Post-communist Nostalgia

1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-84545-671-9
Verlag: Berghahn Books

Buch, Englisch, 310 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 631 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Todorova, Maria

Gille, Zsuzsa

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Ideologien Marxismus, Kommunismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures

Introduction:From Utopia to Propaganda and Back

Maria Todorova

Part I: Rupture and the Economies of Nostalgia

Chapter 1. From Algos to Autonomos: Nostalgic Eastern Europe as Postimperial Mania

Dominic Boyer

Chapter 2. Strange Bedfellows: Socialist Nostalgia and Neo-Liberalism in Bulgaria

Gerald W. Creed

Chapter 3. Today's Unseen Enthusiasm: Communist Nostalgia for Communism in the Socialist Humanist Brigadier Movement

Cristofer Scarboro

Chapter 4. Nostalgia for the JNA? Remembering the Army in the Former Yugoslavia

Tanja Petrovic

Chapter 5. Dignity in Transition: History, Teachers and the Nation-State in post-1989 Bulgaria

Tim Pilbrow

Chapter 6. Invisible-Inaudible: Albanian Memories of Socialism after the War in Kosovo

Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers

Chapter 7. “Let's all freeze up until 2100 or so”: Nostalgic Directions in Post-communist Romania

Oana Popescu-Sandu

Part II: Nostalgic Realms in Word, Sound and Screen

Chapter 8. Sonic Nostalgia: Music, Memory, and Mythography in Bulgaria, 1990-2005

Donna Buchanan

Chapter 9. "Ceausescu Hasn’t Died": Irony as Counter-Memory in Post-Socialist Romania

Diana Georgescu

Chapter 10.  Goodbye Lenin, Aufwiedersehen GDR: On the Social Life of Socialism

Daphne Berdahl

Chapter 11.  “But it’s ours”: Nostalgia and the politics of authenticity in postsocialist Hungary

Maya Nadkarni

Chapter 12. Looking Back to the Bright Future: Aleksander Melikhov's Red Zion

Harriet Murav

Chapter 13. Dwelling on the Ruins of Socialist Yugoslavia: Being Bosnian by Remembering Tito

Fedja Buric

Chapter 14. The Velvet Prison in Hindsight: Artistic Discourse in Hungary in the 1990s

Anna Szemere

Chapter 15. Vacant History, Empty Screens: Postcommunist German Films of the 1990s

Anke Pinkert

Postscript

Zsuzsa Gille

Über Autor(innen)

Todorova, Maria
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).

Gille, Zsuzsa
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).