Post-communist nostalgia

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 peoples 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.

Introduction : from utopia to propaganda and back / Maria Todorova -- pt. I. Rupture and the economies of nostalgia. From algos to autonomos : nostalgic Eastern Europe as postimperial mania / Dominic Boyer -- Strange bedfellows : socialist nostalgia and neoliberalism in Bulgaria / Gerald W. Creed -- Today's unseen enthusiasm : communist nostalgia for communism in the socialist humanist brigadier movement / Cristofer Scarboro -- Nostalgia for the JNA? : remembering the army in the former Yugoslavia / Tanja Petrović -- Dignity in transition : history, teachers, and the nation-state in post-1989 Bulgaria / Tim Pilbrow -- Invisible-inaudible : Albanian memories of socialism after the war in Kosovo / Stephanie Scwandner-Sievers -- "Let's all freeze up until 2100 or so" : nostalgic directions in post-communist Romania / Oana Popescu-Sandu -- pt. II. Nostalgic realms in word, sound, and screen. Sonic nostalgia : music, memory, and mythography in Bulgaria, 1990-2005 / Donna A. Buchanan -- "Ceauşescu hasn't died" : irony as countermemory in post-socialist Romania / Diana Georgescu -- Good bye, Lenin! Aufwiedersehen GDR : on the social life of socialism / Daphne Berdahl -- "But it's ours" :…