All things East German are back in vogue, with a major art exhibition and an acclaimed film part of the bandwagon, writes Derek Scally
The people milling around the food hall look like ghosts from another era with their mullet haircuts, salmon-coloured jeans and Deirdre Barlow glasses. They could have stepped out of archive footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but are, in fact, modern-day visitors to Ost-Pro, the Berlin fair of East German products. Everything is here to gladden the East German heart, from the beloved Spreewald Pickles to no nonsense nailbrushes. In one corner a man in red dungarees and a wild beard is selling subscriptions to Neues Deutschland (New Germany), the former communist party paper.
"What we sell here you can't get anywhere else. None of the West German supermarket chains will have us. But we know our market. We have over 100,000 visitors twice a year," says Ramona Oteiza, manager of Ost-Pro.
It may be 13 years since German unification but the popularity of Ost-Pro shows how much affection former easterners have for selected parts of the their past in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Now the media has decided the trend has gone national and that Germany is experiencing a wave of GDR nostalgia or Ostalgie, after ost, the German for east.
The first Ostalgie wave this year came with Good Bye, Lenin!, a film that hit the country like a rush of blood to the head. Five months after it opened, the film has earned €36 million at the box office and has passed the six million admissions mark: one in 13 Germans has seen the film.
It's easy to see the film's appeal: for the first time, it seems, the end of East Germany had been captured on film in a way that is neither overly flippant nor overly worthy. It succeeds in capturing on celluloid the common answer easterners give when struggling to explain life in the vanished GDR: Es war halt so, "that's just the way it was".
Interest in East Germany's past has kept ticking over through the years with a steady stream of books and documentaries about East German childhoods and political dissidents.
Things took a new turn last weekend with the opening of the largest exhibition of art produced in the former East Germany, Kunst in der DDR (Art in the GDR). Before the doors even opened, the organisers were accused of airbrushing history by including dissident artists and excluding the socialist realism movement that left East Germany littered with statues of Marx and Lenin and portrayals of happy, healthy workers.
"We're showing what wasn't in vogue in East Germany, what was criminally neglected," says Roland März, one of the curators, adding that socialist realist "platitudes" have, in his opinion, been honoured enough.
"It's not that so-called art that distanced itself from the regime or opposition art is the only thing that one sees or that we've blocked out regime-promoting art. Instead, we've taken the whole spectrum into account under the motto: art is art," he says.
The exhibition is organised thematically, presenting everything from pop art to the expressionist works by artists in Dresden and Leipzig that developed as a reaction to the socialist realism of the time. Artists from the eastern states appear, in the main, to be pleased with the exhibition, though many wish more could be said about the system in which this art was created and how it influenced the creative process.
Others are less less than thrilled.
"This exhibition shouldn't have taken place. After 13 years we should for once and for all stop treating with the GDR as a special case," says Wolfgang Mattheuer, a painter from Leipzig. He favours an east-west exhibition with the title, "Art from the Time of Division".
Despite the controversy, or more likely because of it, the exhibition has become a huge success, attracting more than 10,000 visitors in its opening weekend. The exhibition will go at least some way to reversing the march of the GDR opportunists. Over a decade on, there is still a huge local market for communist chic, recycling all manner of East German clothing, furniture and imagery for the ironic needs of bar owners and fashion designers.
Extreme examples include the German entrepreneur who has plans to open a GDR theme park in eastern Berlin, a 10-square-kilometre world of surly border guards, barbed wire and whining Trabants, the infamous East German car.
The German television station, RTL, is getting in on the act, following up the success of its 1970s and 1980s tribute shows with a special "GDR show" to feature East Germany's one true star, ice skating Olympic champion Katarina Witt.
The so-called Ostalgie phenomenon awakes mixed feelings in former East Germans. They are pleased their history has been dusted off, but are anxious that it is being used for commercial rather than historical gain, with many easterners as willing accomplices.
"People from the former GDR see Good Bye, Lenin! and hope that their country was like that. But they're deluding themselves. It wasn't hip and cool, it was a boring, inhibited country," says Henrik Goetze, a computer programmer from the former East. He enjoyed the film but is wary of the current Ostalgie wave. "I don't like my history just being used as material for amusement. You don't see people using their own West German history in the same way," he says.
German psychologists see the so-called Ostalgie wave - whether a media phenomenon or not - as just another round in the endless battle of German identity politics.
"The GDR had no identity as a person, just the identities of individuals who have to deal with experiences of people that were different to their own," says Dr Malte Mienert, psychologist at Berlin's Humoldt University. He doesn't see anything sinister in the current trend of airbrushing out the less savoury aspects of the GDR regime. "The identity in anyone's biography changes continually based on who they are today. Today, the GDR is sometimes seen as evil, sometimes as harmless and innocent. We're witnessing a stage in a continual process which, at the moment, sees the GDR past as a historical curiosity."
Far from the Ostalgie hype are the hundreds of people in Germany who work through the GDR's past. The former Stasi prison in Berlin has seen an increase in visitors this year, although the tour guides, many former victims of the Stasi, know their take on history isn't always popular with people who want to take a rose-tinted trip down memory lane.
"We are working hard to do the difficult work here on a limited budget. We have mountains of material in a huge depot dealing with 40 years of GDR persecution," says Silke Bauer, spokeswoman for the foundation that manages the former prison.
She is equal parts wary and philosophical about Ostalgie. "I'm from the West and, personally speaking, I think the current wave of Ostalgie can, in part, be justified. But it's not always helpful that people fix on individual things and ignore the system."
It's a safe bet that long after the media-fuelled Ostalgie wagon has moved on, the arguments and competing representations of Germany's history will continue to fight it out, proving that it's business as usual in Germany.
Kunst in der DDR (Art in the GDR) runs at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Strasse 50, Berlin, until October 26th