Special issue of Wiener Almanach “Beyond Nostalgia”
Jenseits der Nostalgie? Neuaneignungen des Spätsozialismus in osteuropäischen Gegenwartskulturen [Beyond Nostalgia? New Appropriations of Late Socialism in Contemporary Eastern European Cultures], eds. Riccardo Nicolosi and Matthias Schwartz, special issue of Wiener Slawistischen Almanachs, vol. 90 (2023), 118 p., ISBN 978-3-631-91729-9
The special issue of Wiener Slawistischen Almanachs, “Beyond Nostalgia? New Appropriations of Late Socialism in Contemporary Eastern European Cultures”, edited by Riccardo Nicolosi and Matthias Schwartz, investigates nostalgia as a key category in the research on the contemporary culture of Eastern Europe.
The first post-socialist decades oscillated between a critical confrontation with the socialist past and a diffuse nostalgic longing for lost stability. This has recently changed. Many areas of Eastern European literature and culture have observed an artistic and discursive reappropriation, especially in relation to the late socialist period which is strongly influenced by media, popular culture, and identity politics. After years of neoliberal transformation, the time prior to 1989 is being rediscovered as a space of missed opportunities in which the future was still open and yet to be determined. The last decades of socialism are increasingly fictionalised or reinterpreted in television series, autobiographically influenced family novels, and motion pictures as well as by nationalist or religious countercultures and revanchist cultural politicians. What are these moments of fascination based on, and in which media and artistic formats are such shifts expressed in particular?
The volume contains project member Magdalena Marszałek’s contribution “Was ist das Volk? Neuverhandlungen der Volksrepublik und die neuen Ansätze einer ‘Volksgeschichte’ in Polen” [What is the people? Renegotiations of the People’s Republic and the new approaches to a ‘people’s history’ in Poland].