In the 1970s there were American press reports of an Iowa man who was tormented by his yearning for the 16-year stretch of time that ran from 1752 to 1768. His misery was the result of not being able to find anyone who shared this deep nostalgia for a period when electricity was still a rumour and America was proud to think of itself as British.
But does this really count as nostalgia? Is it not, actually, a bid for attention, a way for the man from Iowa to signal that, while his body might be tethered to the cornfields, his mind is free to roam in exquisite pastures where gentlemen routinely wear wigs and night-time travel is best reserved for a full moon? Agnes Arnold-Forster doesn’t say, but deploying the anecdote allows her to draw attention to the slipperiness of the very concept of nostalgia. Is it a legitimate and trans-historical emotion, like sadness or rage? Or could it be rather a cultural confection, a passing fancy expressive of a particular time and place (in the case of the man from Iowa, this would be Gerald Ford’s post-Vietnam America)? Most fundamentally of all, can you feel nostalgic for a time or a place that you never actually experienced yourself?
In this wide-ranging book Arnold-Forster raises a lot of questions, and, while she doesn’t offer many answers, she covers plenty of interesting ground along the way. The “danger” part of her subtitle most obviously applies to the political realm. Starting at home (and “home” is a key concept here, a place of emotional and physical refuge to which the fortunate among us frequently long to return), she leads off with the Brexit debacle of 2016. Quoting Michel Barnier, the EU chief negotiator, she sees the vote to leave Europe as a direct expression of Britain’s “nostalgia for the past”, alerting us to the way that Barnier’s tautologous phrasing suggests a doubling down – Britons really, really want to live in a once-upon-a-time land when foreigners knew their place. Then there is the even more terrifying rhetoric of Donald Trump whose repetition of the word “again” is matched only by the incantatory repetition of “bring back” to launch what amounts to a mission of restoration, a promise to return America to some vaguely defined former state of perfection.
Also chilling is the revelation that people in the former eastern bloc countries are yearning for the communist absolutism of their youth. In 2004 the television channel Nostalgiya was launched in Russia. Brandishing a hammer-and-sickle logo, it is now broadcast in those parts of the world with a large eastern European immigrant population, including the US, Germany and Israel. In addition to showing decades-old talkshows, documentaries and television programmes, Nostalgiya runs news programmes and weather forecasts from the cold war period. Meanwhile in Poland, the 1960s series Czterej Pancerni i Pies, or Four Tank Drivers and a Dog, has been repeated six times since 2001. Most incredibly of all, 66% of Romanians claim that they would vote for Nicolae Ceaușescu if he were alive today.
To some particularly astringent thinkers, this kind of temporal and geographic homesickness is nothing more than personal pathology. In the postwar period, the psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor characterised the way that recent European immigrants to the US, of which he was one, harked back to “the old country” as a disguised desire to crawl into their mother’s womb and stay there rocking in amniotic fluid for eternity. Today Fodor’s attitude comes over as brutally dismissive. Arnold-Forster quotes one clinical psychologist who suggests that giving proper weight to the role that longing for “home” may play in immigrant experience could helpfully offset a worrying tendency to over-diagnose such patients with PTSD, stress or depression.
In the last two decades, academic historians have turned their attention to the history of emotions, and the result has been some excellent and revelatory work. While Nostalgia lacks the rigorous organisation that makes the best of this so thrilling, it still provides plenty of ways of thinking about that dull ache that so many of us feel for “our own far-off country”, in the phrase of CS Lewis, author of the Narnia books, who knew a thing or two about longing for home.
• Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion by Agnes Arnold-Forster is published by Picador (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
