History and Theory 57, no.

2 (June 2018), 234-250 © Wesleyan University 2018 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.12059

Forum: Historicizing Nostalgia

1.

THE MEANINGS OF NOSTALGIA: GENEALOGY AND CRITIQUE

TOBIAS BECKER

ABSTRACT

Nostalgia has become a new master narrative both in public discourse and academic
research, serving as an explanation for trends in fields as different as popular culture,
fashion, technology, and politics. This essay criticizes the wide-ranging use of the term.
It argues that nostalgia often does not adequately describe the diverse uses of the past to
which it is applied. It does this by historicizing the nostalgia discourse with particular
emphasis on the 1970s, when dictionaries first noted a semantic shift from homesickness
to a sentimental yearning for the past, and intellectuals discussed a widespread, patho-
logical “nostalgia wave.” After the introduction, the second section looks at the changing
meanings of nostalgia, the third examines how the “nostalgia wave” was seen to manifest
itself and who was thought to be afflicted by it, and the fourth discusses contemporary
explanations. Building on this, the final section critically examines the nostalgia discourse
before evaluating its continuing influence.

Keywords: nostalgia, popular culture, retro, memory, decline, cultural criticism, United
States, Britain, West Germany, France

INTRODUCTION

If we believe cultural critics, contemporary society is haunted by nostalgia.

With its penchant for recycling older genres, styles, and stories, popular culture
is regularly accused of showcasing, eliciting, and cashing in on nostalgia, most
vocally by the critic Simon Reynolds in his book Retromania.1 Others explain the
current success of right-wing populist politics as a yearning for an idealized past

1. Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber, 2011),
xiv; similarly Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
(Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014); Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia (London: Verso,
2016); Stuart Jeffries, “Backwards to the Future: How Britain’s Nostalgia Industry Is Thriving,”
Guardian (July 25, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/25/backwards-to-the-future-
how-britains-nostalgia-industry-is-thriving (accessed February 26, 2018). Earlier versions of this
article were presented at the Institute of Historical Research, the University of Konstanz, the Institut
für Zeitgeschichte München, the University of Bielefeld, the University of Oxford and King’s College
London. I would like to thank Fernando Esposito, Leila Essa, Dion Georgiou, Achim Landwehr,
Patricia Lorcin, Martina Steber, and Willibald Steinmetz as well as my colleagues at the German
Historical Institute London for their comments and advice.
 THE MEANING OF NOSTALGIA 235
before decolonization, globalization, and feminism.2 In an article in the Guardian
Mohsin Hamid brought these strands together, describing nostalgia as “a terribly
potent force at this moment of history” that informs “political rhetoric”—Islamic
State, Brexit, Trump—as well as “our entertainment and artistic culture”—period
dramas like Mad Men and Downton Abbey—and “the realm of technology.”3 In
Retrotopia sociologist Zygmunt Bauman characterized our time as “the age of
nostalgia.”4
Nostalgia seems to have become a new master narrative, capable of explaining
phenomena as different as entertainment preferences and voting patterns. Such
overgeneralizations alone are enough to question the diagnosis. What is more, the
claim that our time, “this moment of history,” is particularly nostalgic is far from
new. Having been made in every decade since the 1970s, it has become a well-
rehearsed argument in the toolkit of cultural critics. This essay does not doubt that
many people yearn for days gone by or that nostalgia has a role to play in culture
and politics, but it criticizes a discourse that has turned nostalgia into a catch-all
term potentially describing any form of engagement with the past. Instead of
raising questions—who is nostalgic for what and why—the nostalgia discourse
sets up the straw man of a universal and uniform zeitgeist. This essay wants to
challenge the nostalgia diagnosis by historicizing it. It does not provide a history
of nostalgia but a genealogical exploration of how the term “nostalgia” has been
used and how nostalgia has been conceptualized—a necessary requirement for
a history of nostalgia that in the first instance needs to clarify its terminology.5
Such a clarification is all the more necessary as nostalgia not only figures promi-
nently in public discourse but also in academic research across disciplines, from

2. See Ishaan Tharoor, “The Other Side of the Global Right-Wing Surge: Nostalgia for
Empire,” Washington Post (December 2, 2016), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/
wp/2016/12/02/the-other-side-of-the-global-right-wing-surge-nostalgia-for-empire/?utm_term=.
e355299ffc16; Zoe Williams, “An Obsession with Nostalgia Offers Us Only Political Poison,”
Guardian (November 20, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/20/nos-
talgia-political-poison-strictly-bake-off; Mark Lilla, “Our Reactionary Age,” New York Times
(November 6, 2016), http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/opinion/our-reactionary-age.html; Samuel
Earle, “The Politics of Nostalgia,” Global Policy Journal (October 31, 2016); Mark Lilla, “Only an
Apocalypse Can Save Us Now: On the Politics of Nostalgia,” Harper’s (September 2016), 49-53;
Martin Kettle, “On Left and Right, Our Politics Is Now Dominated by Nostalgic Gestures,” Guardian
(August 25, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/25/left-right-politics-
dominated-nostalgic-gestures; Alan Levinovitz, “It Was Never Golden,” Aeon (August 17, 2016),
https://aeon.co/essays/nostalgia-exerts-a-strong-allure-and-extracts-a-steep-price (all URLs accessed
February 26, 2018).
3. Mohsin Hamid, “Mohsin Hamid on the Dangers of Nostalgia: We Need to Imagine a Brighter
Future,” Guardian (February 25, 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/25/mohsin-
hamid-danger-nostalgia-brighter-future (accessed February 26, 2018).
4. Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017), 1.
5. For attempts at theorizing nostalgia, see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the
Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,
1984); Bryan S. Turner, “A Note on Nostalgia,” Theory, Culture & Society 4, no. 1 (1987), 147-154;
Stuart Tannock, “Nostalgia Critique,” Cultural Studies 9, no. 3 (1995), 453-464; Linda Hutcheon,
“Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern: Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory,”
Studies in Comparative Literature 30 (2000), 189-207; Janelle L. Wilson, Nostalgia: Sanctuary of
Meaning (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005); Scott Alexander Howard, “Nostalgia,”
Analysis 72, no. 4 (2012), 641-550; for more literature, see the following footnotes.
236 TOBIAS BECKER

psychology,6 anthropology,7 geography,8 sociology9 to philosophy10 but particularly

in literature,11 media,12 and fashion studies.13 Concerned primarily with the here and
now and the recent past, few of these books historicize nostalgia systematically.
Historians, however, have, with few notable exceptions, contributed little to the lit-
erature on nostalgia and have all but ignored the recent trend.14 The reasons for this

6. Clay Routledge, Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource (New York and London: Psychology
Press, 2016); Douwe Draaisma, The Nostalgia Factory: Memory, Time and Ageing, transl. Liz
Waters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Constantine Sedikides, Tim Wildschut,
and Denise Baden, “Nostalgia: Conceptual Issues and Existential Functions,” in Handbook of
Experimental Existential Psychology, ed. Jeff Greenberg (New York: Guilford Press, 2004), 200-
214; Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Jamie Arndt, and Clay Routledge, “Nostalgia: Content,
Triggers, Functions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91, no. 5 (2006), 975-993; idem,
“Nostalgia: Past, Present, and Future,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 17, no. 5 (2008),
304-307; see also John Tierney, “What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows,” New
York Times (July 8, 2013), http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/science/what-is-nostalgia-good-for-
quite-a-bit-research-shows.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0; Tim Adams, “Look Back in Joy: The Power
of Nostalgia,” Observer (November 9, 2014), https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/09/
look-back-in-joy-the-power-of-nostalgia (both URLs accessed February 26, 2018).
7. Anthropology and Nostalgia, ed. Olivia Angé and David Berliner (New York: Berghahn, 2015).
8. Alastair Bonnett, The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on Modernity
and Loss (London: Routledge, 2016).
9. The Commonalities of Global Crises: Markets, Communities and Nostalgia, ed. Christian
Karner and Bernhard Weicht (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Tim Strangleman,
“‘Smokestack Nostalgia,’ ‘Ruin Porn’
or Working-Class Obituary: The Role and Meaning of
Deindustrial Representation,” International Labor and Working-Class History 84 (2013), 23-37;
Jan Willem Duyvendak, The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Western Europe and the
United States (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
10. Jeff Malpas, “Philosophy’s Nostalgia,” in Philosophy’s Moods: The Affective Grounds of
Thinking, ed. Hagi Kenaan and Ilit Ferber (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 87-101; Helmut Illbruck,
Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 2012); Dylan Trigg, The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2012).
11. Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics, ed. Tammy Clewell (Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Jennifer K. Ladino, Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in
American Literature (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012); Linda M.
Austin, Nostalgia in Transition, 1780–1917 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007);
Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001); Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books,
2001).
12. The Past in Visual Culture: Essays on Memory, Nostalgia and the Media, ed. Jilly Boyce Kay,
Cat Mahoney, and Caitlin Shaw (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2017); Stefanie Armbruster, Watching
Nostalgia: An Analysis of Nostalgic Television Fiction and its Reception (Bielefeld: Transcript,
2016); Jean Hogarty, Popular Music and Retro Culture in the Digital Era (London: Routledge, 2016);
Michael D. Dwyer, Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies
and Eighties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the
Remaking of Modern America, ed. Linda Beail and Lilly J. Goren (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015);
Ryan Lizardi, Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media (Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2015); Jason Sperb, Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital
Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Lincoln Geraghty, Cult Collectors:
Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture (London: Routledge 2014; Gilad Padva, Queer
Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Media and
Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future, ed. Katharina Niemeyer (Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering, The Mnemonic Imagination:
Remembering as Creative Practice (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
13. Heike Jenss, Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture (London: Bloomsbury,
2015).
14. See Thomas Dodman, What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Richard Jobson, Nostalgia and the Post-War Labour
 THE MEANING OF NOSTALGIA 237
are not hard to find. Most historians do not see nostalgia as a worthwhile research
topic, believing that it presents a “lopsided view of history,” in which the past
becomes “better and simpler than the present.”15 Charles Maier has compared it to
“kitsch,” Tony Judt and Dipesh Chakrabarty have even called it a “sin.”16 Repeated
calls for a history of nostalgia have so far gone unheeded, although nostalgia is
directly connected to important research fields such as memory and emotions.17
Although the history of nostalgia has been traced back variously to the
Romantic period, the seventeenth century, or even antiquity, the nostalgia dis-
course is of more recent vintage. It was at the turn from the 1960s to the 1970s
that “nostalgia” ceased to be a medical term for homesickness and came to sig-
nify an obsessive yearning for the past, or at least it was then that the guardians
of language—the editors of dictionaries—recognized nostalgia’s new meaning.
The semantic shift was accompanied by a discourse that saw nostalgia as a wide-
spread cultural phenomenon.
The first to speak of a “wave of nostalgia” was the American futurologist
Alvin Toffler in his 1970 bestseller Future Shock.18 This analysis seems to have
resonated with his contemporaries as it was quickly taken up by the mass media.
“Nostalgia for the American dreamland is sweeping the country like a Kansas
twister,” proclaimed Newsweek in 1970.19 “Everybody’s Just Wild About . . .
Nostalgia” was the title of a 1971 issue of Life.20 As early as 1971, Time magazine
asked: “How much more nostalgia can America take?”21 The answer was, appar-
ently, a lot because comments about a “nostalgia wave” and its social and cultural
dangers persisted all through the 1970s and 1980s.22

Party: Prisoners of the Past (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2018); Gary Cross,
Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press,
2015); Patricia Lorcin, Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia: European Women’s Narratives of Algeria
and Kenya 1900–Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the
Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2004); idem, “How Nostalgia Narrates Modernity,” in The Work of Memory: New Directions in the
Study of German Society and Culture, ed. Peter Fritzsche and Alon Confino (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2002), 62-81; Frank Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of a
Metaphor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 182-229.
15. John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (Harlow, UK: Longman 2010) 18.
16. Charles S. Maier, “The End of Longing? Notes toward a History of Postwar German National
Longing,” in The Postwar Transformation of Germany, ed. John S. Brady et al. (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1999), 273; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
(London: Heinemann, 2010), 10; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History:
Who Speaks for ‘Indian Pasts?’,” Representations 37 (Winter 1992), 1.
17. See, for instance, Maier, “The End of Longing?,” 274; Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man
(London: Penguin, 2002), 168. Surprisingly, the research on collective and cultural memory has all
but ignored nostalgia, and the history of emotions has looked at nostalgia only in its older meaning of
homesickness; see Susan J. Matt, Homesickness: An American History (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011); Juliane Brauer, “Heidi’s Homesickness,” in Learning How to Feel: Children’s
Literature and Emotional Socialization, 1870–1970, ed. Ute Frevert et al. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014), 209-227.
18. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (London: Bodley Head, 1970), 407.
19. “Nostalgia,” Newsweek (December 28, 1970), 30.
20. Life (February 19, 1971), cover.
21. Gerald Clarke, “The Meaning of Nostalgia,” Time (May 3, 1971), 37.
22. To mention just the most important contributions: Frank Heath, “Nostalgia Shock,” Saturday
Review (May 29, 1971), 18; Thomas Meehan, “Must We Be Nostalgic About The Fifties?,” Horizon
9, no. 1 (1972), 4-17; Howard F. Stein, “American Nostalgia,” Columbia Forum 3, no. 3 (1974),
238 TOBIAS BECKER

At the same time, the “nostalgia wave” spilled over to Europe. British newspa-
pers noticed a widespread return of and to the past ever since 1970; one British
historian saw it as a “national disease.”23 In West Germany, the “nostalgia wave”
arrived in 1973, when an article in an issue of Der Spiegel entitled Nostalgia:
The Business with Longing, made out a rampant “passion for the passé” that
had German intellectuals puzzling over its origins and meanings.24 France wit-
nessed a similar trend but gave it a different name: “la mode retro,” a term that
soon entered the English and German language as “retro.”25 In many ways this
neologism better described the use of the past in popular culture than nostalgia,
and although the terms are often wrongly conflated it is necessary to distinguish
between the two, as Elizabeth Guffey, among others, has argued.26
Although the nostalgia discourse of the 1970s and 1980s has generated little
scholarship, it continues to have an effect. For one, taking the contemporary dis-
cussion at face value, historians like Daniel T. Rodges have continued to describe
nostalgia as a characteristic of the 1970s.27 Even more important, perhaps, the

20-23; Richard Hasbany, “Irene: Considering the Nostalgia Sensibility,” Journal of Popular Culture 9
(1976), 816-826; Roy McMullen, “That Rose-Colored Rearview Mirror,” Saturday Review (October
2, 1976), 22-23; Anthony Brandt, “A Short Natural History of Nostalgia,” Atlantic (December
1978), 58-63; Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press,
1979); Christopher Lasch, “The Politics of Nostalgia: Losing History in the Mists of Ideology,”
Harper’s 269 (1984), 65-70; Stephen Holden, “Pop Nostalgia: A Counterrevolution,” Atlantic 255,
no. 4 (1985), 121-122; Tom Shales, “The Re Decade,” Esquire 105, no. 3 (1986), 67-69; Edward S.
Casey, “The World of Nostalgia,” Man and World 20 (1987), 361-384; Sven Birkerts, “The Nostalgia
Disease,” Tikkun 4, no. 2 (1989), 20-22, 117-118.
23. See Leonard Buckley, “Backwards into the 1970s,” Times (January 1, 1970), 6; Ray Connolly,
“The Fascinating ‘50s,” Evening Standard (March 4, 1972), 13; Benny Green, “Forward into the
Fifties,” Daily Mirror (May 30, 1972), 14-15; Simon Jenkins, “The Return of the Foggy ‘Fifties,”
Evening Standard (January 2, 1973), 24; Douglas Johnson, “Not What It Used to Be,” Vole 5 (1978),
42-43; Michael Wood, “Nostalgia or Never: You Can’t Go Home Again,” New Society 7, no. 632
(1974), 343-346.
24. Horst-Dieter Ebert, “‘Jene Sehnsucht nach den alten Tagen...’,” Der Spiegel (January 29,
1973), 86; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, “Das nostalgische Syndrom: Überlegungen zu einem neueren
antiquarischen Gefühl,” Frankfurter Hefte 28, no. 4 (1973), 270-276; Dieter Baacke, “Nostalgie: Ein
Phänomen ohne Theorie,” Merkur 30, no. 5 (1976), 442-452; Arnold Gehlen, “Das entflohene Glück:
Eine Deutung der Nostalgie,” Merkur 30, no. 5 (1976), 432-442.
25. See “Anti-Retro: Michel Foucault in interview with Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Toubiana
(1974),” Cahiers du Cinéma, vol. 4: 1973–1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle: An anthology
from Cahiers du Cinéma nos. 248-292, September 1973–September 1978, ed. David Wilson (London,
New York: Routledge, 2000), 159-172; see also Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation (Paris:
Éditions Galilée, 1981); Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since
1944, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 127-131; Alan
Morris, Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed: Writers and the Mode Rétro in Post-Gaullist France
(New York: Berg, 1992); Margaret Atack, May 68 in French Fiction and Film: Rethinking Society,
Rethinking Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Guffey, Retro: The
Culture of Revival (London: Reaktion Books 2006).
26. See Guffey, Retro, 20.
27. Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011); see also Thomas
Hine, The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); for Britain, see Dominic Sandbrook, State of Emergency:
The Way We Were: Britain, 1970–1974 (London: Penguin 2011), 197, 337; for West Germany, Lutz
Niethammer, “‘Normalization’ in the West: Traces of Memory Leading Back into the 1950s,” in The
Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000), 237-265; Paul Betts, “Remembrance of Things Past: Nostalgia
in West and East Germany, 1980–2000,” in Pain and Prosperity: Reconsidering Twentieth-Century
 THE MEANING OF NOSTALGIA 239
nostalgia discourse of the 1970s still influences how we define and conceptualize
nostalgia. To understand what nostalgia means today, it is necessary to historicize
the term as well as the critical discourse surrounding it. This is what this essay sets
out to do. The second section looks at how the meaning of nostalgia changed in the
1960s and 1970s. The third examines how the alleged “nostalgia wave” was seen
to manifest itself and who was thought to be afflicted by it, and the fourth looks
at contemporary explanations for it. Building on this, the final section questions
the usefulness of the term “nostalgia” and, returning to the present, looks at the
continuing influence of the nostalgia discourse of the 1970s and 1980s.

DEFINITIONS

When exactly nostalgia ceased to mean homesickness and took on a temporal

rather than a spatial meaning is hard to pin down. According to the current
Oxford English Dictionary, nostalgia first described a “sentimental longing for
or regretful memory of a period of the past” in the early 1900s.28 However, as the
Times and the New York Times digital archives show, nostalgia signified primar-
ily homesickness well into the interwar period.29 This suggests that in the case of
the English language, the semantic shift from a yearning for a place to one for a
period in the past occurred slowly and gradually in the first half of the twentieth
century.
This impression is reinforced by a survey of dictionaries. Webster’s still
defined nostalgia as “homesickness” in 1957, adding a second entry in 1961: “a
wistful or excessively sentimental sometimes abnormal yearning for return to or
return of some real or romanticized period or irrecoverable condition or setting
in the past.”30 The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English knew nostalgia
only as “homesickness” in 1951; the 1964 edition was the first to mention a “sen-
timental yearning for (some period of the past).”31
German dictionaries took even longer. The entry for “Nostalgie” in the 1955
edition of the Brockhaus simply read “homesickness”; in 1969 this was still the
case but with the amendment: “also: yearning for the past.”32 The postposed

German History, ed. Paul Betts and Greg Eghigian (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 178-
207. The historiography on West Germany has described nostalgia more as a phenomenon of the
1980s, but there, too, it was discussed in the 1970s.
28. “nostalgia, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
September 2016), http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/128472?redirectedFrom=nostalgia& (accessed
October 7, 2016).
29. Times Digital Archive, http://gale.cengage.co.uk/times.aspx/; New York Times Article Archive,
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/nytarchive.html (both accessed February 26, 2018).
30. “Nostalgia,” Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (London: Bell,
1957), 1667; “Nostalgia,” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language
(London: Bell, 1961), 1542.
31. “Nostalgia,” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1951), 805; “Nostalgia,” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1964), 822. In academic studies, nostalgia was still used as synonymous with home-
sickness in the 1960s; see, for instance, Charles Zwingmann, “Die Heimwehrreaktion alias ‘pothopat-
ridalgia,’” Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 201, no. 4 (1960–61), 445-464; Ina-Maria
Greverus, “Heimweh und Tradition,” Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde 61, no. 1-2 (1965), 1-31.
32. “Nostalgie,” Der große Brockhaus in zwölf Bänden (Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1955), VIII, 471;
“Nostalgie,” Brockhaus-Enzyklopädie in zwanzig Bänden (Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1971), XIII, 575.
240 TOBIAS BECKER

“also:” and the brevity of the definition makes it seem as if the new definition
had been added hastily before publication to account for a recent change in
meaning. This impression is reinforced by a comment in the journal Der Spiegel,
according to which nostalgia had become “the very latest fashionable term of
the cultural scene” in the early 1970s.33 Der Spiegel portrayed the “nostalgia
wave” as an American fad West Germans slavishly copied. Yet, as the Spiegel’s
continued references to the United States imply, what was actually adopted was
the American nostalgia discourse. The 1974 edition of Meyers Enzyklopädisches
Lexikon included a lengthy entry on nostalgia—now defined as “enthusiastic,
romanticizing return to earlier times idealized in memory and coupled with
yearning or melancholy”—describing the history of the term from its inven-
tion by Johannes Hofer in 1688 up to the “so called nostalgia wave (since ca.
1973).”34 So important did the trend appear to the editors of the encyclopedia,
they followed it up with a four-page essay on the topic.35 When the new, com-
pletely revised 1979 edition of the Brockhaus finally came out, it also featured
an extended article on nostalgia, mentioning a “nostalgia wave” that had begun
in the middle of the 1960s.36
Similarly for the French dictionaries: the 1957 edition of the Dictionnaire de
la Langue Française defined nostalgia as “Homesickness, a wasting away caused
by the desire to return to the home country.”37 The entry in the Dictionnaire du
français contemporain from 1966 read “A vague sadness caused by being away
from what we have known, by the feeling for a past gone.”38 The French meaning
of nostalgia was much wider, though. The Dictionnaire Hachette de la langue
française, published in 1980, defined it as “melancholy caused by regret.”39
Crucially, there was no mention of a “nostalgia wave.” Like their counterparts
in the United States, Britain, and West Germany, French intellectuals detected a
widespread tendency to look back to the past, but they spoke of “la mode retro”
rather than “nostalgie.”40
In contrast to the dictionaries, many authors writing on nostalgia did not take
pains to define the term or to go into its history. Some referred to its original
meaning as homesickness, quickly adding that it was yearning for a time, not

33. Horst-Dieter Ebert, “‘Jene Sehnsucht nach den alten Tagen . . . ,’” Der Spiegel (January 29,
1973), 87.
34. “Nostalgie,” Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon in 25 Bänden (Mannheim, Vienna, and Zürich:
Bibliographisches Institut, 1976), XVII, 447. On the coinage of the term and the history of nostal-
gia before the twentieth century, see the article by Achim Landwehr in this issue as well as Jean
Starobinski and William S. Kemp, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 14 (1966), 81-103; Michael S.
Roth, “Dying of the Past: Medical Studies of Nostalgia in Nineteenth-Century France,” History and
Memory 3, no. 1, (1991), 5-29; Illbruck, Nostalgia, 5-16; Thomas Dodman, What Nostalgia Was:
War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 16-42.
35. Dieter Baacke, “Nostalgie: Zu einem Phänomen ohne Theorie,” Meyers Enzyklopädisches
Lexikon in 25 Bänden (Mannheim, Vienna, and Zürich: Bibliographisches Institut, 1976), XVII,
449-452.
36. “Nostalgie,” Der Grosse Brockhaus in zwölf Bänden (Wiesbaden: F. A. Brockhaus, 1979),
VIII, 301.
37. Émile Littré. Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, vol. 5 (Gallimard, Hachette, 1957).
38. Dictionnaire du français contemporain (Paris: Larousse, 1966), 776.
39. Dictionnaire Hachette de la langue française, ed. Françoise Guerard (Paris: Hachette, 1980),
1064.
40. See footnote 24.
 THE MEANING OF NOSTALGIA 241
for a place. Although nostalgia no longer denoted an illness, many authors still
described it as such: Toffler defined it as “a psychological lust for the simpler,
less turbulent past,”41 others used medical terms like “disease,” “sickness,” or
“symptom.”42 A way to escape the problems of the present, nostalgia indicated
an escapist, regressive, naïve, and infantile mindset.43 Almost all texts on nostal-
gia from the 1970s and 1980s, then, had two things in common. First, they saw
nostalgia not as an individual emotion—or at least they were not interested in its
individual psychological form—but as a collective cultural phenomenon, a “rec-
ognizable and distinctive public mood,” in short, a zeitgeist.44 And second, they
all saw nostalgia consistently as negative and as, at least potentially, “positively
harmful.”45
Simultaneous with its redefinition, the term became much more widely used,
as Google’s Ngram Viewer suggests.46 The English language has seen a gradual
rise since the early 1900s, which became more prominent after the Second World
War. This observation is further substantiated by newspaper online archives
such as those of the Times and the New York Times. In Germany, the trend was
even more pronounced. Before 1970 Nostalgie had hardly been used. In the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung the term occurred only nine times in the 1950s
and fifty-one times in the 1960s, but 1,033 times in the 1970s. Both the redefini-
tion of the term and its more frequent use were clearly linked to the discourse
about a “nostalgia wave.” But who was supposed to be nostalgic and for what?
How did this alleged “nostalgia wave” manifest itself?

MANIFESTATIONS

In the early 1970s, the “nostalgia wave” referred almost exclusively to popu-
lar culture and fashion. Toffler mentioned “[a]ntique furniture, posters from a
bygone era, games based on the remembrance of yesterday’s trivia, the revival of

41. Toffler, Future Shock, 407.

42. See, for instance, Clarke, “The Meaning of Nostalgia”; Wood, “Nostalgia or Never,” 343;
Johnson, “Not What It Used to Be”; Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate
of Change (London: Methuen, 1987), 10; Birkerts, “The Nostalgia Disease”; Malcolm Chase and
Christopher Shaw, “The Dimensions of Nostalgia,” in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia,
ed. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989), 1.
43. See Brandt, “A Short Natural History of Nostalgia,” 60; Schivelbusch, “Das nostalgische
Syndrom,” 276; Baacke, “Nostalgie: Zu einem Phänomen ohne Theorie,” 450; Peter Clecak,
America’s Quest for the Ideal Self: Dissent and Fulfillment in the 60s and 70s (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1983), 93; Lasch, “The Politics of Nostalgia,” 65; David Cannadine, “Nostalgia,”
in The Pleasures of the Past, ed. David Cannadine(London: Collins 1989), 256-271 (first published
as “Brideshead Re-revisited,” New York Review of Books [December 19, 1985]), 258-259; Chase and
Shaw, “The Dimensions of Nostalgia,” 1.
44. Cannadine, “Nostalgia,” 256-271; see also Schivelbusch, “Das nostalgische Syndrom,” 270,
275; Baacke, “Nostalgie,” 450; Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, 104-110.
45. Johnson, “Not What It Used to Be,” 42.
46. Google Ngram Viewer charts frequencies of words per year in texts; for English, see
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nostalgia&year_start=1900&year_ end=1990&
corpus=15&smoothing= 3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cnostalgia%3B%2Cc0; for German, see
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Nostalgie&year_start=1900&year_ end=1990&
corpus=20&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CNostalgie%3B%2Cc0 [both accessed
October 11, 2016].
242 TOBIAS BECKER

Art Nouveau, the spread of Edwardian styles, the rediscovery of such faded pop-
cult celebrities as Humphrey Bogart or W. C. Fields.”47 Whereas his examples
invoke the periods between the 1900s and the 1940s, most of the other com-
mentators observed a nostalgia for the 1950s. In a richly illustrated title story on
“The Nifty Fifties,” Life magazine reported a revival of 1950s rock music and
rock stars like Bill Haley and Elvis as well as fashions and fads of the period
such as petticoats, ducktails, and hula hoops.48 Yet the trend did not stop there;
current popular culture, too, displayed signs of nostalgia most famously with the
rock group Sha Na Na, which, in their music and appearance, drew heavily on
the 1950s.49 Hollywood took up the vogue for the 1950s with films such as The
Last Picture Show (1971) and American Graffiti (1973), both coming-of-age sto-
ries set in small-town America. The 1950s revival was not limited to the United
States. According to the British historian Michael Wood, “the world of popular
music has simply become haunted by the 50s.”50 In West Germany, coffee-table
books, exhibitions, and television programs on the postwar decades as well as the
return to the fashion of 1950s furniture and design objects were seen as indicative
of a widespread “homesickness for the false fifties”—false because it overlooked
and underplayed the glumness and gloom of the era.51
Nostalgia for the 1950s would have attracted little comment had it been
restricted to adults fondly remembering their carefree childhood and youth.
What baffled commentators was that “those under the age of thirty . . . are most
nostalgic”—those who should have been “involved in the present and the future”
and not the past.52 Instead of rebelling against the older generation’s tastes and
coming up with new music and fashions, they were seen to adopt the popular
culture of their parents. It was only natural, then, to suspect nostalgia, as some
commentators did, of being conservative if not reactionary. However, nostalgia
was criticized by both conservative and liberal intellectuals. Writers discussing
the politics of nostalgia often concluded that it could be found as much on the left
as on the right and, in the end, it was not political at all but indicative of a retreat
into a private, apolitical space.53
In France, the focus was much more on the 1940s than the 1950s, triggered
by a wave of novels and films about the German occupation, such as Patrick

47. Toffler, Future Shock, 407.

48. “The Nifty Fifties,” Life (June 16, 1972), 38-46; see also Meehan, “Must We Be Nostalgic
about the Fifties?”; Jonathan Rodgers, “Back to the ‘50s,” Newsweek (October 16, 1972), 78-82;
“Back to the Unfabulous ‘50s,” Time (May 8, 1974), 60; on the representation of the 1950s in the
United States, see Daniel Marcus, Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in
Contemporary Cultural Politics (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Dwyer, Back to
the Fifties.
49. On Sha Na Na, see Dwyer, Back to the Fifties, 48-58.
50. Wood, “Nostalgia or Never,” 343.
51. “Heimweh nach den falschen Fünfzigern,” Der Spiegel (April 3, 1978), 90-111; see also “‘Mit
Pepita voll im Trend’: Der neue Kult um die 50er Jahre,” Der Spiegel (April 2, 1984), 230-235,
Schivelbusch, “Das nostalgische Syndrom.” On the West German fifties revival, see Niethammer,
“‘Normalization’ in the West,” 237-265; Betts, “Remembrance of Things Past.”
52. Meehan, “Must We Be Nostalgic about the Fifties?,” 5.
53. See Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, 108-109; Baacke, “Nostalgie: Zu einem Phänomen ohne
Theorie,” 451; Clecak, America’s Quest for the Ideal Self, 96; Chase and Shaw, “The Dimensions
of Nostalgia,” 3.
 THE MEANING OF NOSTALGIA 243
Modiano’s occupation trilogy (La Place de l’Étoile [1968], La Ronde de nuit
[1969], and Les Boulevards de ceinture [1974]) as well as Marcel Ophüls’s
documentary Le Chagrin et la Pitié (1969) and Louis Malle’s film Lacombe
Lucien (co-written with Modiano [1974]). They broke with convention in paint-
ing the French resistance in shades of grey instead of celebrating it. Coinciding
with these films, war-era fashions such as trench coats and platform shoes made
a comeback.54 Unsurprisingly, many intellectuals, and especially left-wing intel-
lectuals such as Michel Foucault, objected to what they perceived as an “erotici-
zation” of the war.55 The critique of “la mode retro” was similar to the nostalgia
discourse insofar as it emanated from the pop-cultural appropriation of the past,
its commercialization and depoliticization, but it was much more limited and
politically charged compared to the discourse in the United States, Britain, and
West Germany.
In the 1980s many forgot how nostalgia had been claimed as a characteristic of
the preceding decade, addressing it as an evil of their own present. The essayist
Sven Birkerts, for instance, insisted that “our culture is awash like never before in
repackaged bits of the past.”56 The TV critic Tom Shales christened the 1980s the
“Re Decade,” “the decade of replay, recycle, recall, retrieve, reprocess, rerun.”57
Both Birkerts and Shales were thinking primarily of pop culture and particularly
of television, which, with the proliferation of commercial channels repeating
old shows and the introduction of VCR technology, worked as a veritable time
machine.
At the same time nostalgia was found more and more outside the realm of pop
culture. British and West German commentators saw the conservation movement
as both motivated by and as a purveyor of nostalgia.58 Conservation was also
at the heart of the British “heritage debate” of the mid-1980s.59 Historians like
Patrick Wright, David Lowenthal, and Robert Hewison, who coined the term
“heritage industry,” drew on nostalgia to explain the popularity of phenomena as
diverse as conservation, museums, heritage centers, heritage tourism, and period
dramas.60 A few years earlier, the historian Martin Wiener had made nostalgia

54. See Guffey, Retro, 14.

55. See footnote 24.
56. Birkerts, “The Nostalgia Disease.”
57. Shales, “The Re Decade.”
58. Reinhard Bentmann, “Der Kampf um die Erinnerung: Ideologische und methodische
Konzepte des modernen Denkmalkultes,” in Denkmalräume – Lebensräume, ed. Ina-Maria Greverus
(=Hessische Blätter für Volks- und Kulturforschung 2/3 [1976], 213-246); Johnson, “Not What It
Used to Be,” 43.
59. Robert Lumley, “The Debate on Heritage Reviewed,” in Towards the Museum of the Future:
New European Perspectives, ed. Roger Mildes and Lauro Zavala (London: Routledge, 2002), 57-69;
Peter Mandler, “The Heritage Panic of the 1970s and 1980s in Great Britain,” The Invention of
Industrial Pasts: Heritage, Political Culture and Economic Debates in Great Britain and Germany,
1850–2010, ed. Peter Itzen and Christian Müller (Augsburg: Wißner 2013), 58-69.
60. Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen,
1987), 9-10, 28-29; Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary
Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, 2009); David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign
Country (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). One of the few historians defend-
ing these developments was Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory. Vol. 1: Past and Present in
Contemporary Culture (London and New York: Verso, 1994).
244 TOBIAS BECKER

responsible for the “decline of the industrial spirit” in Britain since the nine-
teenth century.61 West German intellectuals, too, saw the rise of the conservation
movement as well as the growing number of museums and the popularity of flea
markets, historical exhibitions, and historical coffee-table books as evidence of
a widespread sense of nostalgia.62 As this overview of the manifestations of the
alleged “nostalgia wave” shows, the meaning of the term was quickly expanded
far beyond the dictionary definition to describe almost anything that had to do
with the past and any form of engaging with it.

EXPLANATIONS

Equally diverse were the ways in which intellectuals accounted for the “nostalgia
wave.” More polemical texts were usually content with stressing the omnipres-
ence and dangers of nostalgia. A common explanation saw the “nostalgia wave”
as an escapist flight from the present, the “forlorn 1970s.”63 Following on the
optimistic, future-looking 1960s, the 1970s, characterized by economic down-
turn, rising unemployment, domestic terrorism, and fears of environmental col-
lapse, had taken on a much darker complexion. Instead of engaging with these
problems head on, contemporaries took flight to the past—or so many intellectu-
als argued: “A wave of nostalgia is a symptom of hurt, a symptom of a culture
that seeks relief from anxiety and uncertainty in its cultural childhood, in retelling
stories and rehearing the sounds of the secure past.”64
Another explanation saw the nostalgia wave as a “prolonged ‘morning after’
to the euphoria and excesses of the Sixties.”65 Insofar as the projects of the 1960s
failed, they led to disappointment and disillusionment; insofar as they were suc-
cessful, they resulted in disorientation. At least this was how Fred Davis argued:
“rarely in modern history has the common man had his fundamental taken-for-
granted convictions about man, woman, habits, manners, law, society, and God .
. . so challenged, disrupted, and shaken.”66 In this context, nostalgia fulfilled an
important function, as “collective nostalgia acts restore, at least temporarily, a
sense of sociohistoric continuity with respect to that which had verged on being

61. Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981); on this, see Jim Tomlinson, “Thrice Denied:
‘Declinism’ as a Recurrent Theme in British History in the Long Twentieth Century,” Twentieth
Century British History 20, no. 2 (2009), 227-251.
62. See Walter Schmiele, “Wallfahrt zu entbehrten Glücksgefühlen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung (February 11, 1978), BuZ1; Hermann Lübbe, Geschichtsbegriff und Geschichtsinteresse:
Analytik und Pragmatik der Historie (Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1977), 305-306, 316, 318;
idem, Der Fortschritt und das Museum: Über den Grund unseres Vergnügens an historischen
Gegenständen (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1982), 4-5, 8-9; idem, Zwischen Trend und
Tradition: Überfordert uns die Gegenwart? (Zürich: Edition Interfrom, 1981), 10; Jürgen Kocka,
Sozialgeschichte: Begriff, Entwicklung, Probleme (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977), 114;
Volker Fischer, Nostalgie: Geschichte und Kultur als Trödelmarkt (Lucerne: Bucher, 1980); Hans-
Ulrich Wehler, Preußen ist wieder chic: Politik und Polemik in zwanzig Essays (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1983), 71.
63. Wood, “Nostalgia, or Never,” 343.
64. Hasbany, “Irene,” 818.
65. Christopher Booker, The Seventies: Portrait of a Decade (London: Allen Lane, 1980), 7.
66. Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, 105.
 THE MEANING OF NOSTALGIA 245
rendered discontinuous.”67 In short, nostalgia helped American society to come
to terms with change.
Change played a central role in many explanations for the nostalgia wave,
which made rapid change responsible for an altered perception of time and,
crucially, the past. According to Alvin Toffler, the “acceleration of change in
our time” had resulted in a “break with the past.”68 In contrast to older societies,
the past no longer reached into the present but had become meaningless. The
conservative German philosopher Hermann Lübbe, too, differentiated between
the slowness of the past and “the speed of change of our civilization hitherto
never experienced.”69 Lübbe drew heavily on the work of the historian Reinhart
Koselleck, who defined acceleration as a fundamental characteristic of moderni-
ty.70 Koselleck described how, since the late eighteenth century, people had expe-
rienced history as accelerating, which he traced back to a drifting apart of what he
called the “space of experience” (Erfahrungsraum) and the “horizon of expecta-
tions” (Erwartungshorizont).71 Because of political, social, and economic change,
the present is perceived as being so different from the past that past experience
becomes increasingly useless, and the future is imagined as so different from the
present that it seems impossible to come up with long-range expectations.
Despite writing about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Koselleck’s the-
ory was clearly rooted in his perception of his own time and was as much about
the present as it was about the past, as he unwittingly gave away when he said,
“today, thanks to the population explosion, development of technological powers,
and the consequent frequent changes of regime, acceleration belongs to everyday
experience.”72 Lübbe went one step further by directly applying Koselleck’s the-
ory to the contemporary world, where, as he saw it, the drift between the “space
of experience” and the “horizon of expectation” had resulted in a “contraction of
the present” (Gegenwartsschrumpfung).73
Coming from different directions, Toffler and Lübbe arrived at a similar con-
clusion: the acceleration of change had driven a wedge between past and present
so that the past no longer reached into the present but was separated from it. For
Toffler and Lübbe, this was the prerequisite for nostalgia. Precisely because the
continuity between past and present had broken down, the past had become, as
the British historian J. H. Plumb put it, “a matter of curiosity, of nostalgia, a

67. Ibid., 104.

68. Toffler, Future Shock, 11, 21-26.
69. Lübbe, Zwischen Trend und Tradition, 13.
70. Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, transl. Keith Tribe
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 11.
71. See ibid., 255-275.
72. Ibid., 50.
73. Hermann Lübbe, Zeit-Erfahrungen: Sieben Begriffe zur Beschreibung moderner
Zivilisationsdynamik (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1996), 12-13. In the early 2000s the German
sociologist Hartmut Rosa revived Lübbe’s theory; see Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of
Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Touching on nostalgia in passing, Rosa
argues that “every surge of acceleration is followed by a discourse of acceleration and deceleration in
which, as a rule, the call for deceleration and the nostalgic desire for the lost ‘slow world,’ whose slow-
ness first becomes a distinct quality in retrospect, outweighs the excitement about gains in speed” (41).
246 TOBIAS BECKER

sentimentality.”74 Like Davis, Toffler and Lübbe admitted that nostalgia fulfilled
a positive function. Toffler called for the construction of what he called “enclaves
of the past,” in which time was slowed down to allow people to recuperate from
future shock.75 Lübbe saw nostalgia as a necessary form of compensation: it did
not slow down time but at least it opened up spaces where the ticking of the clock
was inaudible.76
For historians, however, even if they admitted to the potentially beneficial
effects of nostalgia in “helping us to adjust to change,” it posed a bigger prob-
lem.77 Unlike Davis, the historian Christopher Lasch, one of the fiercest nostalgia
critics, argued that nostalgia, far from restoring it, actively discouraged “a sense
of continuity,” evoking “the past only in order to bury it alive.”78 By accentuating
discontinuity—the distance between past and present—nostalgia undermined the
very foundation of history based as it is on continuity. This explains why most
historians, like Lasch, rejected nostalgia. Only an inveterate postmodernist like
Frank Ankersmit was able to appreciate nostalgia’s power to “effectively ques-
tion historist and positivist assumptions.”79

ANALYSIS

As the overview of the nostalgia discourse makes clear, the meaning of the term
quickly grew far beyond the dictionary definition of a sentimental yearning for
the past. The nostalgia critics did not view—or were not interested in—nostalgia
as an individual feeling; they used the term to describe a collective phenomenon,
an inclination of contemporary societies—or large parts of these societies—to
become obsessed with the past, a propensity they saw as both pathological and
dangerous. None of the nostalgia critics admitted to having ever felt a yearning
for the past themselves. Nostalgia was merely something they observed and
criticized in others. And they did not examine more closely the phenomena and
practices they suspected and accused of nostalgia. If they had done so, they would
have had to admit that the term “nostalgia” often did not adequately describe
them, whether in the case of pop culture or of interest in the past more generally.
Let’s begin with pop culture and the 1950s revival as this is where the nostalgia
discourse originated. Doubtless, some people who had been brought up in this
era looked back nostalgically on their youth. However, as many nostalgia critics
noted, the 1950s revival was driven not so much by this age group but mostly by
their children, who had no personal recollections of the period. Rather than dis-
playing a yearning for the 1950s, they adapted some aspects of its culture, while
discarding most others: “There’s no Joe McCarthy revival, and nobody is long-

74. J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (1969). With a preface by Simon Schama and an introduc-
tion by Niall Ferguson (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 14.
75. Toffler, Future Shock, 353.
76. Lübbe, Geschichtsbegriff und Geschichtsinteresse, 318; see also Zwischen Trend und
Tradition, 10; Hermann Lübbe, Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit: Kulturelle und politische
Funktionen des historischen Bewußtseins (Oldenburg: Holzbert, 1985), 13.
77. Hewison, The Heritage Industry, 10.
78. Lasch, “The Politics of Nostalgia,” 70.
79. Ankersmit, History and Tropology, 205.
 THE MEANING OF NOSTALGIA 247
ing for the days of the H-bomb tests,” as one protagonist of the revival said in an
interview, “people listen to ‘50s songs and go to ‘50s movies because it’s fun.”80
This fun aspect of the revival as well as its irony, however, was completely
ignored by the nostalgia critics who took in dead earnest the new fashion for the
old. They also ignored that the nostalgia label was often explicitly rejected, such
as by a founding member of Sha Na Na: “Did we actually feel nostalgic for the
fifties? No. The whole thing was very deliberately made up.”81 The 1950s revival
was much closer to what Susan Sontag had defined in 1964 as “camp” than it
was to nostalgia.82
Occurring at a moment when the dynamic of pop culture had slowed down—
the British invasion was over and the next trend not yet on the horizon—artists
and young people turned to the past for inspiration and fixed on the 1950s, a time
close enough to the present to be accessible and remote enough to seem foreign.
To describe this as nostalgia or a sign of conformity or cultural decline was
simplistic and shortsighted. Adopting and ironizing their parents’ youth culture
might not have been as rebellious and original as rock and roll had been the first
time around, but it too was a sign of opposition to the cultural mainstream. And,
of course, the arts have always looked to the past for inspiration. These glances
over the shoulder, far from being disabling, have been a motor for innovation.
The fifties revival, to stay with this prominent example, did not unimaginatively
recycle the fifties, it appropriated certain aspects of 1950s rock and roll and youth
culture to enliven a music scene that felt stale.
Because of this, the 1970s neologism “retro” characterizes much better what
was going on than the pejorative and misleading term “nostalgia.” Although
retro can trigger or feed on nostalgia, the two are not the same, as art historian
Elizabeth Guffey has emphasized: “Where nostalgia is linked to a romantic sen-
sibility that resonates with ideas of exile and longing, retro tempers these asso-
ciations with a heavy dose of cynicism or detachment; although retro looks back
to earlier periods, perhaps its most enduring quality is its ironic stance.”83 This
ironic stance was characteristic of the 1950s revival and the revivals that followed
on it. Often, however, nostalgia and retro were—and still are—conflated, as, for
example, in Retromania, which, though conscious of it, builds on and continues
the nostalgia discourse from the 1970s insofar as Reynolds views nostalgia as
pandemic, harmful, and as a peculiar characteristic of the present, “a pop age
gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration.”84 In fact, it is Reynolds’s
argument that is retro. This becomes clearer when he labels the 2000s the “Re
Decade,” a term that had been coined a quarter of a century earlier to character-
ize the 1980s.85 If every decade is a re-decade, this attribute completely loses its
meaning. Which decade has not looked back to the past? In Reynolds’s eyes the
answer would be the 1960s (perhaps, not coincidentally, the decade in which he
80. Jonathan Rodgers, “Back to the ‘50s,” Newsweek (October 16, 1972), 78.
81. Quoted in Reynolds, Retromania, 285.
82. Susan Sontag, “Camp,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1967), 275-292.
83. Guffey, Retro, 20.
84. Reynolds, Retromania, 9.
85. Ibid., xi; see Shales, “The Re Decade.”
248 TOBIAS BECKER

was born), a decade he celebrates for the “absence of revivalism and nostalgia.”86
Here the nostalgia critic himself becomes nostalgic, constructing a golden age
before the nostalgia wave of the 1970s, all the while ignoring that what he calls
revivalism was already well underway in the 1960s with the rediscovery of
Aubrey Beardsley, Victoriana, Art Deco, and 1920s styles feeding into the pop
culture and pop art explosion of the period.87 The tendency to seek inspiration
in the past, then, waxing and waning across the decades, has never been totally
absent and never so strong as to suffocate culture.
However, the “nostalgia wave” was not confined to pop culture. Pointing to
the popularity of history books, museums, and the conservation movement, intel-
lectuals observed a general interest in—or rather obsession with—the past. On
closer look these claims become doubtful, too. Although coffee-table books and
exhibitions on the 1950s may have toyed with notions of nostalgia and accentu-
ated positive aspects, such as popular culture and music, most of them did not
ignore politics or negative aspects, such as the fear of the atom bomb, the witch-
hunt for communists, or sexual repression. The conservation movement may have
idealized the past but in doing so criticized the present—urban planning ideals
in the 1950s and 1960s, such as the car-friendly city—thereby advocating an
alternative model. It was not opposed to all change, it was not trying to escape
the present or fearful of the future, as the nostalgia critics alleged; it looked to the
past in search of a different vision of the future.
Finally, although nostalgia may to some extent have driven or framed many
people’s engagement with the past, the nostalgia critics, in exaggerating its
importance, ignored all other motivations and explanations. They did not even
consider that people buying history books or visiting museums could have a gen-
uine interest in history, knowledge, and self-education. They also overlooked the
importance of social transformations, such as the expansion of higher education
that provided people with basic historical knowledge and, even more important,
the rise in incomes and leisure time that created a mass audience for the booming
“heritage industry.” Together the new audience and the public and private institu-
tions catering to it turned the past into a commodity.
Yet if these developments were more important than nostalgia, why then did
historians use the term? First, the popular engagement with the past naturally
differed from academic history. It included, accentuated even, aspects—such
as pop culture, fashion, and everyday life—that historians at the time might not
have found worthy of consideration, and it did not shrink from evoking emotions,
something that was—and still sometimes is—seen as unscientific.88 Second, the
86. Ibid., xxix.
87. See Guffey, Retro; Bevis Hillier, Art Deco of the 20s and 30s (London: Studio Vista, 1968),
158-167; idem, Austerity Binge: The Decorative Arts of the Forties and Fifties (London: Studio Vista,
1975); idem, The Style of the Century (London: Herbert, 1998). West Germany, too, saw a comeback
of the 1920s, as the sociologists Theodor Adorno and Helmuth Plessner noted uneasily, offering their
own, much darker memories of Weimar Germany as an antidote; see Helmuth Plessner, “Die Legende
von den zwanziger Jahren,” Merkur 16, no. 167 (1962), 33-46; Theodor W. Adorno, “Jene zwanziger
Jahre,” Merkur 16, no. 167 (1962), 46-51.
88. As the research into emotions and as historians of emotion have argued, it is as wrong as it
is impossible to distinguish between emotions and rationality; see Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions
a Kind of Practice (And Is that What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to
 THE MEANING OF NOSTALGIA 249
nostalgia discourse was a reaction against popular history. Suddenly historians
were faced with unprecedented competition—from the media, museums, amateur
historians—over the interpretation of the past. By differentiating between history
proper and nostalgia and accusing popular history of the latter, historians were
trying to discredit it and to secure their own interpretive authority over the past.
They particularly rejected the commercialization of the past, which in many ways
was the real target of the nostalgia critics, describing nostalgia as a “business” or
a “marketable commodity” that was “commercially exploited.”89
Historians and retro critics had something in common insofar as both groups
believed that an obsessive interest in the past was a sign of decadence, of cultural
decline. This idea had been around long before the 1970s. In his influential Study
of History, first published in 1939, British historian Arnold Toynbee had distin-
guished between two causes of cultural decline: futurism and archaism, “both
alike, attempts to break with an irksome Present.”90 Toynbee did not use the term
“nostalgia” (which at the time still signified homesickness), but his characteriza-
tion of archaism as “a deliberate, self-conscious policy of attempting to swim
against the stream of life” and an “endeavour to circumvent the remorseless flow
of Time by dodging back into a dead and buried Past” not only anticipated how
the term “nostalgia” would be used in the 1970s, it expressed much better what
the nostalgia critics really meant.91
From Toynbee, the trope can be traced back to Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous
essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Nietzsche was per-
haps the first to accuse his own time of “suffering from a consuming fever of
history,” declaring more generally that the “oversaturation of an age with history
seems to me to be hostile and dangerous to life.”92 This idea informed much
of modernist thought and modernist literature, which, as in André Gide’s The
Immoralist and Jean-Paul Sarte’s Nausea, depicted historians as dried-up, haunt-
ed, and generally unfit for life.93 It is easy to see how in the context of modernism
and modernity, based as it was on a break with the past and the pathos of new
beginnings and progress, nostalgia looked like an aberration. Not coincidentally,
many critics used nostalgia as a manifestation of cultural decline.94 However,
the very idea of progress became increasingly doubtful and under attack in the

Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012), 193-220; Jan Plamper, The History of
Emotions: An Introduction, transl. Keith Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
89. Toffler, Future Shock, 407; “Nostalgia,” Newsweek (December 28, 1970), 30; Lasch, The
Culture of Narcissism, xvii; Schivelbusch, “Das nostalgische Syndrom,” 275; see also Allison
Graham, “History, Nostalgia, and the Criminality of Popular Culture,” Georgia Review 38, no. 2
(1984), 348; Lübbe, Geschichtsbegriff und Geschichtsinteresse, 318; Cannadine, “Nostalgia,” 259;
Hewison, The Heritage Industry.
90. Arnold J. Toynbee, The Study of History (Oxford 1939, 1956), VI, 97.
91. Ibid., 49, 79.
92. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 60, 83.
93. See Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory 5, no. 2 (1966), 111-134.
94. Most explicitly in the following books: Jim Hougan, Decadence: Radical Nostalgia,
Narcissism, and Decline in the Seventies (New York: Morrow, 1975); Wiener, English Culture and
the Decline of the Industrial Spirit; and Hewison, The Heritage Industry, which all feature the word
“decline” in their titles. On nostalgia as the flip side of progress, see Christopher Lasch, The True and
Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991), 92, 119, 219.
250 TOBIAS BECKER

1970s. Although this may have partly fed into the interest in the past, doubtless it
informed the nostalgia discourse, whose attack on nostalgia was also a disguised
defense of progress.

CODA

What, then, remains of the nostalgia diagnosis and the nostalgia discourse? Is
our time plagued by nostalgia, is nostalgia dominating our understanding of and
engagement with the past as some cultural critics are claiming? The findings of
this essay suggest otherwise. On closer inspection, nostalgia does not adequately
describe many of the diverse phenomena and practices to which it is applied, but
it is often used as a term of cultural criticism, which itself is much more indicative
of nostalgia as it necessarily assumes a nostalgia-free golden age against which
it measures the present. In the end, the nostalgia discourse merely shows that the
past has become more easily available and accessible since the Second World
War and that many people engage with it in many different ways. It says little
about why this is the case, how the past is perceived, received, and consumed,
partly because it looks only at the production side. We still simply know too little
about what wearing retro clothes, watching period drama, visiting museums, or
doing family history means to those engaging in these practices because histori-
ans tend not to ask them. Rather than assuming a universal zeitgeist of nostalgia
and looking for examples to support this view, future research is called upon
to closely investigate the ways in which people engage with and make sense of
the past and to find out about their motivations. These objections, however, do
not mean that nostalgia does not exist, that many people do not feel nostalgic
toward the past or that a history of nostalgia is impossible. However, such a his-
tory would need to take nostalgia seriously instead of parroting well-rehearsed
arguments of cultural decline. It would need to differentiate between nostalgia
and other motivations, nostalgia and other uses of the past. It would need to
clarify who is nostalgic for what and why and it would need to be more careful
in ascribing nostalgia to societies and groups from the outside. Such research
can build from the work on memory and emotions as well as from the existing
research on nostalgia in neighboring disciplines, while simultaneously historiciz-
ing its assumptions and findings. And finally, it would need to hold the mirror
up to historians themselves, asking them how emotions like nostalgia feed into
their own contemplation of the past. Historicizing and critiquing the use of the
term and bearing in mind its complexities and ideological baggage is a necessary
prerequisite in any such attempt.

German Historical Institute, London