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Enchanted by consumption Text: Eva Lundgren Photo: Johan Wingborg
A black and white Fender Stratocaster is leaning against the wall in a room at the top of the Department of Business Administration. The room belongs to Benjamin Hartmann, recently appointed Professor of Business Administration, who researches nostalgia and consumption, among other things. – For me, the Stratocaster has special value and I will never sell it. It was my first electric guitar, bought in Berlin in 1991. If you put the stylus onto an LP from 1963 and marvel at the wonderful sound, or put your finger in the dial of an old-fashioned telephone and revel in that solution, then you may have suffered from nostalgic enchantment. At least that is what Benjamin Hartmann thinks. – Maybe you think that you bought the things because they reminded you of your childhood? But there are also strong commercial forces that make you want to relive the past with the help of all sorts of items. Nostalgia is an important driving force behind consumption, whether you are looking for authentic vintage items or newly made retro objects that look old, says Benjamin Hartmann. – Nostalgic consumption creates a kind of enchantment in predominantly three ways: partly there are people who simply think it is fun to wear an old East German military jacket, for example, and partly there are people who want to cleave to the past because they think that things were better then. But it is the third type of nostalgia that interests me the most: when you look back to gain inspiration for the future. For example, in the past, people were much better at reusing and repairing broken objects, and perhaps we should do the same today? Benjamin Hartmann also engages in nostalgic
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consumption. He collects electric guitars, for example, and has a Hagstrom guitar, a Viking Deluxe, the same one as Elvis and Frank Zappa played. – Hagstrom went bankrupt in 1983 but the brand lives on, and the guitars are manufactured under licence in Asia. So my guitar is unfortunately not the old Swedish-made model, but still made according to the old drawings.
Benjamin Hartmann's interest in nostalgia may be
related to his upbringing. He was born in 1981 in West Berlin, an enclave in the middle of an East Germany that no longer exists. A 156-kilometre-long wall stretched around West Berlin, of which 44 kilometres went straight through the city. The wall was built in 1961, but on November 9, 1989, the border was suddenly opened. – I grew up just a couple of hundred metres from the wall and still remember what it was like when loads of East Germans were able to stream in. They got 100 Deutschmarks each to buy goods and quickly bought up all the groceries. People from the West could also cross to the other side, on to streets that were previously inaccessible and that we had always wondered about. I also remember the so-called Todesstreifen, a mined
