Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania

Preface

Preface ἀ e kernel of this book was planted in 1997. Visiting Romania for the first time since completing my dissertation on the history of eugenics, I looked forward to refocusing my attention on the publishing industry’s initial flourishing in the first decade after Communism. As I scoured bookstores and vendors for new and interesting materials, I came to realize that a new phenomenon was taking place before my eyes. Everyone wanted to publish a memoir, and everyone else wanted to buy these memoirs, read them, talk about them, and critique them. ἀ e genre of the memoir was seeing such unprecedented growth, with some examples appearing in very small runs but still somehow making the rounds, that I began to collect these publications. Soon I realized that there were two periods favored by most readers: World War II and the Stalinist years of Communist persecution. Observing this literary phenomenon and also speaking to people who were more than a generation older than I was (in their mid-forties and older), it became apparent that for those generations the project of recovering and making sense of their memories of the 1940s–1950s was an urgent task, relevant to finding a new sense of social belonging. ἀ is occurrence coincided with the beginnings of the growth of “memory studies” in U.S. and parts of European academia. I was thus fortunate to begin making sense of this vibrant phenomenon in post-Communist culture in the company of insightful historians and other scholars. ἀi s study stands on the shoulders of important precursors that have inspired and challenged me to find my own answers to complicated questions. ἀ e work of Jay Winter, John Bodnar, John Gillis, Catherine Merridale, Nina Tumarkin, Gaines Foster, Robert Moeller, Vieda Skultans, Rubie Watson, and many others, has offered rich examples of ways in which memory is important not just as playground for politicians or as a psychological phenomenon, but also as a realm for making cultural meaning out of violence and destruction.1ἀ eir insights also challenged me to articulate where to situate the memory traces I was studying within a broader discourse about remembrance and identity in the modern world. Much of the x Preface literature on this topic took nationalism and the nation as crucial referents for how memory traces are emplotted and deployed in the cultural realm. Such an analysis struck me as somewhat simplistic, even where it seemed to speak to a local reality, as in France, for instance, in the aftermath of World War I.2 ἀ ough nationalism is in fact everywhere apparent in eastern Europe today, it is far from a self-evident force with a straightforward, easily identifiable meaning. ἀ e reality is far more complicated, and the more I read through the work of these prominent scholars, the more I wanted to be able to understand the complexity of commemorative experiences beyond a simple narrative of inventing traditions for the sake of political legitimacy, as Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm suggested in their pioneering study, or constructing rituals to mobilize masses around the flag, as Paul Connerton showed in How Societies Remember.3 ἀ e research of anthropologists working on contemporary Europe and further afield became an important reference point for how I began to modify my understanding of commemorative processes and products in twentieth-century eastern Europe. In particular, the work of Katherine Verdery and Gail Kligman opened up important avenues to allow considering how people in an overwhelmingly rural environment, and with a low level of literacy until the second half of the twentieth century, articulated their identities in connection to the past and community-based memory traces. Verdery’s study, ἀ e Political Lives of Dead Bodies, came out as I was starting to consider framing my study outside questions that focused primarily on nationalism.4Her theoretical insights into ancestor worship and her way of framing questions about rituals and discourses helped me find different questions and angles for my own project. ἀ e work of historians of religion and anthropologists studying the cult of the dead also became important for understanding the kinds of diverse forces shaping choices that communities in Romania made to commemorate the war dead. Gail Kligman ’s work proved essential in this regard.5In addition to her Wedding of the Dead, I was able to use the work of Mircea Eliade, as well as studies by Bruce Lincoln, Loring Danforth, Simion Florea Marian, and Ştefan Dorondel.6 ἀ e scholarship published in the past decade by scholars of...