Ambivalent Entanglements and Participations: New Research on the History of Subjectivities and Identities in East Germany

Ostalgie -nostalgia towards the former East Germany -has never been a mere phenomenon of individual memories, commodification or media events.As a piece of identity production in East Germany since 1990, Ostalgie always had a political dimension.In the last ten years, this dimension has (though not exclusively) become a subject of far-right memory politics.Right-wing forces turn informally established narratives of East Germany as a tragically lost life-world into a source of resistance against Western liberal democracy.In doing so, Ostalgie becomes part of a worldwide growing nostalgia for authoritarian regimes like Russia or Hungary.While scholarship as well as a larger public previously perceived Ostalgie as a unique phenomenon of East Germany, it is now understood as a broader phenomenon.These far-right instrumentalisations, however, do not simply provide backward oriented narratives of the communist past within an increasingly unstable and crisis-driven present and future.They also work as stages to re-valorise long shared negative feelings in East Germany, where many people feel treated as second-class citizens written out from national memory discourses since (re)unification in 1990.According to Thomas Abhe, three quarters of East Germans do not perceive themselves as either opponents or victims of the communist regime shortly before its collapse.Correspondingly, they do not feel emotionally attached either to the master narratives of East Germany like socialism or antifascism or to liberal post-1989 master narratives of the