Issue 15, Winter 2022
Please note: full articles are available only in Hebrew.
Editorial
Mor Geller
The Road to "Hole in the Moon"
Elad Wexler
"Queen Esther of the Third Reich": Leni Riefenstahl in 1930s Jewish Press
Jonathan Kaplan
5. “Nostalgia Isn’t toward What It Used to Be”: Nostalgia and Retro in the Alternative History Television Sci-Fi Drama The Man in the High Castle
Isaac Rosen
The Man in the High Castle
Abstract
Is it possible for us to experience nostalgia toward a past that never actually took place? This article offers an observation on the practice of nostalgic design through retro aesthetics in the television series drama The Man in the High Castle and its historical premise, which presents a fictitious past in which the Axis forces triumph in World War II. Rosen focuses on the following questions: How do the creators construct an imagined past? How do they apply practices of memory and remembrance? In what ways does a mechanism of nostalgia operate in this television series?
The discussion addresses themes like personal and national memory, audio-visual means of rewriting the past, and instruments meant to evoke sensations of longing and nostalgia within the viewers. The article’s main argument is that since The Man in the High Castle expresses nostalgia toward a past that never actually existed, we are presented with a new kind of nostalgia—a simulacrum of nostalgia, an imitation of the nostalgic impulse that has no inherent authenticity. Hence, the central question that arises concerns the meanings and merits derived from this new nostalgic apparatus: How can we evaluate nostalgia toward a historical period that we experience solely through a fictitious cultural product?