Forget “Grease;” Ossi World brings East German flashback

From Civil War reenactments to Renaissance fairs to last summer’s re-creation of Alexander… From Civil War reenactments to Renaissance fairs to last summer’s re-creation of Alexander Hamilton’s fatal duel with Aaron Burr, historical reenactment brings the past to life in dynamic, exciting and totally messed up ways.

I used to think the most bizarre form of historic reenactment was Universal Records’ “Pure ’90s,” which recreates a corporate-owned FM station circa 1997 with such ear-numbingly crappy bands as The Cardigans and Smash Mouth.

That was, until I read about Ossi World.

According to the British Broadcasting Corporation, Ossi World, German for “Eastern World,” will be a 2.5-acre Berlin theme park that will recreate life in East Germany, the region of the country that fell under Soviet control after World War II.

Ossi World will give former citizens of the German Democratic Republic a chance to relive the bygone days of cultural isolation and Stalinist totalitarianism with bland, regulation food rations, a replica of the Berlin Wall and communist work songs blaring from speakerphones. The park will offer rides in Russian-style tanks and Trabants — cheaply made East German automobiles that are the only cars worse than the rickety Pinto I inherited at age 16.

German media mogul Peter Massine is the brain behind Ossi World. Massine is famous for staging the musical “Grease” in German and turning it into a cultural sensation. This makes Ossi World his second most tasteless and inexplicable venture.

Survivors of East Germany’s crackdowns on political dissidents have protested Ossi World, but the park has been dwarfed in controversy and pure strangeness by another East German theme park.

According to Reuters, a German tourism company has purchased Hoheneck Castle in Stollberg, which acted as a prison during the era of East Germany. The company plans to recreate the castle’s gulag days, offering visitors a chance to spend 24 hours as a prisoner. Guests will eat filthy food, sleep in a tiny cell, and, for an extra fee, be forcibly submerged into tubs of icy water in the castle’s dungeon.

Understandably, the International Society for Human Rights is miffed.

“It’s simply unacceptable to turn a prison into a holiday resort,” the group’s spokesman Karl Hafen said.

I, for one, support the Hoheneck project because it will bring both history buffs and S’M fetishists closer together. It will also give parents an alternative to Euro Disneyland for misbehaving children.

The two parks come as a wave of East German nostalgia or “ostalgie” spreads through the former Soviet state. Recently, communist-era foods, fashions and television shows have made comebacks — a trend American conservatives are calling the inevitable aftereffect of the death of Ronald Reagan.

Spearheading the ostalgie movement is Wolfgang Becker’s blockbuster “Goodbye, Lenin.” The film is about a man who tries to save his mother — newly awakened from a coma — from the shock of learning about the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic by recreating life in East Germany in their apartment. “Goodbye, Lenin:” Hoaxing the elderly has never been so hilarious!

Ossi World and Hoheneck Castle, the most extreme manifestations of ostalgie, may be bizarre, inappropriate and as sensitive to an East German prison survivor as Internment Camp Land would be to a 78-year-old Japanese-American, but I hesitate to deem them both wholly idiotic.

Look at the strange ways in which our culture celebrates the past. Paying to be caged, threatened and beaten for the sake of nostalgia is no more depressing than a 2000s-era Aerosmith concert, no more emotionally distressing than a high school reunion and makes for no more of an unpleasant afternoon than a visit to boring Colonial Williamsburg.

So rock on, East Germany, and, on behalf of all corn dog-munching, fanny pack-toting tourist-morons who think an entire peoples’ history can be reduced to a catch phrase and a theme park, I say to you “Ich bin ein Berliner!”

Nick Keppler ended this column with a quote from John F. Kennedy, who rocks twice as much as Ronald Reagan. E-mail Nick your favorite JFK quote at pnk6@pitt.edu.