123 Chapter 5 Consuming Communism Material Cultures of Nostalgia in Former East Germany Jonathan Bach Ostalgie is perhaps the most high profile case regarding the phenomena of sympathetic sentiments for the vanished socialist republics of Central and Eastern Europe. Many years after the film Good Bye Lenin made Ostalgie – the German neologism for nostalgia for the former socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR), also known as East Germany – into a house- hold word, the phenomenon has not faded but rather become a stable part of the tourist and commercial landscape. Today, Berlin’s tourist office promotes the GDR Museum, where ‘the kitchen still has the cooking smells of way back when’, and the Trabi Safari where you can drive the cult cars from old days. The old East German street-crossing signals known as Ampelmännchen are not only the rare GDR vestige adopted in the West, but are a growing international brand with a chain of shops from Berlin to Tokyo, where the Japanese website presents them as the ‘symbol of traffic safety, German unification, and resurrection’ and sells their image on every- thing from lamps to noodles (Ampelmann-Japan 2013). ‘Eastern product’ shops like Ostpaket do a respectable business in the mid six figures, plying over seven hundred items from mundane household goods to novelties such as the Young Pioneers condom with the original Pioneer motto: ‘Be pre- pared – always prepared!’ Tourists can stay in Berlin’s GDR-themed hotel ‘Ostel’ and take in the hit East–West love story musical Beyond the Horizon,