Dominik Bartmanski. «Successful icons of failed time: rethinking post-communist nostalgia»

Abstract

D. Bartmanski’s article is devoted to the re-interpretation of post-communist nostalgia. He begins the analysis with the question: why would people respond to perceived transitional failures by longing for the failed reality they had just fled from? His main goal is to offer the new framework for understanding nostalgia based on the ideas of the iconic turn and American cultural sociology. For this purpose Bartmanski subjects to criticism principal theoretical approaches of nostalgia and provides a comparative analysis of the phenomenon of so-called Ostalgie that manifest itself in the streetscapes of Berlin and Warsaw. His key argument consists in that «nostalgic» icons are successful because they play the cultural role of mnemonic bridges. That is they provide a possibility to re-establish the continuous temporal sequence which was interrupted by sudden social changes.