The feeling of nostalgia comes in two main varieties: like longing for a place or time. It is a reaction to a violation of the usual order of things, associated with the idealization of a bygone time or a temporarily inaccessible place because of war, revolution, economic crisis, radical change in culture, or prolonged travel. The panel presentations present the forms of nostalgia in contemporary European history varying in form and for specific reasons.

Alexey Kotelvas (University of Florida) explores the time when nostalgia appeared in the Soviet emotional mode. Based on the concept of it, the researcher emphasizes the functional significance of nostalgia in the Soviet propaganda system. Invented at the end of WW II as a means of tying soldiers to homeland, nostalgia was used in campaigns for the return of compatriots. The partial opening of the country during Khrushchev's reign contributed to the final consolidation of nostalgia in Soviet official culture.

Eric Zuelow (University of New England in Biddeford Maine) analyzes the King Charles III project to build the idyllic British town of Poundbury, demonstrating the connection between nostalgia focused on the past and utopian projects facing the future. Poundbury and the ideas of the project are considered in the broad context of the post-war debate on environmental sustainability and attempts to reduce the inequality of incomes. The discussion also allows us to raise the question of the relationship between the archaic and the ultramodern in the concept of sustainable development.

Tobias Becker (Free University of Berlin) presents a study of public debate that arose in Germany immediately after Unification in 1990. The economic difficulties caused by unification, as well as lifestyle changes, have become traumatic for both West and East Germans. The characteristic neologisms of the 1990s show the nature of public discussion centered around nostalgia. Thus, the concept of “wall in people's heads” appears, demonstrating the insurmountability of mental differences, “Ostalgie”, denoting nostalgia for the former GDR, and the concept of “Westalgie” that arose as a response to this.

All three papers allow talking about the complexity of the relationship between the categories of time and space in the phenomenon of nostalgia. Thus, idealized space can be either real, saturated with specific practices and living inhabitants, or reflecting historical imagination. Nostalgia can serve as a form of defensive reaction for communities and individuals.

The common leitmotif of the three papers is also the relationship between the state and society in the use of nostalgia in public discourse, addressing us to the previous historiographical debates about emotional regime (William M. Reddy) and emotional communities (Barbara H. Rosenwein) in the history of emotions.

Julia Sneeringer, City University of New York, a researcher on the cultural history of post-war Germany, will comment on the presentations. The chair of the panel is Philip G. Nord - a Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Emeritus at Princeton University, well known for a number of books on French history of the 19th and 20th centuries.