I recently spoke with a friend, who told me that she is very nostalgic. I was so excited to hear this, I didn’t even let her finish the sentence, and exclaimed right away: „Me too!“
I have actually been thinking about nostalgia for quite some time. This avalanche was caused by the book Identitti by Mithu Sanyal, which I read in the spring. It caused me to think a lot about my childhood, and read and write about East Germany. In my search for books centered around East German childhoods, I came across the graphic novel Kinderland by Mawil. I love it so much. It’s genius. Besides the story and the sounds (which become part of the illustration), it’s a subtle visual archive of childhood items to me. It helped me remember all those everyday objects, we used as kids. Since there was never much choice of anything, we all had the same things, pretty much. For example, there was only one Schulatlas.
Years ago, when no one knew about Marie Kondo yet, I went to my parents’ house and discarded almost everything I had saved through my school years. I recycled drawings of mine, essays, and school books dated all the way back to the East German 80s. I even got rid of the cassette tapes I listened to nonstop as a child.
I had the epiphany to do so after a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Where you are to really grasp through your body that everything is temporary, ever-changing, and that nothing will last forever.
But then, recently I ordered original GDR hair ties I used to have a child for my daughter, and was very excited to find a Rubik’s cube at the local book sale. I am also still using a pencil sharpener, erasers, pencils, and a hole punch from way back when I was a child. But this time the emphasis lays on USE. At least that’s what I tell myself.
I wonder how much nostalgia is connected to getting older and contemplating my identity. I am actually not so sure it has to do with age, because my passion for old things as a child, could have just been nostalgia for something that was status quo before me. Young people nowadays are listening to cassette tapes again, and records definitely had a comeback years ago.
My nostalgia has been concentrating on analog times lately. I was greatly inspired by the documentary An Impossible Project, about the last Polaroid factory, and how it was saved.
It evoked a lot of questions in me:
How old does an object have to be to cause nostalgia?
Do you have to keep nostalgic objects?
What about all those new things that remind us of our childhood?
Can I find a compromise between an analog world and today?
How many more records will my husband buy?
Fact is, living analog requires you to own a lot more things. And I don’t know how I feel about that. Also, often nostalgia grabs us by the heart and bypasses the mind. This and clever marketing can trick us into buying products, we remember from „the good old times“. But does that help?