Please join us for a Casual Conversation with Professor Tobias Becker of the University of Heidelberg on Sunday, February 15, 2026, at Noon Eastern Time. Please note the earlier time occasioned by Professor Becker speaking with us from Europe.
Professor Becker wrote Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia (Harvard University Press 2023) ISBN 9780674251755 (hardcover).
Here is a description of Professor Becker from a notice of his January 7 lecture, LOSS IN THE LAND OF PLENTY: Understanding American Crisis, Decline, and Paths to Renewal, at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University of Berlin:
Tobias Becker is a German historian specializing in European and transatlantic history of the nineteenth and twentieth century, with research interest in cultural, media, and urban history, public history, and historical theory. Since 2023, he has been a guest professor of modern history at Freie Universitat Berlin. Since the winter semester 2025/26, he holds a teaching appointment for the professorship of Applied History – Public History at the University of Heidelberg. Becker completed his Ph.D. in modern history at the Freie Universitat Berlin. His research focuses on the public uses of the past, nostalgia, popular culture, and media phenomena in modern Europe.
Professor Tobias’s book came to my attention from a review by Marcus Colla in Times Literary Supplement (2 February 2024):
“Yesterday”, one can say without irony, is a timely book. Barely a day goes by when nostalgia is not invoked in critiques of populist political movements or as a disparaging description of the latest cultural fad. But Becker also reminds us that we have been here before. Every postwar decade and generation has pointed to the growth of nostalgia as a symptom of their epoch’s sickness. As far back as 1948 the historian Richard Hofstadter bemoaned “the overpowering nostalgia of the last fifteen years”. Yet the history of the word tells us more about the power of the “nostalgia critique” than about nostalgia itself. In fact, the more the author digs away at the conceptual sediments that have accrued around the word, the more we understand it as a polemical slogan rather than a meaningful term of analysis.
Tobias Becker even goes so far as to suggest that “nostalgia” should be discarded altogether as a tool of cultural diagnosis. To which one can only say: good luck with that. Readers of this wide-ranging, innovative and thought-provoking book will find it hard to shake the feeling that nostalgia’s future is likely to be as busy as its past.
Timely, indeed. The vast majority of our Dartmouth classmates are 78 years old—some a few years younger and others perhaps one or two years older. With Social Security actuarial figures giving us each, on average, about ten more years of life (per recent email from classmate Peter Elias), we have a lot of personal and cultural past available to us. But for what purpose? Nostalgia, Professor Becker, points out is used as a derogatory term by critics of particular uses of the past: Tony Judt’s description of the heritage industry as “an obsession with the way things weren’t—the cultivation, as it were, of genuine nostalgia for a fake past”.
Professor Becker, in turn, is critical of the dismissal of the role(s) the past can play in our understanding of the present:
. . . [A]udiences react to representations of the past in diverse ways. . . . [P]layfulness, irony, and shock have been as much in evidence as yearning or sentimentality, if not more. Here again, “Yesterday” prompts us to move beyond existing critique and recognize how looking back can be a stimulus for creativity rather than a sign of its absence.
Timely also because of classmate Tex Talmadge’s February 4 posting to our Class listserv which discusses the television series Star Trek. He concludes:
For our Dartmouth generation, Star Trek wasn’t escapism. It was rehearsal. It suggested that idealism need not be na?ve, that intellect and empathy could coexist, and that the long arc of history might bend—not magically, but deliberately—toward something better. We didn’t just watch it. We carried it with us.
Live long and prosper.
How we engage with the past is a question that we all face, and our Baby Boom generation, now that we are rapidly approaching the old-old age of 80, with more urgency. How shall we engage with our pasts? How do social critics of heritage, patrimony (for the French), postmodernism, nostalgia, presentism or modernism stand up to scrutiny.
I will leave for the present with a lyric from the wildly successful British musical Salad Days, sung by a man and woman leaving college after graduating:
“But if I start looking behind me and start retracing my tracks, I’ll remind you to remind me, we said we wouldn’t look back. We’ve broken the ties, we’ve said our goodbyes, there’s no more for us to pack. Don’t turn round, we’re outward bound and we said we wouldn’t look back.”
How do we look forward, and how does the past inform our future? Come spend time with Professor Becker, your classmates, and yourself, to consider these (and other) questions. Sunday, February 15 at Noon Eastern Time. Let me know at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com by close of business Friday, February 13.
Arthur Fergenson
P.S. I much preferred The Prisoner over Star Trek. No escape, mordant humor: Thrilling!