This essay is dedicated to Jan Robert Bloch, who died in May 2010.

SIMON ARMITAGE’S POEM on the beauty of the lost future points to a fundamental truth about Ostalgie that I would like to address here — namely that it has only marginally to do with the GDR as it was constituted and probably even less to do with real nostalgia for that state. The set of events and attitudes we have observed in the twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany could be transposed to many different places and can be said to have its roots in the nature of what it is to be born or, in Heidegger’s terms, thrown into this world at any specific time and place. What I wish to do here is to use the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the GDR, and the twenty years since the unification of Germany to conduct a wider philosophical investigation into the place of memory and politics within a significant turning point in human history. Of course the contingency of the event has a wider universal context and — in true Hegelian fashion — that wider context is also the product of contingent events, but my emphasis here will be on what the period since 1989 can tell us about the relationship between what was, what is, and what might be.