Idealised image of disintegration

I refer to a phenomenon of ‘Ostalgie’ as an idealized view of the past framed by a particular political totalitarian regime. I re-enter the family space in which I explore and look into the past of my grandmother’s small history. It is with her that a recollective optimism is present when remembering (her) past. She does not remember communism through the lens of the totalitarian era, as a period in its broad context of historical stages, but on the line of her personal life, in an introspective framework. The image of the past is subject to selective memory, and thus becomes idealized. I notice a “double past”. The past of the big history - ideological and the past of small history - of individual human life.

My grandmother, as a member of the older generation, lived most of her life under the onslaught of communist ideology. She now finds herself in a maximally complex world, in an open society with democratic principles to which she has never been guided and taught to deal critically with information in the public space. She finds the world disorienting in its mass of information, and so resorts to the "simple solutions" offered by some politicians as "the only possible way out of this chaos". I see the consequences of her life in a totalitarian political regime today, when she is susceptible to manipulation by populist politicians who deliberately use the narrative and rhetoric of social security and stability, which precisely makes the older generation feel nostalgic for their life in the past regime, but with the aim of gaining absolute political power.

What I have realized in the process is the presence of social isolation of the elderly. They are marginalised from public life and find themselves on the margins. There is no space in society where there is intergenerational dialogue, which creates a huge gap of mutual misunderstanding, which I also perceive between me and my grandmother. The only space in which my grandmother moves is her own house, which also creates a framework for her mental isolation, in which she takes refuge in the "nice" past and displaces, overlooks or even distorts the problematic aspects of the past that did not existentially affect her, because she moved within the given and controlled frameworks of the then regime.