sehepunkte 24 (2024), Nr. 9

Tobias Becker: Yesterday

Today, Tobias Becker notes in Yesterday, "nostalgia" tends to be associated with a "yearning for the past", but it is relatively well-known that the term was originally connected with a "yearning for home" (2). Becker argues that the current meaning of 'nostalgia' was established relatively recently, beginning in "the 1960s and only gained widespread usage in intellectual thought and everyday language in the 1970s" (2). In seeking to explain this shift, Becker's book is distinguished from other works that explore the existence of nostalgia itself - works that, for Becker, effectively become primary sources - by focusing instead on "the nostalgia critique" as something to be analysed in its own right (3).

Nostalgic orientations towards the past, Becker notes, can be easily detected long before the Second World War. In this light, the take-off of, for example, "living museums" in the late-twentieth century does not look so radically different from the approaches to the past found in earlier periods (14). But why did so many people begin to detect nostalgia around them in the late-twentieth century, and why did the meaning of nostalgia change? Yesterday contextualizes the emergence of diagnoses of nostalgia in the late-twentieth century, employing a range of both archival and published sources, "focusing mainly on the United States and the United Kingdom", sometimes alongside France and (West) Germany (8).

Becker's answer is that nostalgia was most commonly invoked by people who were sceptical of this form of engagement with the past - primarily, Becker argues, in order to offer "a veiled defense of the modern idea of progress that had come under threat" (3). The book's first chapter focuses on debates amongst intellectuals, and Becker's major argument is borne out in its evidence that "the most vicious attacks on nostalgia doubtless came, [...] from radical and liberal authors" (25). Nostalgia's critics tended to treat as nostalgic "certain engagements with the past that in their eyes were backward-looking as well as approaching the past in an emotional key" (38-39). The following chapters of the book then look at responses to nostalgia in recent politics, pop culture, and popular history. Although this structure entails some retreading of chronological ground, it also means that Yesterday offers a refreshingly broad coverage of different forms of engagement with nostalgia.

The second chapter, focusing on national politics, shows interestingly how politicians sometimes labelled as nostalgic because of their discussions of the past and their veneration of tradition also distanced themselves from the term. In the United States, for example, Ronald Reagan could in speeches confess to personal nostalgia while also looking ahead - as Becker writes, "Reagan's rhetoric was ultimately present-centered and forward-looking" (79). In the United Kingdom, although Margaret Thatcher famously endorsed 'Victorian values' of "self-reliance" she was also, Becker finds, critical of nostalgia, and appeared to some as "an unsentimental modernizer" (84, 87).

Becker's approach in this chapter speaks to several other strengths of the book. It is very useful, as Becker does, to compare the force of charges of nostalgia to other overlapping ways of connecting past and present, such as the story "of decline and projected revival" told by Reagan (79). This chapter also attests to the impressive chronological range covered in Yesterday, as Becker's coverage extends up until the populism of the last decade that has often been framed as "nostalgic" (106). Although Becker focuses more on national public discourse than on the views of the public, this chapter also offers brief insights into popular ideas about nostalgia in relation to the 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom leaving the European Union.

Turning to the third chapter, on pop culture, Becker points amongst many different examples to popular bands in the 1970s like Sha Na Na who drew on earlier styles, but who "rejected the association with nostalgia" - in fact, Becker argues, "neither they nor their audiences longed for the 1950s or wanted to escape the present", and the group used "a collage of elements, taking selected associations with 1950s pop culture and often exaggerating and updating them for contemporary tastes" (128). The chapter's reflection on the importance of "young people" in driving revivals of prior culture provides, Becker writes, an interesting counter-point to pervasive associations of nostalgia with the elderly (171).

It is also in this chapter that Becker makes particularly clear an important subsidiary argument of the book, which is to de-centre the importance of the 1970s in the growth of a nostalgic discourse. With bands like The Kinks criticising post-war urban planning, Becker writes, "many of the phenomena and practices subsumed under the nostalgia label were already in evidence in the 1960s" (155-156). Crucially, however, Becker clarifies that such earlier invocations of nostalgia were more "neutral or even positive" than they subsequently became (170).

Becker makes a similar argument in the final chapter, on popular history, which dates phenomena like historical re-enactments initially to the 1960s, not the 1970s. While some of the material in this chapter may appear initially a little familiar to readers familiar with debates over the status of heritage in the United Kingdom, Becker's research into the re-enactments - including using fascinating material from the archive of one major re-enactment group, The Sealed Knot - is refreshingly new, and also attests well to the book's broader ambition to stress "the transnational nature of the nostalgia discourse" (8). As Becker writes, "While American preservationists looked to Europe as a model, historical reenactments and family history spread there from the United States" (232).

My one, minor, question about the framing of Yesterday around the "critics" of "nostalgia" is prompted in part by this chapter (134). Elsewhere in the book, Becker writes that it was a rare writer to provide "a positive view of nostalgia" (112). And yet, while reading Yesterday I could not help but think of the many products of what might be called the 'nostalgia industry' - like the collections of historical photographs of towns and cities and their residents spread in their thousands in contemporary Britain by local newspapers, dedicated book series, and social media (133). It is in this final chapter that Becker goes most fully "beyond the perspective of the critics" and "also considers the view of the practitioners" (179). "We are in the nostalgia business", explains a representative of a local authority in England quoted here (202-203).

Becker is admirably clear that it is "in intellectual discourse" that nostalgia tends to "carry a negative, pejorative connotation", and that "there is no dearth of radio stations, TV shows, and shops sporting either the word nostalgia or retro in their titles" (120). I would have been interested to read a little more about the outgrowth in self-consciously proud 'nostalgia', around the same time as the commentators that are the focus of this book came to condemn the trend. Becker's clearly-written book will hopefully stimulate further research in this area, and ought to make its readers much more cautious the next time they instinctively reach to describe something as "nostalgic".