When Ostalgie swept Germany, all the cool kids in Berlin (many who were barely out of diapers when the Wall crashed down) were throwing GDR parties, fetishizing Trabant cars, and, apparently, shopping for East German foodstuffs. Personally, I was five years old and living in a comfortable New York City apartment when the Berlin Wall fell, which is about as far as you can get from Stasi headquarters.
Can you be nostalgic for something you have not personally experienced? The word "nostalgia" comes from the Greek nostos, meaning return, and algos, meaning suffering. As Milan Kundera poignantly wrote, "Nostalgia is the unappeased yearning to return." I might not have been raised on Globus peas or Spreewald pickles like Alex in the film, but my childhood brushed with Socialism when my family moved to Budapest, Hungary, in the early 1990s. Just as Burger King and Coca-Cola were the first emblems of modernity in Good Bye, Lenin!, they, too, were well-established in Budapest when we arrived there in 1993. But I can't imagine that early '90s Budapest, where life was shrouded in the same mustard-yellows, mauves, and army greens, and whose drab, gray buildings reflected drab, gray skies, differed much from the GDR, at least from a culinary standpoint. Finding lettuce at the supermarket during the winter months in 1993 in Budapest was laughable, and Western products remained scarce. One of the most exciting moments of our two-year stint in Hungary was the day when an unexpected shipment of Camp maple syrup appeared in our neighborhood supermarket located on Batthyány Tér. As my mother and I practically wept with joy for this familiar reminder of home, the bottles ironically went untouched by the Hungarians, who considered them ridiculously costly at about five dollars apiece and who also simply didn't know what to do with them.
In Good Bye, Lenin!, food and food choices symbolize progress (in another telling scene, Alex's older sister quits college to work at Burger King). As Alex narrates, "Overnight our drab corner store became a gaudy consumer paradise and I was its king." But when he goes shopping for his mother's favorite products from the GDR , he encounters difficulties:
"Mocca Fix?" he asks a shopkeeper.
"We don't have that any more," she says.
"Fillinchen crisp bread?"
"Not in stock anymore."
"Spreewald pickles?"
"Boy, where have you been hiding? ... We have Western money now and you want Mocca Fix and Fillinchen?"
When I told my friends in Berlin that I wanted to go to Ostkost, I was met with similar reactions. But why? And so I made the trip to Prenzlauer Berg, where Ostkost is located, alone.
In the earlier part of the decade, Prenzlauer Berg attracted artists and musicians, but stroller-pushing, more affluent dwellers have slowly pushed them out to Kreuzberg and Neukölln, and the area now is decidedly gentrified. Ostkost is located at 54 Lychener Straße, a quiet street dotted with boutiques and coffee shops.