EISENHÜTTENSTADT, Germany, Jan. 6 - This town is the perfect setting for the strange mood of nostalgia that seems to be taking hold in Germany lately, even if a Socialist utopia from the Stalinist former German Democratic Republic (otherwise known as East Germany) does not seem a natural inspirer of warm and fuzzy feelings about the past.
But, strange as it is, a wave of what is called ostalgie (ost meaning east in German) has become a phenomenon in this country. People wear born-in-the-G.D.R. T-shirts, or they collect Trabants, the rattling two-cylinder cars that East Germans waited years to buy, or they go on line to be contestants on the "Ossi-Quiz," all questions relating to East German pop culture.
Here in Eisenhüttenstadt - Steel Mill Town - a few miles from the Polish border, ostalgie has been provided with its own museum, officially known as the Documentation Center on Everyday Life in the G.D.R. It is just down the road from the giant steel mill built here in the early 1950's as an industrial showpiece.
The museum is just a few rooms, mostly on the second floor of a former day-care center, but it holds 70,000 to 80,000 objects from the former East Germany. About 10,000 people a year come to look at Mikki transistor radios, jars of Bulgarian plums, schoolbooks, plastic water glasses that never seemed to come in the right colors. Seeing these familiar objects clearly stirs warm feelings about the vanished and unrecapturable past.
"It's a very nice place when you want to remember your childhood," Thomas Blechschmied, a 29-year-old visitor, said the other day. "My parents still have those egg-holders," he continued, pointing to a bright yellow object inside a case of plastic kitchen utensils from the early 1970's.
There's no general wish for the East German state be revived, Mr. Blechschmied said, explaining the limits of ostalgie. It is more a recognition that millions of people made do as best they could for the 40 or so years between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the East Germans competed in all areas of life, from consumer products to Olympic ice skating. A person might, looking at a jar of nougat, have a Proustian recollection of the shortages that plagued everyday life in East Germany.
"The products are genuine and the shelves are genuine," Mr. Blechschmied said, standing inside the well-stocked store, "but usually they were more spread out than you see here, and there were lots of empty spaces."
Ostalgie is complicated, made up of various ingredients. One is clearly the disillusionment felt by many former Easterners over German reunification, which took place 13 years ago. Unemployment these days is commonly 25 percent in regions like Eisenhüttenstadt. Rents are no longer subsidized. Doctor visits cost money. People can be fired. In addition, as Andreas Ludwig, the West German scholar of urban history who started the museum a few years ago, noted, even capitalist products break down or are shabby and schlocky.
All this has given rise to a sort of East German post-mortem feeling that maybe the East had its good aspects after all, especially a certain economic security and stability, even if your best vacation option was Bulgaria.
Ostalgia got a huge lift during the course of the last year by the success of a movie, "Goodbye Lenin," which offered a poignant, very human image to life in the East. Set in East Berlin just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's the story of a woman in such delicate health that she might die if she learns that her country has ceased to exist, so her loving children maintain an ever more elaborate charade aimed at persuading her that nothing fundamental has changed.
The mother, for example, asks for Spreewald Pickles, a highly valued East German product that disappeared from the market after the fall of the wall (and has since, by popular demand, reappeared). When the children find a discarded bottle with the Spreewald label still on it, they treasure it as an item that can save a life.
Looking around Eisenhüttenstadt is to see that the Center of Everyday Life is a museum inside another sort of museum. Built during the course of the 1950's, the town was one of four model communities East Germany created to embody in the here and now the futuristic promise of Communism.
The steel mill continues to operate, one of the very few such socialist installations still doing so. The workers' housing blocks, with their sometimes Stalinist-classical facades, are actually rather attractive, painted in creamy or buttery or ochre tones. There are parks, playgrounds, day-care centers, schools. At the same time, the place imparts a feeling of emptiness; there is an absence of bustle, a quiet at the center of things, that is itself a legacy of central planning.
Mr. Ludwig, who comes from what was West Berlin during the divided years, proposed the museum to the state of Brandenburg, though his purpose was not then and is not now to provide props for national nostalgia. He felt that with the East German state dead, it had become appropriate to collect its artifacts and to study them, just as one might have collected objects and testimonies about the American South right after the Civil War.
"There's no real reason to be nostalgic toward the G.D.R.," he said. "It was a dictatorship and people couldn't get out." People, he said, rarely come alone to the museum; more often, two or more generations of a family come together, or Ossis with Wessies, and they find that objects impart not only memories but lessons.
"The thing about everyday objects is that they don't say much about politics," Mr. Ludwig said. "But people start talking when they're in front of things. `I remember that,' A says to B. People intervene, and that starts a discussion."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/13/international/europe/13GERM.html> *****
_Goodbye, Lenin!_ (Dir. Wolfgang Becker): <http://www.good-bye-lenin.de/intro.php>
Ossiladen: <http://www.ossiladen.de/> -- Yoshie
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