A German Orientalism

"This sudden switch in the perception of western goods from real to fake is partially a result of eastern Germans behaving too much like the ideal consumer. They fell for advertisements and felt at once betrayed and wiser as they came to understand that guile is part of advertising. But of course the whole idea of packaging is motivated by the supposition of consumer gullibility. In the West consumers hover between giving into the seduction of commercials and an awareness that the inside of the package never looks like the picture on the cover. East Germans, however, had to undergo a certain learning process in order to acquire the necessary “cultural fluency,” as Berdahl (1999: 137) felicitously phrases it, in their practices of consumption."

-Jonathan Bach, “ ‘The Taste Remains’: Consumption, (N)ostalgia, and the Production of East Germany,” 252

Does this strike anyone else as naively condescending? It’s not as though East Germans lived in a world completely void of consumption, or even of selling. Certainly there was a different mode of consumption that they were apprehending, and certainly this required adjustment, but this passage talks about East Germans like ignorant savages being introduced to civilization for the first time. Or, alternatively, it casts them as children who have not yet learned the harsh realities of the world. In both cases, there is an assumption that East Germans are incapable of rhetorical or figurative interpretation – they can only think concretely (a product will look exactly how it does in the advertisement…when a commercial claims a product is the best in the world, it really will be the best in the world, etc.). This is a fundamentally infantilizing, and, frankly, exoticizing assumption. It’s nearly colonialist (even if we could say that the unification of Germany actually amounted to a certain kind of colonialism). Those silly East Germans! They’ve just now learned how to wear clothes and use forks! Good thing we were here to teach them how to be civilized, because the poor buggers just didn’t know any better!

This position can be echoed in the obsession of many West Germans (the “Wossis”) with the “authenticity” and “nostalgia” of East German products. Is this very far off from the characters in Turistas who are looking for the “authentic” experience (a desire that is ultimately cast as condescending, colonialist, exoticizing, and oppressive)? Is this very far off from the American obsession with “authentically” ethnic restaurants, or “authentically” crude art and souvenirs? In this context, “authentic” means aboriginal, old fashioned, kept comfortably in a manageable past – delightfully anti-modern, anti-progressive.