nostalgia
Nostalgia describes a longing turning to past objects or practices. Nostalgia can relate to one's own life as well as to times that have not been experienced oneself (so-called collective nostalgia ). The word is derived from the Latin nostalgia (" homesickness "), which can be traced back to the Greek words νόστος nóstos (“return, homecoming”) and ἄλγος álgos (“pain”).
Origins and meaning
The term appears for the first time in a medical context. Nostalgia was used to describe a sick feeling of homesickness that particularly affected Swiss mercenaries abroad. The word creator was the doctoral student Johannes Hofer (1669–1752). In his Dissertatio medica de Nostalgia, or Heimwehe (Basel 1688), this phenomenon was first presented in detail. Only later did nostalgia acquire its non-medical significance today. Today, nostalgia in German means a wistful turn to bygone times, which are often strongly idealized and transfigured in memories . It can be a question of historical epochs as well as biographical temporal circumstances. Nostalgia is expressed, for example, in the mourning behind the good old days , when everything was supposedly much nicer and better than in the present. Examples of this are the transfiguration of the golden age , antiquity , the Middle Ages or the imperial era . The lovers of nostalgia are called nostalgics . There are many fields: in art , in music , in technology or in politics . Nostalgic people are often accused of escaping the present .
Possible causes
Nobody perceives all sensory impressions that affect him unfiltered. Everyone involuntarily filters what they see and hear into important and unimportant things ( memories ). Since people constantly rearrange and reinterpret their memories throughout their lives, some memories become more important than others. Particularly beautiful and pleasant events seem to be more permanent than sad or boring ones. This could be explained by the fact that people are constantly trying to reshape their memories to generate the most successful and happy biography possible. Hardly anyone in old age would pretend to have led a meaningless life full of failures and embarrassments. Sad events, however, can also be permanent, perhaps even more permanent, due to their intensity, than events that one perceived as beautiful or pleasant, as it is of great importance whether such an event shaped and changed life or whether it was decisive.
Nostalgia can be seen as a kind of corrective. It can arise in people who are in a mental or physical imbalance. Nostalgia may restore a kind of balance from which strength can be drawn, or it offers an emotional way out of the situation in difficult moments. Nostalgia can thus be understood as a therapeutic agent that can lighten a depressed mood. The psychological research on nostalgia, however, mostly refers to nostalgic moments intentionally brought about in the studies. Nostalgia as a trait, on the other hand, may have the opposite effects.
The advertising industry tries to take advantage of the tendency towards nostalgia through targeted measures, for example the retro look .
Special
A special form of nostalgia is Ostalgie , the turning to certain aspects of life in the GDR . The trunk word from the East and nostalgia was allegedly coined in 1995 by the Dresden cabaret artist Uwe Steimle . Many people who retrospectively deal with life in the GDR, however, resist being Ostalgic and wanting to glorify life in the GDR.
There are similar social phenomena in the former Yugoslavia , where one speaks of the so-called Yugonostalgija (Yugo nostalgia), or in the former Soviet Union .
See also
literature
- Daniel Rettig: The good old days: Why nostalgia makes us happy . dtv, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-423-26013-8 .
- Stefan W. Schmidt: "The loss of place for the geographical subject. Topophenomenological analyzes of nostalgic memory". In: Phenomenological Research 2019.1, 157–171. https://doi.org/10.28937/1000108310
- Dominik Schrey: Analog nostalgia in digital media culture. Kadmos, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-86599-345-8
- Jutta Steiner: Nostalgia in the upside down. The progressive potential of nostalgia in the retro series »Stranger Things« . Büchner-Verlag, Marburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-96317-177-2 .
Web links
- Nostalgia: The longing for home on agem-ethnomedizin.de (nostalgia and migration)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Nostalgie auf duden.de, accessed on March 2, 2014.
- ↑ Johannes Hofer, Johann Jakob Harder : Dissertatio medica de Nostalgia, or homesickness. Typis J. Bertschii, Basel 1688, doi : 10.3931 / e-rara-18924 (variant 1, on the title page Nostalgia in Greek script, with the correct printing year 1688), variant 2 online (on the title page Nostalgia in Latin script, with a typographical error 1678 in the printing year )
- ↑ Nostalgia ( Memento of the original from March 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at schekker.de, accessed on March 2, 2014.
- ↑ Fanny Jiménez: In uncertain times people become nostalgic - nostalgia offers an emotional way out in: Die Welt from December 22, 2013.
- ↑ Sedikides, Constantine, Wildschut, T., Routledge, C. and Arndt, J (2015) Nostalgia counteracts self-discontinuity and restores self-continuity. European Journal of Social Psychology, 45, (1), 52-61, doi : 10.1002 / ejsp.2073 .
- ↑ Ostalgie - The Beauty of the Past. ( Memento of the original from December 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on zdf.de, accessed on March 2, 2014.
- ↑ Hrvatsko slovenska stafeta stize u Beograd on tportal.hr
