modernism. And the life he led, which included displacement, diaspora, exile, multiculturalism, and stints in Petersburg, the Crimea, Berlin, Prague, London, Paris, and America--hints at the affinities between post-modern biography and post-modern literary trends.

Nostalgia

Nick's sad, loan post touched on an interesting theme, nostalgia for the Soviet Union. In Russia itself, a wide segment of Soviet Soviet is obviously nostalgic for the Soviet past, even or especially Stalinism. One wonders how this could be possible, but history always has winners and losers and so perhaps it's not especially surprising that some current losers would hearken back to a time when they or the people they identify with were higher up in the pecking order.

One can't completely condemn those in Stalin's hometown, or in Georgia in general, who take some pride in the largeness of Stalin's legacy, for good or evil. Then there is the nostalgia born of traumatic experience. People obviously get stuck in a time that was somehow more important than other times. World War II by itself, the Great Patriotic War, was a horrific event, but one understands that its survivors must view later life as somehow less real than the war years. Moreover, survivors must want to stay in touch with a time when many of their loved ones still lives. The tragedy itself probably invites people to stay rooted to the moment of loss.

There's a whole literature of nostalgia that explains how this process works. This literature suggests that modernity and instability and radical change--see Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air--lead to greater levels and more ac cute forms of nostalgia. Of course, the post-Soviet experience with economic shock treatments, political disintegration, gangsterism, and unbridled capitalism naturally lead to nostalgia. To use the title of one book on American nostalgia, Russians probably miss "the way things never were."

And, to be fair, there probably are a few things that are worth missing, such as relative economic equality, political stability, international power and prestige, and visions of a communist utopia that was always on the horizon. To a lesser extent, it's also interesting to reflect upon nostalgia in the West. As Nick says, CCCP gear are back in vogue. I suspect this Western nostalgia will grow and the Cold War becomes more surreal, Stalin's crimes more distant, etc.

And perhaps we do have some things to mourn in terms of international system stability and some form of perceived alternative to the existing economic or cultural system in the West.