Wandering through Berlin three years ago, I wondered if I had entered some parallel universe. It is a truism in our world that the victors write history, and consign the losers to oblivion. Berlin, in the 20th century, embraced more than its fair share of losers: Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and Hitler all rose to prominence in the city, and all died ignominiously there. Yet a quick glance at a map would make one wonder whether the German Revolution had really failed after all — it is difficult to square the course of the 20th century with the existence of prominent thoroughfares in the former East Berlin such as Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse and Karl-Marx-Allee. In Berlin, it seems, history follows different rules: even the losers are allowed to keep their names in the book. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the German has even invented a word for this quirk of historical memory: Ostalgie, a portmanteau of the words for “nostalgia” and “East”, as in the Communist state of East Germany.

I thought back to the idea of Ostalgie when I read, on Friday, about the newest credit card offering from German bank Sparkasse Chemnitz, featuring a picture of a stern bust of Karl Marx. There is, somewhat surprisingly, a fairly mundane explanation for this design, the runaway winner of an online vote: from 1953 to 1990, Chemnitz was called Karl-Marx-Stadt. Both the popularity of the statue, and the past era it evokes, reveal a discomfort with recent German history. In 2009, the German magazine Der Spiegel asked residents of the former East Germany which was the better state: contemporary, unified Germany, or the old German Democratic Republic. To the shock of the West, 57 percent of respondents chose to defend the GDR’s record. East Germany apologists cited the absence of unemployment and homelessness under the old planned economy; one man even called the East a “paradise” lost on November 9, 1989. More disturbingly, a majority of young people in the East refuse to identify the former Communist state as a dictatorship, and most defended the infamous Stasi (secret police) as an ordinary intelligence agency.

These aren’t just idle words: Die Linke, a hard-left party sometimes accused of revisionism regarding the GDR, receive significant support from the former East Germany. In Saxony, the German state home to Chemnitz and its Marx Mastercard, Die Linke is the second-biggest constituency in the regional parliament. While it’s easy to criticize misplaced nostalgia for a brutal dictatorship that ruled through a near-total surveillance state — whose loss is, obviously, nothing to rue — it’s difficult to blame East Germans for their disappointment. Over two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the numbers still tell a story of a stark divide between West and East, the latter having unemployment and poverty rates nearly double those of the former, as young Berliners and Dresdeners head west. While the Eurozone crisis cements Germany’s place in the center of the European order, Ostalgie remains a thorn in the country’s side, a reminder that even Germany has its periphery.

Which brings us back to the simple piece of plastic. While it’s easy to laugh at the absurdity and irony of a Karl Marx credit card, there’s more to the picture than meets the eye. For a part of Germany that feels itself ill-served by recent decades, the past provides hope for the future in spite of its serious faults. The losers of history don’t look like losers at all. Yet as Marx appears on a credit card, his challenge to consumer credit becomes safely commodified and his political program defanged. While the Germans let even losers write their names in history, they must do so on the winner’s terms.


 
 
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