Thirty Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Reflections on Contexts and Textures of Memories and Nostalgias in Europe

Abstract

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 21st Century started with a boom of hope, reliant on the extension of liberalization processes, the benefits of representative democracy, the peak of civil liberties and human rights, free market prosperity, and the fall of totalitarian projects in a globalized world. However, that initial optimism has been diluted during the subsequent years. Facing an unstable and fragile present and a future that, on the one hand, has turned science fiction into reality and, on the other, appears dark, the past is present as a memory that reinterprets the past decades’ history, as a resonance of past intolerance, xenophobia and racism (reminiscent of the principles sustained by the political movements of the interwar period during the 20th century, which even if not necessarily similar, are inspired by the same ideological matrix), or as nostalgia for a lost time, place or home that has ceased to exist and is yearned to be restored.