Volker Braun: <http://germany.poetryinternational.org/cwolk/view/20382>
***** "What I never had, is being torn away from me. What I did not live, I will miss forever." With these line from his drama _Property_ (_Das Eigentum_, 1990), playwright Volker Braun renders his melancholic reaction to the disintegration of the German Democratic Republic. The GDR once prided itself as the tenth strongest world economy, but following the postcommunist turn, or _Wende_, most of its industries have been brought to a halt, and hundreds of thousands have found themselves jobless. The euphoria at the opening of the Berlin Wall dimmed within a few months, and a pall seemed to set in over the two Germanys, one which prompted many to reconsider the disintegration of state socialism. Whereas most Germans considered the communist project a failure, many others proceeded to mourn its passing, nonetheless. Paradoxically, what Braun's protagonist lost with the collapse of communism was the possible past he never really had.
The mass perception of loss has elicited a memory crisis in contemporary culture. While retrospective literary texts and artworks proliferate, museum exhibitions salvage and curate the wreckage of the GDR as if there were literally no tomorrow. A new German word has surfaced to describe this trend: _Ostalgie_, derived from _Nostalgie_, or nostalgia. The first syllable drops the letter _n_ to become _ost_, the word for east. What remains signifies something like nostalgia for the "eastern times" of state socialism. Yet the nostalgic longing for some home that, perhaps, never really existed distinguishes itself from two other modes of memory that charge postcommunist culture: mourning and melancholia. . . .
(Charity Scribner, "Left Melancholy," _Loss: The Politics of Mourning_, University of California Press, 2003, p. 300) *****
Charity Scribner: <http://web.mit.edu/fll/www/people/CharityScribner.html>
Charity Scribner, _Requiem for Communism_, 2003: <http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=60FAA42F-67F5-4A28-8EFD-71C1087D6CF6&ttype=2&tid=9916>
_Loss: The Politics of Mourning_, eds. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, 2002: <http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9581.html> -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>