Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
75
Stalinallee whilst listening to accounts of the stages of its construction and of the
neighbourhood’s history during the GDR period with an audio-guide.
Equally interesting is the
DDR Design Hostel
(or
Ostel
) designed and opened by a
former tightrope walker of the GDR State Circus. This establishment, near the east train
station (Ostbahnhof) is decorated like an East German hotel, giving prominence to the
furniture and furnishings of the 1970s design in the GDR. Tourists can book a room and enjoy
the pleasures of Socialist Realism in an entirely reconstructed environment, which is truly
extraordinary considering that the
Berolina
and
Unter-den-Linden
East German hotels were
demolished in 1996 and 2006 respectively.
Apart from individuals who exploited an imaginary vision of the East with the aim of
promoting their establishments, other individuals started to buy a large number of East
German pieces of furniture, books, decorative and everyday objects, and opened shops in the
‘fashionable parts’ of the city (the central-eastern quarters). Thus the
Vorwende-Laden
(the
Shop From Before the Turn) located in Thaerstrasse in Friedrichshain sells civic books, comic
strips, crockery and souvenirs manufactured in East Germany. The
VEB Orange
(
Volkseigene
Betrieb
– The People’s Business) in Oderbergerstrasse (a street of Prenzlauer Berg very
popular among Berliners and tourists) sells a large number of pieces of furniture, retro
objects, postcards and clothes ‘made in the GDR’. These antique dealers of the East flourish
in the Prenzlauer Berg, Mitte and Friedrichschain districts and are part of the very peculiar
Berlin atmosphere of which Western tourists are so fond.
An ever-growing number of individuals from the east and west of Berlin, but also
foreigners, have understood how to surf on the wave of Ostalgie. Through their enterprises,
they offer the Berlin population and visitors visions of the communist past which are out of
line with the official discourse. These visions are ironic, inventive or protesting.
Entrepreneurs offer glamorous, fashionable or bad-taste communism; they create micro-
accounts that penetrate the city and propose alternative visions of the past and of local
identities. The meeting of the tourist demand with the Ostalgie generates unpredictable
reinterpretations of the past that can open the way to new forms of identification. This
happens mainly for three reasons.
Firstly, it appears that the objects and icons in use during communism today embody
values and practices proper to a society that has disappeared and which is sometimes
idealised. Moreover, these objects and icons seem to fulfil a role in the collective memory of
certain eastern Berliners. According to Dietrich Mühlberg, these artefacts are refuges that
enable former GDR citizens to establish the ‘conditions for a positive relation with [their
own] history’ (Mühlberg 2005: 11).
Secondly, it appears that the semantic reinvestment in old communist objects and
icons contributes to the projection of ‘new images, new stories’ (Rautenberg, 2009) and,
ultimately, to the production of identity. In an article about the treatment of communist
objects and icons in Central and Eastern Europe, Mariusz Czepczyński emphasises the way in
which communist thematic bars target ‘both local clientele and the tourists, searching for
something familiar and funky’ (Czepczyński 2010: 76). According to Czepczyński, ‘Many of
those places are not only full of tourists, but usually also local students, for whom looking for
