Successful icons of failed time: Rethinking post-communist nostalgia

Abstract

Under what cultural conditions can the relics of symbolically polluted time re-emerge as its purified signifiers and culturally successful icons within new circumstances? What does it mean when people articulate ‘nostalgic’ commitments to social reality they have themselves recently jettisoned? Drawing on the ideas of the iconic turn and American cultural sociology, the article offers a new framework for understanding post-communist nostalgia. Specifically, it provides a comparative reinterpretation of the phenomenon of so-called Ostalgie as manifest in the streetscapes of Berlin and its counterpart in Warsaw. One of the key arguments holds that ‘nostalgic’ icons are successful because they play the cultural role of mnemonic bridges to rather than tokens of longing for the failed communist past. In this capacity they forge a communal sense of continuity in the liquid times of systemic transformation. As such, the article contributes to broader debates about meanings of material objects and urban space in relation to collective memory destabilized by liminal temporality.