Comment by David Lowenthal

Abstract 0

In his comment of the conference, David Lowenthal defined nostalgia as a longing for longing, for both retrospective and future longing. For Lowenthal, the nostalgia boom since the 1970s is rooted in the experience of the destructions of the Second World War and the Holocaust, rapid social and cultural change and the media's treatment of the past. In his eyes, the longing for the past is rooted in the understanding of the past as better than the present because it is over and, thus, stable in...