Ostalgie

[1] Social scientist Thomas Ahbe argues that the term "ostalgia" is often misunderstood as a lack of willingness to integrate, an attempt to reverse German reunification and reinstate the GDR.

[3] As with other cases of Communist nostalgia, there are various motivations, whether ideology, nationalism, wistfulness for a lost sense of social status or stability, or even aesthetics or irony.

The division of Germany into East and West for over 35 years engendered the formation of distinct identities between the two regions.

This was particularly true for working women who had enjoyed organised healthcare and equal pay in the GDR and who faced the greatest unemployment post-Wende.

Women were laid off faster than men, as well as suffering the consequences of the collapse of state-run childcare facilities and traditional ideals of female domesticity and consumerism were reinvoked, having been challenged by the state in the GDR.

Ostalgie particularly refers to the nostalgia for aspects of regular daily life and culture in the former GDR, which disappeared after reunification.

Available again are brands of East German food, old state television programmes on video tape and DVD, and the once widespread Wartburg and Trabant cars.

Those seeking the preservation of East German culture banded together to save the "Eastern Crosswalk Man" (Ost-Ampelmännchen), an illuminated depiction of a man wearing a "perky", "cheerful" and potentially "petit bourgeois" hat (inspired by a summer photo of Erich Honecker in a straw hat)[12] in crosswalk lights.

Life in the GDR has also been the subject of several films, including Leander Haußmann's Sonnenallee (1999), Wolfgang Becker's internationally successful Good Bye, Lenin!

Boyer writes that ostalgie has created a "no-place" East Germany, which is only "realistic" from a West German perspective.