Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania

Introduction: Memory Traces: On Local Practices of Remembering and Commemorating

European enlargement could only succeed culturally and existentially “when our memories have been shared and brought together as one.” —Claus Leggewie (2006)1 Introduction Memory Traces: On Local Practices of Remembering and Commemorating In 2006, the online journal Eurozine initiated a dialogue about the European memory of World War II. Enlightened public intellectuals from Europe and North America —philosophers, historians, sociologists, journalists, and psychologists—responded with various considerations about the meaning of the war in various places in Europe and at various points of time.2This dialogue revealed a major division between two groups: some respondents considered a common memory to be desirable, even if they acknowledged that such a memory doesn’t exist and that there are serious obstacles to its creation. Unsurprisingly, these observers come from western Europe.3 Other respondents, from both East and West (Europe and North America), did not think that a common memory is possible, given the way the European Union is constructed today; they pointed to problems with the very concept of a European memory of World 2 HEr OEs ANd VICt Ims War II.4Their critique generally centered on the inability of the commemorative narratives about World War II written as “European” to represent the significance of that war for those who lived in the Communist bloc after 1945. most surprising in this discussion was the lack of attention to how average people relate to this question. Although many respondents pointed out that memory is linked to locally grounded events and context, they did not articulate the ways in which place and community are in fact essential to how average people construct and recollect the meaning of specific events. Instead, differences and divergences were represented along broad national(ist) lines. Beyond the Politics of “European Memory” of the World Wars my study represents a response to the debate about memory culture with regard to the two world wars. This debate has focused insufficiently on the eastern front and has not considered the localized dimensions of commemoration and cultural production of rituals as central elements of how we need to understand the culture of remembrance in twentieth-century Europe. I challenge the prevailing views by shifting my focus and privileging the local, both chronologically and also conceptually. I also place the institutional , centralized, state attempts to mold commemorations on the receiving end of the process of constructing meaningful sites of memory and rituals to remember the two world wars. And by making memory the central concept for examining the production of cultural identity markers, I avail myself of a wide array of vantage points and memory traces that have been largely untouched as sources for writing a historical narrative of cultural practices in twentieth-century eastern Europe. The novelty of my analysis (especially in the eastern European context) rests also in the claims I make for thinking of memory work not only in terms of permanent, monumental sites of memory, but especially through smaller funerary markers, rituals , and other manipulations of space (e.g., street names, plaques, use of particular spaces for specific rituals), as well as autobiographical writings, novels, and film. This wide array of memory traces implicitly and explicitly argues for placing small, marginal, and sometimes evanescent markers alongside solid and prominent ones, and inviting a revaluation of their everyday cultural meaning. my analysis ultimately seeks to privilege the seldom heard voice of average people at the local level, even while acknowledging that the state and other powerful institutions, such as religious establishments, have had greater resources and a continuous will to control the commemorations linked to the two world wars. And by focusing on r omania, a country that was situated in the midst of the eastern front during both world wars, I also introduce an example that challenges the dominant narratives about the meaning and memory of the war dead in both world Introduction 3 wars, constructed primarily around the German and French cases. my aim is to open up new avenues for thinking about the diversity in wartime experience and especially its representation through the commemorative efforts that sprang up after the wars, both locally and subsequently more broadly at the national level. The politicization and institutionalization of such commemorative events has led to a devaluation of understanding how these rituals came about, as well as how they have continued to be both challenged and simply made meaningful in diverse and specific ways that are always...