This article discusses the relationship between the past future and the present past, departing from the visions of the future that perished with the GDR, in particular the hope for a reform-socialist renewal and the hope for economic stabilization through “flourishing landscapes” (“blühende Landschaften”). Both futures, plausible in their time yet competing, were historically and politically marginalized and, in terms of the culture of memory, ‘forgotten’ during the following years. Nevertheless, they have shaped (East) German society to the present day. This is reflected both in fictional literature and in the East German protest culture since 1990. The analysis of the, sometimes very different, idiosyncratic appropriations of the past futures of 1989/90 facilitates understanding the heterogeneity of experience and expectation as well as the present political culture in the East.