The Piteşti Syndrome: A Romanian Vergangenheitsbewältigung? (original) (raw)
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Recuperative memory in Romanian post-Communist society
Nationalities Papers, 2016
This paper explores the idea of “recuperative memory” with respect to the process of coming to terms with the past after the fall of the Romanian Communist regime in 1989. Its method is to examine the mechanisms used by recuperative memory in order to re-appropriate the past and emphasize the inherently mediated and multifaceted nature of this process. Using various examples from oral testimonies, autobiographical writings, literary works, and cinema, the paper argues that the role of recuperative memory is not only to facilitate the process of coming to terms with the past, but also to offer the material necessary to sustain a viable politics of memory. This entails providing a platform for the intergenerational transmission of memory and knowledge for those who did not live under the Communist regime, filling in this way the intergenerational gap, despite the lack of political class engagement.
LEGITIMATING THE DEMOCRATIC STATE IN POST-COMMUNIST ROMANIA: MEMORY AS A CULTURAL GOOD
New Europe College Europe Next to Europe Program Yearbook , 2013-2014; 2014-2015, ed.by Irina Vainovski-Mihai Bucharest., 2018
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.
The organization of Romanian social memory after the December 1989 events
Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, 2013
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...
Südosteuropa, 2016
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, ...
The Romanian Journal of Society and Politics
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.