De Balie Podcast

How is nostalgia used as a political weapon? The acclaimed Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov (Time Shelter, The Death and the Gardener) explores the relationship between collective memory and identity in contemporary Europe.Populist politicians are merchants of nostalgia. But what happens when the desire to preserve the past overtakes the will to shape the future? Georgi Gospodinov explores how collective memory is shaped, used, and misused. Having lived through a communist dictatorship, Gospodinov warns for grand stories and favors the small, the personal and the particular.Georgi Gospodinov won in 2023 the International Booker Prize with Time Shelter, in which he tells the story of a ‘clinic of the past’ offering Alzheimer’s patients spaces recreating different decades of the twentieth century. Soon the clinic attracts healthy people seeking refuge from an uncertain present. Gospodinov’s most recent book, The Death and the Gardener (2025), is about a son who mourns his father and, in do