The Canon of Remembering Romanian Communism: From Autobiographical Recollections to Collective Representations (original) (raw)

The social memory phenomenon causes debates nowadays, puts in opposition methodological schools, generates a series of incompatible theoretical positions. Proof that the concept of "social memory" "lived" its first age are the numerous research which regards the phenomenon, studies which led either to new theories of social memory (the theory of the organization of memory according to culture and interests is one of the acknowledged theories from which it starts in the development of the subject), or they certified the ones established until then. The present paper proposes as its objective to evaluate the factors which led to the readjustment of the social memory of the Romanian people after the events from 1989. I consider that the social memory can be organized under the influence of factors which acts unitary. As a result, I will analyze the connection between the political factor (decision – maker agents that can influence some contents of the collective mem...

The fall of the communist regimes in the East Central Europe can be seen as a momentous historical juncture for reclaiming the 'repressed' memories' during the past regime. The revolutionary changes of 1989, which mark a multifarious transition could trigger a different representation of the past. Long after regime change, the emergence of Institutes of Memory in most of the countries of East Central Europe, constitute a new empirical reality, which continues to be addressed within the framework of politics of memory, or transitional justice. In this paper, I propose a different theoretical perspective and focus on the case of Romania, given that issues of the past since December 1989 have been central to different actors at different levels. On the other hand, it is a case that can help understand the shift from the symbolic politics of the 90s, to memory production as a legitimating frame of the new democratic regime.

This paper examines the mnemonic battle fought over the Romanian communist past between the active forces of intellectual democratic elites and the passive resistance of the majority of the population. The former try to impose a narrative of cultural trauma regarding the communist past against the latter’s popular resistance expressed by strong nostalgic attachments towards the same communist past. The paper investigates the formation of the new official consensus on the communist legacy as cultural trauma, proposing a three stage sequence of its articulation: i) the breakthrough made by detention memorialistic literature in the aftermath of 1989 Revolution; ii) the officialization of communism-as-cultural-trauma’ narrative by the Tismăneanu Report condemning the communist regime; iii) the institutionalization of the cultural trauma narrative in the educational system. All these struggles over the memory of communism from the part of the anticommunist political elites are tacitly countered by strong popular nostalgia, as revealed by extensive survey data.

In Romania, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism triggered a testimonial drive that shifted from early concerns with victimhood, justice, and retribution to seemingly apolitical revivals of everyday life under socialism. Drawing on a range of memoirs of socialist childhood published over the last decade by an aspiring generation of Romanian writers, this article examines the role of public intellectuals in articulating hegemonic representations of the socialist past. To understand both the enduring power and limits of such representations, the author argues that published recollections should not be read only for their (competing) perspectives on the past, but also for the sociopolitical effects they have in the transitional present, where they facilitate the socialization of emerging writers into the ethos of the postsocialist intelligentsia. Exploring the tenuous relationship between dominant intellectual discourses and social memory in postsocialist Romania, ...

This article proposes a phenomenological interpretation of nostalgia for communism, a collective feeling expressed typically in most Eastern European countries after the official fall of the communist regimes. While nostalgia for communism may seem like a paradoxical feeling, a sort of Stockholm syndrome at a collective level, this article proposes a different angle of interpretation: nostalgia for communism has nothing to do with communism as such, it is not essentially a political statement, nor the signal of a deep value tension between governance and the people. Rather, I propose to understand this collective feeling as the symptom of a deeper need at a national level for solidarity and ultimately about recapturing a common feeling of identity in solidarity. This hypothesis would be in line with a phenomenological approach to memory as a process of establishing shared codes by rewriting the past in such a way as to strengthen social bonds and make possible a re-imagining of a common future. Nostalgia for communism does not need to be ultimately an uncritical stance as it has been depicted, instead one could interpret it as a form of critical reflexion about our current forms of life. Instead of seeing communism nostalgia as a specific form of being stuck in the past, one could explore its potential for pointing at the things that are still not working in the current neo-liberal regime.

Controversies over social memory form an important aspect of reality in the post-communist countries of eastern europe. On the one hand, there are debates about coming to terms with the communist past and the Second World War that preceded it (because important parts of the memory of the war were "frozen" during the communist era), and, on the other hand, and intimately connected to that, are discussions about the constant influence of communism on the current situation. This article presents some of the main trends in research on collective memory in the post-communist countries of eastern europe and reveals similarities and differences in the process of memo-rialization of communism in the countries of the region. although there are works devoted to a comparative analysis of memory usage and its various interpretations in the political sphere in the countries of eastern europe, there are still many issues concerning daily practices (economic, religious, and cultural) associated with varying interpretations of the war and the communist past which needs further elaboration and analysis.

Many scholars have turned their attention to a certain boom in memory studies, which in Western Europe became evident during the 80s of the last century, by identifying as causes of this phenomenon above all postmodernism and loosening, if not the general fall, of existing up-to-date paradigms, theories and research concepts. A similar process did take and is taking place also in many countries of Central, Eastern and SouthEastern Europe after the fall of the communist regimes, i.e. after 1989/1991. Nowadays, almost in every renowned scientific journal from the fields of sociology, anthropology or history one can easily find an article or a publication, which is dealing with at least one dimension of memory: social, collective, cultural, historical etc. Other scholars in a more moderated way have pointed out another area, which became the impulse for the booming of research on memory, namely the growing presence and role of commemorative practices in the social and political life. Numerous studies have shown that both accentuated presence of memory in social and political life, as well as reflection on this process are nothing new in the human history, and, hence, postmodernism should not be seen as the only accountable for the memory boom. Yet, the scale of the process is entirely new. From here it's easy to pinpoint a number of reasons for such a strong presence of memory in social life: the general democratization of social life, a multiplicity of actors and social dimensions of their activities, the impact of the audiovisual media of mass communication, and – from already few years now – the dynamic development of social media. When discussing about post-communist Europe another crucial reason has to be taken into account. Namely, one of the main postulates and slogans guiding the post-communist transformation processes was to clean the historical memory from the falsifications imbued in it by the former communist regimes. Aiming to reveal the historical truth was and still remains one of the basic components in the process of building and materializing of transitional justice. For that reason studying the memory of/on communism goes far beyond the frames of " normal " social research, touching upon a larger spectrum of important political, social and cultural problems that the post-communist societies are dealing with.