Ostalgie
Ostalgie is the word they use in Germany for people who harbour nostalgia for life in the former East Germany. If you’ve seen ‘Goodbye Lenin’ you’ll know what it is. It’s big business in Berlin and Leipzig these days, as market traders and upmarket boutiques peddle their hammer, compass and rye slogan t-shirts and Lenin photos. Of course, it’s all fairly harmless stuff. It’s quite easy to filter out the food and fuel shortages, the queues, the isolationism and above all the secret police (the Stasi, notorious even amongst the police forces of the Eastern bloc) when you’re a young East German (an “Ossi”, as opposed to a “Wessi”), who is now living in an increasingly hip Berlin, with the choice to drive a Trabant over Audi, or drinking Vita-Cola instead of Coke Zero, while also enjoying T-Mobile, the Bundesliga and broadband.
Why is this of any relevence? I think I lost my point somewhere. Basically, I’m about to introduce you to my form of Ostalgie. I’ve been bathing myself in the dirty puddles of retro-video. So come back with me to a time before mass music video channels, and together let’s pretend that life and music and TV wasn’t actually as shit as it was, and forget about our Stasi of the time (Simply Red or Wet Wet Wet).
Immerse yourself in Inspiral Carpets and Pixies and Gene and Senseless Things and Suede and Boo Radleys and Saint Etienne and Happy Mondays and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Menswear and The Shamen and Teenage Fanclub and Spiritualized and Verve and Kristen Hersh…
DDR shirts available here.
