Post-communist ironies in an East German hotel

On 1 May 2007, a new hotel opened in Berlin: Ostel. As its name implies, it is located in the former East of the city, now 'Berlin Mitte'. The Ostel joined Berlin's burgeoning hotel scene at a time when Ostalgie - the supposed longing East Germans feel for the past - marked no longer a condition of mourning and loss but had become 'hip'. In this article to carry the analysis of Ostalgie beyond the themes of trauma or resistance into the more playful dimensions of what Czech-French writer Milan Kundera (1992) has called 'the joke,' that is, an ironic form of humor ubiquitous in former Soviet and East European contexts. I engage irony as a situated experience and practice chiefly through the 'artful lens' of material culture. In focusing on the Ostel's interior, I am especially interested in irony's 'critical edge'. I argue that it is this edge that makes it possible to open up critical interpretations of German post-unification history. © RAI 2009.