The word nostalgia has a war-torn origin among homesick soldiers : NPR
A vinyl record is seen at United Record Pressing, July 11, 2024, in Nashville, Tennessee.
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George Walker IV/AP
Think of a pleasant time and place from your childhood – perhaps a walk with a parent along a wave-swept beach. The memory is happy (and probably idealized), but always tinged with the bittersweet knowledge that you can never go back.
It’s a complex emotion that we call nostalgia.
People experience it for their lost youth, their first love and some even long for a time they never experienced. This feeling is especially strong this time of year, as the holidays approach.
As part of NPR’s Word of the Week series, we look at nostalgia, its origin, and how it went from a 17th century disease to a 21st century marketing strategy.
It all started with homesick soldiers
During the 1600s, Europe was plagued by a series of major conflicts — the Thirty Years’ War, the Franco-Dutch War, the Nine Years’ War and others. Switzerland, although largely neutral, became a key source of mercenaries. Many of these Swiss soldiers, far from home in unfamiliar lands, experienced a strange set of symptoms such as anxiety, irregular heartbeat, stomach pain and melancholy, first described in 1688 by Alsatian medical student Johannes Hofer.
Jess Zafarris, the author of Useless etymologysaid Hofer attributed these symptoms to the soldiers’ desire for the Swiss Alps, calling this illness heimwehe or “woe at home”.
“It started as a medical diagnosis – a kind of homesickness typical of Swiss soldiers – and became, over time, an emotional longing for the past,” she says.
In a scientific article on this disease, Hofer coined the term “nostalgia” from Latin forms of Greek words. nostos (“returning home”) and algorithm (“pain”).
Zafarris says the illness Hofer described likely involved healthy doses of what we would today call post-traumatic stress disorder. But it “evolved to mean much more than homesickness,” she says. “Often it’s not a question of location at all, but of time.”
Recognizing the change that comes with time can be a powerful trigger for these emotions, according to Thomas Dodman, author of What nostalgia was: war, empire and the time of mortal emotions. As a result, the rapid transformation of modern society makes our times a particularly nostalgic one.
“I think of nostalgia as a modern emotion,” Dodman says. “It’s linked to capitalism. It’s linked to modernity. It’s linked to this time that accelerates and looks to the future, which leaves things behind and therefore creates a sense of loss and longing. People didn’t think of loss in that way 300 years ago, 400 years ago.”
Retro gaming, including dozens of vintage gaming systems and computers, thousands of games, and 16 full-size arcade machines, in Yukon, Oklahoma, 2004.
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Tapping into that emotion can also be a revenue stream, according to Mark Schaefer, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. From vintage Pepsi cans to re-released “classic” video game consoles made by Atari and Nintendo, “almost every brand today taps into nostalgia in one way or another. It’s become a universal marketing language,” he says.
“In times of economic or psychological insecurity,” playing the nostalgia card, at least from a marketing point of view, makes sense, he adds. “Brand marketing is about creating an emotional connection between what you do and your audience. [and] Nostalgia is one of the deepest emotional connections we have.”
A 1970 Rolling Stones t-shirt is on display in the Westfield Garden State Plaza shopping center in Paramus, New Jersey in 2022.
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Personal and historical nostalgia
Krystine Batcho, a psychology professor at LeMoyne College, studies nostalgia. She draws a distinction between personal nostalgia – “when someone misses or longs for something from their own lived past” – and historical nostalgia, a longing for a time never lived.
“When someone says they wish they lived in the Victorian era, it’s historical nostalgia. But when someone misses family outings or childhood conversations, it’s personal nostalgia“, she notes.
This historical nostalgia is illustrated at Ka-Chunk!! Records, a store in Annapolis, Maryland specializing in new and used vinyl. The 47-year-old owner and manager, Matt Mona, remembers listening to 45s and long-form records. But most of its customers don’t. On a Saturday afternoon, the store is full of young people in their twenties rummaging through the shelves of old records.
Mona says as a child he owned a Fisher-Price record player and had albums like Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the soundtrack of Star Wars.
“But growing up, all my favorite bands that I tended to like, I guess [were] more obscure, like punk music and indie music, and all those guys still made records over the years,” he says. “All my favorite bands always had records. So for me, it’s always been pretty normalized.”
When he decided to open his store in 2010, his clientele was mainly older. “Now there’s still a little bit of everyone, but there are a lot of young people getting into it.”
Historical nostalgia? Perhaps, but Mona also sees the germ of a future personal nostalgia. Vinyl has advantages over digital music streaming, he says. There’s a reason why people love looking through stacks of old albums.
“You literally create memories when you interact with something physical, anything tangible and tactile,” observes Mona. “It just triggers things in your brain that really react and create memories. And you don’t do that with MP3s or anything. So I think people really enjoy that.”
