Cold War Nostalgia: From the International Spy Museum, Washington D.C. to Stalin World Theme Park, Lithuania

My paper is drawn from a broader project that examines competing narratives about the historical significance of the Cold War through focusing on post-1989 public and material culture exhibited in museums, parks and memorials. This paper focuses on particular sites of “Cold War Nostalgia” in the west as well as in the former eastern bloc. While my project focuses on a critique of U.S. Cold War triumphalism and the victor’s history this view engendered, I am interested in Cold War nostalgia as an international phenomenon, and the particular flashpoints of Cold War nostalgia that arose in the west and the east. My paper will consider the production of nostalgia at the International Spy Museum in Washington D.C., Stalin World Theme Park in Lithuania, and the Memento and Statue Park (Szoborpark) in Budapest. In each case I question the cultural/political work of each site, as well as its explicit and/or implicit interventions in international Cold War discourse. I examine official site/museum narratives as well as national/local controversies about the sites. Along with public memorials, I am particularly interested in the consumer history promoted in museum and park shops. German critiques of kitsch have long suggested its complicity in fascist and authoritarian regimes, and more recently scholars have examined the role of kitsch in producing U.S. national cultures of “innocence,” and the denial of empire. I am interesting in extending these questions to the self-paraodic Cold War kitsch that has arisen on both sides of the former east-west divide, and is prominently for sale at shops at each of these sites.