Post‐communist ironies in an East German hotel

Abstract

On 1 May 2007, a new hotel opened in Berlin: Ostel. As its name implies, it is located in the former East of the city, now ‘Berlin Mitte’. The Ostel joined Berlin's burgeoning hotel scene at a time when Ostalgie ‐ the supposed longing East Germans feel for the past ‐ marked no longer a condition of mourning and loss but had become ‘hip’. In this article to carry the analysis of Ostalgie beyond the themes of trauma or resistance into the more playful dimensions of what Czech‐French writer Milan Kundera (1992) has called ‘the joke,’ that is, an ironic form of humor ubiquitous in former Soviet and East European contexts. I engage irony as a situated experience and practice chiefly through the ‘artful lens’ of material culture. In focusing on the Ostel's interior, I am especially interested in irony's ‘critical edge’. I argue that it is this edge that makes it possible to open up critical interpretations of German post‐unification history.

The Discreet Charm of Lenin

“…What makes the critique of kitsch so important is not only a question of aesthetics and taste but one's intellectual responsibility to respond to the uses of kitsch by both capitalist culture industries and totalitarian states. This is a view that does not sit well with the camp sensibility that Susan Sontag () describes as an interesting derivative of kitsch, with camp's emphasis on satire, paradox, and irony (Rethmann ) – a view that matches up nicely with the rather tongue‐in‐cheek sense of much of post‐Soviet and sots‐art, with its emphasis on the Soviet ordinary marvelous and surreal. Apart from the fact that in Greenberg's definition ethical and aesthetic judgments always converge, in his view kitsch can only always be a poor imitation of the effect of art, an effect that in Russian and Soviet visual culture almost always involves a mediation on history, and – as one consequence – Lenin.…”

“…In Russia, a country that during the last few decades has been through extreme calamities, wars, revolutions, and epochs of terror, nostalgia can serve different functions. It can, for example, be utopian by emphasizing a longing for some thing that was once had but may never return, or ironic (Rethmann 2009; 2008) in emphasizing not a specific referent but temporal distance. Nostalgia, of course, becomes particularly pronounced during a time of crisis, a crisis that in Russia articulates itself to some extent in the search for previous forms of community, a collective home.…”