The first panel looked at nostalgia from a more theoretical point of view. In his paper “‘Good Old Things’: Nostalgia and the Discourse of Historical Authenticity” ACHIM SAUPE explored the relationship between nostalgia and authenticity by exploring the changing meaning and usages of the two terms in the nineteenth and twentieth century and by looking at the contemporary “nostalgia industry”.

While authenticity is ofthen associated with nostalgia ISHAY LANDA was interested in an often neglected aspect of nostalgia: pain—in this case a nostalgia for pain, which he traced beginning with Nietzsche, via Joseph Conrad, Ernst Jünger and Aldous Huxley to Michel Foucault.