The longing for the “good old days” seems to be served a lot in 2021: ABBA back, Gottschalk back on the “Wetten, dass ..?” Couch. An expert explains whether this is just nostalgia.
The summers longer, the music more beautiful, the photos more permanent (paper), the phone calls more binding (landline), the television more connecting and Christmas was of course more tinsel anyway – you know.
Everything was better in the past, people quickly say. And in view of the ABBA comeback and the ZDF revival of “Wetten, dass ..?” With Thomas Gottschalk and other revived TV formats such as “TV total” and “Go on the whole”, the question is currently whether there will actually be a lot of nostalgia in 2021.
“Nostalgia”, according to the “Duden”, is a mood “triggered by discomfort in the present”, which expresses itself in the “turning back to a past, glorified time”, its fashion, art, music or whatever then revive.
So far so good. However, the term “nostalgia” has a special meaning, as the historian Tobias Becker says. In German, the word has only been in use for 50 years, says Becker from the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam. He is currently working on his habilitation project “Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia”.
According to Becker, the foreign word “nostalgia” is 333 years old. The doctor Johannes Hofer invented it in 1688 for a medical phenomenon, namely a strong homesickness that attacked Swiss mercenaries abroad and made them seriously ill. According to Tobias Becker, Hofer took the terms “Nostos” (homecoming) and “Algos” (pain) from Homer and put them together. “Nostalgia” and “homesickness” were the same for a long time. But the two terms diverged.
“In Anglo-Saxon, the word slowly detached itself from space after about 200 years and now described less the home, the place where you were a child, but rather it merged with time. One no longer longed for a place, but referred more and more to an earlier time », says Becker. Up until the 1960s, “Nostalgia” in Central Europe was known only to exiles like Theodor W. Adorno.
In the early 1970s, nostalgia, applied to popular culture, came to Germany on a grand scale from America. In 1973 there was a “Spiegel” cover story: “Nostalgia – The Business of Longing”. The article called nostalgia a “fashion vocabulary of the cultural scene”.
The term retro fits better with pop culture
“Most of the phenomena to which the word was and is related should always have a critical negative connotation,” says Becker. But he wrongly sees nostalgia in disrepute. «The criticism of nostalgia is based on the assumption that everything has to be somehow new, but almost everything in culture always goes back to some model and then creates something new with it. Inspiration never comes from nowhere, but from reflection. “
In addition, pop is usually “more complicated and more intelligent than just looking back”. Artists not only reconstructed the old times and performed old things again, but mostly focused on modernization and an examination of their own present.
When referring to pop culture, Becker prefers another word instead of nostalgia in order to emphasize the positive aspect: “I prefer to speak of” retro “because the term is much more open and somehow more neutral.” Most people think that everything that is retro is very popular. “Retro is on television, in the cinema, on streaming services, in music – just everywhere.” And it doesn’t come in waves, as the popular term nostalgia wave suggests. “It’s always there, it’s more the attention that is sometimes more and sometimes less there for it.”
“Bet that..?” as a time capsule
The presenter and author Micky Beisenherz wrote in his «Stern» column about the ZDF show with Gottschalk: «” Wetten, dass ..? ” is antiquated nonsense. Lived standstill. A time capsule. A booster vaccination against too many 2020s. ” It was “lustful backwardness” and “a safe space for boomers”. Nevertheless, according to a recent Yougov survey, more than a third of those questioned would say “Wetten, dass ..?” wish back on TV.
Historian Becker says: “In the reporting on this show, there is a lot of thought about what significance linear television still has, whether there is still anything that can bring our divided society together. So all the questions that concern us anyway are happily played through on such products. ” And it has also become clear that a retro show not only triggers pleasant feelings and memories as a freshly bathed child in a bathrobe in front of the telly, but can also be repulsive, for example when it comes to old man’s jokes and all the old rituals.
Becker points out that any criticism of retro and nostalgia that allegedly only wants to wipe away and cover up can itself become a kind of nostalgia: “It is a problem with nostalgia criticism that when it describes nostalgia as a new phenomenon, it suggests that there was a better time before nostalgia. “
Source From: Stern

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