My recent posts about the Berlin Wall, Communism, kitsch, history and Bulgaria have given me an opportunity to think seriously (and not so seriously) about Bulgaria. Today it's about nostalgia.

It's apparently gotten my readers thinking as well. Yesterday I quoted from my graduate school friend <a href="http://misplacedyinzer.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/20-years-later/">Robyn's blog</a> about kitsch and communism in Budapest and Berlin.  Today it's my dear friend Bridget who spent hours upon hours with me in German classes in college (for the record, her German is better than mine but I have a hunch my Bulgarian is better than hers).  It's as if she read my mind. Yesterday I said to myself: hey, you need to write a post about nostalgia in the post-socialist block.  Apparently we're on the same wave length because this morning when I was reading my blog comments I was pleasantly surprised to read her comment and realize that she's written the perfect introduction to my newest post.  So, Bridget lived in Germany for two years after college and wrote this thoughtful comment on my post <a href="http://karolinkabulgaria.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/communist-kitsch/">Communist Kitsch</a>:
<blockquote>I think, for (East) Germany at least, it’s a mixture of kitsch and actual nostalgia for the era that is past. The younger generation idealizes a time period they never experienced, with the Trabis, Ampelmaennchen, Spreewald pickles, etc. And of course all these things are marketed in various forms, as capitalism has emerged from the wreckage of the GDR. But some people who remember communism had it much better back then (or at least think they did); they remember a time when unemployment was practically zero, all their needs were basically taken care of, and maybe they didn’t have a choice of products in the supermarket but they had enough. So the German concept “Ostalgie” is a combination of imagined and real nostalgia, I think.</blockquote>
I agree. Actually, I couldn't agree more.  Bridget's comment catches the push and pull between kitsch and nostalgia.  The current hipness and cool of the Trabis and Ampelmaennchen these things--Eastern chic--seem to represent a glance backwards while also a push forward into the capitalist 21st century.  Not everything from the socialist past is bad.  There's a layer of gray being introduced into a dichotomy that at its most basic was once something like the west is good and the east is bad.

That's the problem.  Right? This dichotomy between good and bad, west and east, democracy and socialism--there's no room for gray.  <!--more-->There's no room for the in between. There's no space for nuance.  This dichotomy doesn't provide any room for compromise.  The dichotomy suggests that a complete break from the past is necessary and condemns the socialist past.  It's here that nostalgia sneaks in.
<blockquote>Nostalgia is a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.</blockquote>
The present doesn't provide a space for a past that is complicated, nuanced or multiple.  I think this is where a yearning for a time that has passed comes from. It's the intersection of nostalgia and memory.  A longing for a past that no longer exits.  A past that we can no longer access.  This longing and yearning helps us edit our memories and our past.  It's a time that we cannot return to and as such it holds some power for us.

But in this process we edit.  We edit the good and the bad, we edit our emotions, we edit our memories and our past. And we edit our interpretation of these events. We rescue and we banish an all the while we name and rename these things and experiences. It's in this interpretation that we attempt to claim power over the past. Does this make nostalgia dangerous? In its sentimentality and melancholy does nostalgia hurt us?

I am not sure.

I hear Bulgarians say things like: It was different then.  Everyone had jobs. But their intonation suggests that they know what the cost of this was. Young people lament the cost of living today in Bulgaria (for good reason).  And Bulgarians of every age speak about pensions of the elderly and their words hang heavily in the air.

I get it. There's something seemingly unspeakably unfair about the whole thing.  The promise of the west was that things would be better without socialism, without communism.  The reality of things is that this hasn't always been the case. Enter: nostalgia.

It leads me to wonder: what markers are there of nostalgia and "Ostalgie" in Bulgaria?