Nostalgic Effects: The Case of the DDR Museum in Berlin

This chapter considers another typology of space for nostalgia, taking as its main example a specific section of the DDR Museum in Berlin. This private museum embodies Ostalgie: the neologism that, as a crasis between the German words “Ost” and “Nostalgie”, defines the absence and longing for everyday life in former East Germany. Inaugurated in 2006, the DDR Museum is one of the main tourist attractions in the German capital. It also represents a very fruitful example to discuss how nostalgia can be constructed as an “effect” in a museum space. In particular, analysing the reconstruction of a typical East-Berlin apartment within the museum, I focus on how spatial playfulness, interactivity and the narrative of domesticity are combined with the historical trauma of the German Democratic Republic. In other words, I investigate how the “dollhouse rhetoric”, specific museological choices and the “realism effect” proposed in the reconstructed apartment interact with and compromise traumatic narratives, enacting a “nostalgic effect”.