Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania

3. Remembering the Great War through Autobiographical Narratives

All this humiliation . . . you witnessed with your own eyes. Of course for you this spectacle remains a great, indescribable pain. . . . You did well to bring to light all that you saw. Others should do the same. . . . Our Calvary will not be fully told if we don’t also know these horrors. . . . When all is known, the virtues of our people who produced today’s Romania will appear even more brilliant. —Take Ionescu (1921)1 If I dare bring to light my modest war Journal after so much time, it is because I kept waiting for others more capable than me, more competent at writing, to speak and remember those who fulfilled their duty under the folds of the holy Flag of the Red Cross, raised here by the greatest and dignified Queen of our days. I waited, I searched, but I did not find more than two-three lines here and there. —Jeana Col. Fodoreanu (1928)2 3 Remembering the Great War through Autobiographical Narratives Remembering World War I was only in part a matter of mourning the dead and coping with loss. While some worked to lay to rest their loved ones, others worked through their own remembrances of the war. In the interwar period Romania saw an explosion in autobiographical writing, much of it centered on the 1914–1918period. Everything from poetry to theater and from correspondence to journals was put into print. Soldiers, civilians, men, women, professional writers and first-time writers, and 74 HEROES An d VICTImS people of every creed and linguistic group put pen to paper and saw fit to share their impressions with a wider public. Remembering World War I thus became powerfully shaped by these individual voices and their reception, especially in the literary circles of interwar Romania. The early canonization of certain writers such as Camil Petrescu (1894–1957)and Liviu Rebreanu (1885–1 944), who focused on the experience of the average soldier and officer of the Romanian army, at the expense of others who focused on different subjects (e.g., women and non-Romanians) and experiences (e.g., pacifism) led to powerful narratives about whose experiences mattered and how heroism and self-sacrifice were to be valued and remembered, both in the interwar generation and since then. The present chapter represents a critical reexamination of these narratives. Commemorative Discourses in Word: Autobiographical Writing Eastern Europe was much like the rest of the continent in the flourishing of autobiographical memoir literature it experienced after the war.3Romania was no exception; but in this case, literary critics did not view war-related writing as an important artistic development. From the beginning, much criticism surrounded its production. A great deal of this writing has remained marginal, if present at all, in the historical accounts of Romanian literature of the twentieth century.4Yet despite the mixed and generally dismissive response from the literary establishment, people continued to write and attempted to publish war-related writings. These neglected sources need to be integrated into our understanding of the commemorative discourses that developed after World War I. When their writers made public the intimate and painful images of the wartime years, these authors were in fact claiming a kind of personal knowledge they believed to be a truthful representation of the war. Authors were aware they were speaking about events everyone in the country had lived through, so that their words did not aim at creating an imaginary universe, even in the case of fiction writing, but rather worked to evoke memories of experiences the writers shared at some level with their imagined public. Conversely, though today it is possible to read these texts as purely literary creations, the people who picked up these publications in the 1920s and 1930s did so fully understanding that these were pieces evocative of the war, and would likely function as triggers for their own memories. It is difficult to understand both intentionality and broad readership interpretation for literature where there is a thin record of readers’ responses, as was the case with Romania. But, as I show in the following pages, there was in fact a lively interaction among authors and even between authors and readers of these texts, which suggests that literature about the war was an important locus for thinking Remembering the Great War through Autobiographical n arratives 75 publicly (albeit on the individual level) about how the war was to be remembered and...