'Good Bye Lenin' and Coca-Colanization: Building Identities Through Consumption Under Socialism

The main critical and theoretical questions raised by the Critical Studies issue I am discussing concern the relationship between Eastern European socialist economies of shortage and the study of consumption patterns. In her introduction to the issue, Anna Wessely links the study of development of consumerism in Eastern Europe to “strategies of adaptation to the ever-changing circumstances, the exploration and exploitation of every gap and leak in the evidently dysfunctional system of central economic planning, state-controlled redistribution, and commerce” (p.6). The main goal of the articles is to bring Eastern European phenomenology of socialist consumption into the perspective of Western cultural (and historical) studies.

By juxtaposing these main concerns with two case studies of Coca-Cola (as a globally traded good and as a semiotic symbol) and the film Good Bye Lenin!, my paper analyzes both the limitations and potentials of applying cultural studies’ methods to the study of consumption under socialism. 

Firstly, it analyzes the methodology of the journal’s articles as a reflection of a post-1989 attempt to anchor the study of Eastern European culture within the Western cultural studies discourse. Secondly, the paper discusses journals’ goal to ‘humanize’ countries which had been previously studied solely in terms of a monolithic socialist structure and a false West-East binary. By shifting focus from the universal to particular, authors draw an axis of consumption practices that connects European ‘center’ with its ‘periphery’ and thus reject the lense of ideology, social-politics, and economics. Lastly, the paper reveals a paradox of applying cultural studies concepts and methods to the study of consumption under socialism. In an attempt to humanize the experience of Eastern European life under socialism, authors zoom in on particular and grotesque examples (eg. collecting and repurposing candy wrappings or decorating homes with empty Western cans and boxes). Paradoxically, this ‘hyperrealism’ distorts the full image of life in socialist regimes and exoticizes the Eastern European experience (as fundamentally foreign). In other words, bridging of the emotional distance between European West and East comes parallel to the re-discovery of a cognitive distance.