Pasts into Present: Ideology, Memory, and Monuments in Communist and Post- communist Romania (original) (raw)
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Exhibitions on the Communist past are scarce in Romanian museums. In contrast to this scarcity, commemoration of the “Communist tragedy” through memorials, monuments and the hybrid species of memorial-museum is disproportionately present. This article will dwell mainly on these exhibitions and the monuments erected to the victims of Communism, arguing that what was marginal for more than 15 years, namely the anti-communist approach to Communism, is now becoming main-stream discourse in Romanian public life. The core of this discourse maintains that the communist regime was a foreign body introduced by force into the national history, a devilish undertaking to be finally defeated by proper exorcism. Thus, the anti-communist and the public discourse of the Romanian Orthodox Church became strongly attached, since both appealed to national feelings and frustrations.
Societies, 2021
After the demise of state socialism, public space became an issue of contention that occupied an important place within societies’ efforts to come to terms with the recent past. Extant scholarship documented extensively how postcommunist societies in Central and Eastern Europe have reconfigured the public space by removing the symbolic presence of the former regime (e.g., monuments and statues, but also place- and street names). However, there is a scarcity of research done on exploring the reception of these broad changes brought to the public statuary and urban nomenclature. In this study, we aim to contribute to this nascent strand of literature by investigating the generational differences in social attitudes towards the symbolic transformation of public space in postcommunist Romania. Data collected through a national web-survey conducted in February 2021 (n = 1156) revealed significant intergenerational differences regarding the removal of monuments and the renaming of streets. In particular, higher approval of such memory work was found among the generations born during communism in comparison to the postcommunist generation. Taking stock of these generational differences, as well as the factors underpinning them, contributes to a better understanding of how ordinary people relate to the politics of memory enacted in transforming societies.
This article analyses 'Project 1990' (2010–2014) as an example of 'art of memoriali-sation'. The project included twenty temporary artistic interventions on the empty pedestal of the former statue of Lenin in Bucharest. The author compares this example of art of me-morialisation to other memory strategies found in the Romanian public space after 1990. Building on James Young's concept of anti-monument, 'Project 1990' questioned the ways in which communism is remembered in Romania, and how the transition to democracy, in the opinion of many of the exhibiting artists, failed. This curatorial project is a good example of the aestheticisation of memory—that is the anti-nostalgic and ironic treatment of symbols of the past, among which Lenin himself. Caterina Preda is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Bucharest. In the last decade, Romania has registered an increasing number of artistic productions dealing with its communist legacy. These productions have covered different topics, various media, and a plurality of perspectives. An interesting example is 'Project 1990' curated by Ioana Ciocan between 2010 and 2014, which included twenty artistic interventions on an important site of memory in Bucharest: the empty pedestal of the former Lenin statue. The tone of these artworks was ironic and anti-nostalgic, simultaneously using and evoking an aestheticised version of the communist past. This article investigates 'Project 1990' as an anti-monument, situating it within the Romanian art of memoria-lisation. Furthermore, the article questions how Ciocan's work, including the curated installations, wanted to incite memorialisation. These works of anti-monumentality stand in an interesting contrast to other memorial strategies found in the Romanian public sphere after 1990, namely: the strategy of official forgetting; public and private initiatives to promote a history and memory of victimhood; and personal as well as socially networked nostalgia. The space occupied by 'Project 1990', which was previously physically empty but emotionally fraught, provides an interesting window into the way communism is
In recent years the Romanian cultural heritage has been gaining more and more interest from European scholars. It is understandable, since the turn of the 20th and 21th century is regarded as the moment of the explosion of interest in the subject of heritage and collective memory. Romania, which in the time of Communist regime was a “stronghold” on the border of the East and West, can still boast unknown and unresearched monuments, which provide a lot of new information on Byzantine and post-Byzantine culture, as well as on the cultures of ethnic and religious minorities living in this country. This article presents the characteristics of cultural heritage management in Romania, as well as the most important institutions dealing with this. Tangible cultural heritage listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites are presented, e.g. the painted orthodox churches and monasteries of Bukovina, the wooden churches of Maramureș, the Dacian Fortresses of the Orăștie Mountains, and the fortified churches in Transylvania. The discourse around these monuments in the Romanian culture is also briefly commented on. It revolves around the ancient settlement myth referring to the Dacian heritage, the orthodox faith understood as fidelity to original Christianity and, gradually, the multicultural heritage of other ethnicities so strongly inhabiting the Romanian territory. It shows that Romania, just like other European countries, has the need to present its history through tangible heritage and emphasizing the Dacian-Roman and Orthodox identity, as well as the need to create new narrative and new post-communist countenance, with a clearly emphasized aspect of a multicultural country inhabited by various ethnicities and religions.
Mare Ponticum, 2020
The Holocaust in the post-communist memory discourse in Romania: the case of the monuments and memorial sites to the victims of the Iasi pogrom of June 1941 1 Abstract The current paper focuses on the monuments which commemorate the victims of the pogrom in Iaşi between the 29 th of June and the 1 st of July 1941. More specifically, monuments and museums mark several parts of the city as memory places of the killings of thousands of Jews by the Romanian and the German authorities in Iaşi. In the last few years the commemoration of this inconvenient traumatic past has been one of the aims of both academic research and public debate. The major differences between the communist memory discourse which blamed mainly the German authorities for the massacre and the post-communist discourse which points out the responsibilities of the Antonescu's regime and its collaboration with the German officials, reflect, of course, different politics of memory and history. Taking into serious consideration both the transnational character of the Holocaust and the specificities of the Romanian Holocaust and the city of Iaşi, we shall deal with the way in which the memory places 'interact' with the academic narratives and the public discourse (cinema, media, literature etc) and become a part of a broader post-communist memory discourse in Romania. This post-communist memory discourse in Romania condemns the atrocities of Ion Antonescu's regime, rejects the communist politics of memory concerning tragic and traumatic events and promotes the image of Romania as a European and multicultural society ready to come to terms with its recent traumatic past.
Postsocialist Statuary Politics in Romania and Bulgaria: An Ambivalent Socialist Heritage
Comparative Southeast European Studies, 2023
Using an approach situated at the intersection of cultural memory studies and (critical) heritage studies, with a focus on the ambivalent socialist heritage of socialist statues and monuments and their changing role in postsocialist public spaces, this article engages with the postcommunist strategies of reckoning with the past in Romania and Bulgaria in the period 1990-2020. Comparing the kinds of monumental memory of communism that were established in these countries, the author discusses how each dealt with their ambivalent socialist heritage through a public memory policy comprising three combined strategies: removal; preservation; and the replacement of communist heroes with anticommunist counter-monuments. The author concludes that stances toward the socialist heritage manifest various tensions in terms of the types of statues that were removed or, alternately, allowed to remain; of the opposition between local and national decisions as well as between the official approach and citizens' perspectives; and, finally, of aesthetic versus political criteria.
Monuments and Memorial Sites in Changing Social-Political Contexts - Szeged, 22-23 November 2017
The constructed knowledge about the past could be often visible through different memorial sites and monuments. Their role and function had undergone many changes. During the second half of the 19 th century all over Europe plenty of monuments were erected which connected the symbols of the mythical past to defined places in the context of the modern nation state. After the WWI new practice unfolded among the warfaring countries in the name of the cult of the soldier heroes. In the second half of the 20th century the in Eastern Europe communist regimes had been constructing their own memorial sites, which were often used to exercise power in a symbolic way. However, memorial culture has undergone significant changes in the Western Europe in that time as well. After the collapse of communism the memorial practices had been taking new forms, but at the same time many social conflicts emerged.
Assessing the cultural value of the communist legacy in Romania
2014
Starting for the statement within the discourse on heritage formation that not everything is heritage not will end up acquiring the status of heritage, but anything has the potential to become heritage, in my presentation I am interested in identifying the mechanisms involved in the process of creation of "heritage" when particularly dealing with material assets of the communist past. One central problem to be presented is how historical assets are negotiated and assessed as culturally valuable and they are being incorporated, perceived and preserved as components of the national cultural heritage. Since of the amount of material present from the communist past is enormous, I will focus my presentation on two particular sites of the historic interest, namely the civic centre in Bucharest, the Victory of Socialism with a focus on the House of the People and the collections of the former museum of the Communist Party in Romania.
Justyna Budzinska, Edyta Glowacka-Sobech, Bernaette Jonda (eds.), Niepamięć wojny. Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia w XX/XXI wieku (Oblivion of War. Central and Eastern Europe in the XX / XXI century), Instytut Historii UAM, 2017: 389-401., 2017
Remembering World War II has always been controversial in Romania. It was controversial during communist times, as the official propaganda discourse did not fit most people's attitudes and memories of the war. It remained controversial at the end of Ceausescu era, when important figures of the war, such as Ion Antonescu, head of State during World War II, an ally of Hitler and artisan of fascist policies in Romania, were officially rehabilitated when Ceausescu himself denounced the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as illegitimate. It stayed controversial during the post-communist period, which has witnessed both continuity in discourse in line with the national communism of the Ceausescu epoch and a new narrative which condemns the genocidal actions of the Romanian government toward Jews and Roma. The aim of this study is twofold; on the one hand, I shall describe and interpret the public memory of World War II in Romania from the end of the war until today, and, on the other, I will try to see to what extent the public discourse has mingled with personal experience in the life stories of people who experienced World War II as either participants or witnesses.
A monument embodies a desire to preserve in time something as fragile as human memory, capturing it in solid material to fix it, so it can remain unchanged for posterity. A network of monuments to events and individuals from a nation’s historical past, especially when they go back to its origin, would serve then to establish a national identity, to anchor it in the present and claim its existence. But a nation’s historical past is only remembered according to particular interpretations usually serving political needs and this would apply even more to a communist regime that seeks to re-construct history in a way best serving its purposes to construct a new social order. The communist regime in Bulgaria produced in the period 1944 – 1989 an astonishing quantity of monuments commemorating individuals, historical events and ideals. These monuments were erected in all parts of the country to serve the established narration of the nation’s historical past and to guarantee its permanence and presence in everyday life. But the practice of constant reinvention of historical narrative is not unique to the Communist Party. After the fall of the regime a new identity and historical narrative were needed. This report addresses the way in which the monuments constructed in Bulgaria during the communist regime reveal a continuing process of rewriting history and argues that despite the intention for permanence, they are unstable and reflect the instability of what is considered historical truth or worthy of remembering. Five examples are explored in the context of the Bulgarian Communist Party politics on historiography, culture, and education, as well as contemporary debates on the legacy of the regime to outline not only how historical narrative was inscribed in monuments, but also how it can be distorted within shifts of political power and how these monuments perform their task today. By adding another dimension – the interaction between a monument and its visitors, the agency of the public is acknowledged in the process of evolution of their significance.