Introduction : from utopia to propaganda and back / Maria Todorova -- From algos to autonomos : nostalgic Eastern Europe as postimperial mania / Dominic Boyer -- Strange bedfellows : socialist nostalgia and neoliberalism in Bulgaria / Gerald W. Creed -- Today's unseen enthusiasm : communist nostalgia for communism in the socialist humanist brigadier movement / Cristofer Scarboro -- Nostalgia for the JNA? : remembering the army in the former Yugoslavia / Tanja Petrović -- Dignity in transition : history, teachers, and the nation-state in post-1989 Bulgaria / Tim Pilbrow -- Invisible, inaudible : Albanian memories of socialism after the war in Kosovo / Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers -- "Let's all freeze up until 2100 or so" : nostalgic directions in post-communist Romania / Oana Popescu-Sandu -- Sonic nostalgia : music, memory, and mythology in Bulgaria, 1990- 2005 / Donna Buchanan -- "Ceauşescu hasn't died" : irony as countermemory in post-socialist Romania / Diana Georgescu -- Good bye Lenin! Aufwiedersehen GDR : on the social life of socialism / Daphne Berdahl -- "But it's ours" : nostalgia and the politics of authenticity in post-socialist Hungary / Maya Nadkarni -- Looking back to the bright future : Aleksander Melikhov's red Zion / Harriet Murav -- Dwelling on the ruins of socialist Yugoslavia : being Bosnian by remembering Tito / Fedja Burić -- The velvet prison in hindsight : artistic discourse in Hungary in the 1990s / Anna Szemere -- Vacant history, empty screens : post-communist German films of the 1990s / Anke Pinkert.