Abstract:
‘Club cola’, once the only brand of cola drink available in the eastern part of Germany, is again gaining popularity there. Proudly asserting its ability to survive on the new ‘open’ market under the slogan, ‘Hurrah! I’m still alive!’, it is one of a number of products manufactured in the former German Democratic Republic which are presently being promoted with appeal to the good old days’. Revealing once again the amoral opportunism of capitalism for which, as Marx and Engels observed, nothing is taboo, advertisers have now discovered that even nostalgia for ‘really existing socialism’ can be turned into a marketing strategy. What they are bargaining on, and thereby also fostering, is a certain sense of solidarity, a shared, exclusively eastern German identity, grounded in defiance against the view that everything about the world they have lost was inferior to the sparkling and prosperous west. The success of this strategy is a sure indication that although few would really want a return to Soviet-style socialism, many are less than happy about life under the new dispensation. Here at least, the Coke and Pepsi paradise of consumer capitalism appears to have gone a little flat.
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