I was born in the DDR in October 1989. Father was U.S. soldier and I was raised in US. My mother misses Honecker. How common is Ostalgie?

Ostalgie is definitely a real social phenomenon as is the long-term legacies of the failed workers' and peasants' states. One notable palimpsest is the vote for the SED's semi-successor party, the Linke, whose electoral support invariably falls within the old borders of the GDR, such as in the recent 2017 election. Even more curiously, the far-right AfD also has a strong bedrock of support in the former GDR. The dual support for the AfD and Linke is not surprising given the vagaries of post-1989 development but also the cultural and social legacies of the GDR. Not only did the SED dictatorship encourage a support for a type of left-wing politics that lives on among the Linke, but it also inculcated a relatively provincial German order that was ill-suited to embrace foreigners and aspects of a globalized world. Peter Bender has tartly argued that while West Germans became Europeans during the period of division, East Germans remained German as they were more or less stuck behind the Iron Curtain. As contradictory as it might appear, the various state initiatives helped stimulate Ostalgie post-unification even as they created the very social forces that brought the dictatorship down.

The historian Konrad Jarausch coined the term Fürsorgediktatur (welfare dictatorship) in a highly influential 1999 essay on life in the GDR. The SED according to Jarausch was not simply a totalitarian state policing its population into submission, but rather was a dictatorship that promised a better life. But Fürsorge also implies a form of control and a paternalistic order. The state slogan of the early Aufbau period, "produce more, live better" captures some of the ambiguity of the state's paternalism; workers were promised a better life free from the capitalist rat-race, but they had to meet state production quotas and otherwise conform.

The SED's commitment to the welfare of its population was impressive on paper. The GDR constitution established employment as a civil right as well as entitlement to vacations and other amenities. The GDR also established a number of equal-opportunities for women as well as establishment of daycare facilities. The state envisioned an expansive cradle to grave network of social care. German division and the cultural Cold War also stimulated a GDR attempt to lay claim over the positive aspects of German history and culture. These cultural polices became progressively stronger as it became clear that the FRG was the more prosperous of the two Germanies by the late 1960s. The SED invested a good deal of time and resources into Heimat celebrations and various anniversaries such as the 500th year Luther's birth in 1983.

The results of this broad panoply of social programs were quite mixed. For example, the GDR had one of the highest proportions of women working in the first and second worlds (curiously, the FRG had one of the lowest rates of female employment). Single motherhood was common as was cohabitation. Yet GDR women often operated under the classic double-burden of having to both provide for their families' domestic life as well as balance their work lives. The former was particularly hard in the endemic shortages of consumer goods and women also found that the glass ceiling was quite hard to shatter. For all of its platitudes to gender equality, the SED was loathe to promote women into positions of authority and the upper echelons of the state remained a male preserve.

The paradoxical position of GDR women- working in higher numbers than in German history, but scraping by- was emblematic of the wider problems of the relationship between the state and its people. The shortages of the planned economy as well as soft compulsion to conform created a persistent grumbling and dissatisfaction with the state. Rents may have been legally held quite low, but mandated low rents are meaningless in the face of severe housing shortages. Stasi surveillance and other forms of police control were a reality within the GDR, but so too were long queues for daily necessities. The SED tried post-1961 to inject a degree of stability and create a socialist consumer culture in which the GDR citizen would enjoy high-quality consumer goods. As this collection of GDR tv commercials shows, this consumerist turn emphasized socialist plenty mixed with older German bourgeois norms of luxury and non-flashy products. Although long waits and shortages remained endemic throughout the lifespan of the GDR, consumer goods like the Trabi car were undeniably more available by the late 1960s and 70s. Goldbroiler restaurants for example, provided modern American-style fried chicken (recreated in this recipe ) and other consumer items that meant daily life finally became more comfortable for East Germans than the prewar 1930s.

The prosperity of the the late 1960s and early 70s was maintained through an often reckless and ultimately self-defeating economic shell-game by the SED. The state balanced foreign loans, sales of Soviet oil during the oil crisis, and a myriad other fiscal balls to keep its fragile economic growth rates. These games did not resolve the inconsistencies of the planned economy and did precious little to arrest internal corruption. The SED's solutions to these dilemmas in the late 1970s often exacerbated the problems of SED society. Various Intershops which sold Western goods or Eastern bloc luxuries for foreign currency emphasized the stratified political system of the SED dictatorship where trusted Party members had access to a life of relative comfort while the rest of the GDR had to scrimp on by and adjust to perennial shortages. One of the nicknames of the East Berlin gated community of Waldsiedlung for the SED elite was Volvograd, which simultaneously mocked the SED's dependence upon the Soviets and their penchant for parading around with Western luxuries. Incompetence like the shortage of coffee in 1977 only made the inequities of an already unfair system more apparent. When the GDR was gearing up to celebrate the 750th anniversary of Berlin, an undertaking that cost a great deal when the GDR economy was in free fall, Western news reports mentioned that many Berliners slashed the tires of Western-made cars in the city, which were often owned by SED elites.

The basic problem of the GDR was not just that it simply could not pay for the expansive cradle to grave social legislation, but it also demanded a degree of supplication for products in short supply. This only underscored the inequities of the GDR. The fact that the GDR was not supposed to be a society dominated by shortages and inequities was one of several ropes used to hang the SED in the 1980s.

But the contradictions of the SED's dictatorship allowed it to have a posthumous glow applied to it. One of the coping mechanisms for the dictatorship was to develop a sense of Eigen-Sinn. As Alf Lüdtke noted, Eigen-Sinn was not only about a stubborn resistance to the SED's overweening control, but was also about erecting internal and informal social barriers between the state and the self. Social networks were one of the ways to get by within the shortage economy as favors became an essential means to gain access to luxuries. The state's commitment to leisure and hobbies led to many GDR citizens reclaiming them as personal space they were entitled to, not as gifts of the dictatorship. Acts of Eigen-Sinn could sometimes use the state's own rhetoric against it; GDR citizens often used SED slogans and phrasing when composing the numerous petitions asking for state largess or redress of grievances.

Eigen-Sinn was part of a larger process of close-knit social relations that was one of the ways to stomach living under a dictatorship. Unification though rendered these networks and coping mechanisms somewhat obsolete. The SED may have been a crummy dictatorship, but it still had to play lip-service to its ideals, and on occasion had to live up to them. The post-1989 capitalist world was a different animal. Although Bonn did compromise on a number of issues such as savings and pensions, it could not maintain the SED's promises of universal employment. Much of the GDR's industrial plant was obsolete and its ranks were over-stuffed with excess personnel. While life under the GDR was characterized by over-employment, the exact opposite occurred for a good decade and into the millennium. A number of Ossis also resented the condescending attitude of Westerners to the GDR and its life.

In some respects, Ostalgie was a natural counter to such attitudes. Nostalgia is also a complex process; Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's assertion in Fresh Air that Ostalgie has its origins in the fact than people are looking back to when they were young is too pat of an explanation for this phenomenon, but a desire for the world of youth is not completely absent in Ostalgie either. While the historical record of the GDR's failures is obvious- the state persistently failed to live up to its promises- people's memories and longing for the past is not always so clear-cut.