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Sensory memory and creating a community of memory

The feeling of coarse toilet paper bought after hours in a queue, the scent of sweat on a train to a Bulgarian summer camp, the fizz of Soviet shampanskoye igristoye on New Year’s Eve – these are not just fragments of nostalgia. They are traces of a collective past, an embodied memory of life under communism that continues to shape how a generation remembers itself.

December 8, 2025 - Magdalena Banaszkiewicz - Hot TopicsIssue 6 2025Magazine

A recreation of an East German café in the GDR Museum in Pirna, Germany. As with many museums of communism, the objects themselves are mute – but they gain meaning when a person fills their emptiness with their own memory. Photo: Iwona Reichardt

Sensory memory most often begins with taste. It rises from the darkness of the mouth, stirring images that have long been dormant. The tongue, which is one of the body’s most agile and intricate muscles, is the organ of both speech and remembrance. As such, it not only allows us to eat and articulate sounds, but also preserve the flavours of the past. Thus, the tastes that we once experienced and which accompanied us in our most formative moments, linger in the subconscious until they are suddenly recalled – triggered by contact with food. In that instant, taste becomes a time capsule, one that allows us to re-experience what once defined us.

In the catalogue of dishes that form a generational identity, we find flavours that are both comforting and melancholic, revolting and delightful. Each, like the legendary madeleine cake in Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, unlocks a passage to the past. It serves as a sensory key to the stories that seek meaning within our labyrinths of memory.

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