Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania

2. Mourning, Burying, and Remembering the War Dead: How Communities Coped with the Memory of Wartime Violence, 1918–1940

With my heart ἀlled with the tenderest gratitude, I beg you to receive the expression of my most profound appreciation for the immeasurable good you did to me, by bringing back the earthly remains of my unforgotten son, Lascăr Luţia. . . . Now I am happy, as I can always go on pilgrimage to my precious grave. —Teoἀla Luţia (1922)1 2 Mourning, Burying, and Remembering the War Dead How Communities Coped with the Memory of Wartime Violence, 1918–1940 The experience of total war between 1914 and 1918was unmistakably life-altering for the populations of eastern Europe. The unprecedented magnitude of the front, the duration of the war, and the political outcomes confronted average people and elites with ἀnding new means to cope with loss and make sense of death. These challenges became important battles for legitimating political regimes from 1918 to 1939. Just as importantly, the great human and material losses in the war dramatically transformed many small communities and innumerable individual lives. This chapter 50 HEr o Es a Nd VIc TIms reconstructs the ἀrst attempts to deal with these losses at the local level, which is where the initial impact of coping with the dead in World War I took place. By placing the story of these responses ahead of the discussion of how political elites attempted to capitalize on the massive deaths in World War I toward political ends, I want to accentuate the dialogical relationship between margins and the center in commemorative practices. my analysis questions the very centrality of what was happening in the capital, in large cities, and in the officially sanctioned commemorative practices linked to the war. o ther historians, much like the cultural elites of the interwar period, have read the role of the government unproblematically as legitimate, rather than seeking legitimacy.2 a closer look at what took place in the interwar period in rural and community-based commemorative practices reveals divergence and a fluid, two-way communication between official and vernacular practices, with the capital often playing the role of catching up to the quick commemorative initiatives that sprouted up elsewhere after the war. This decentered narrative then helps question the signiἀcance and speciἀc meaning of nationalist cultural practices as viewed from the center, describing official commemorations more as reactive rather than proactive phenomena in relation to community-based and individual cultural practices. What nationalism and heroism came to mean in the twentieth century can only be understood in this unstable context, which underscores the relative and often secondary signiἀcance of central political/state institutions vis-à-vis more locally relevant practices and traditions. In this chapter and the next, I lay the groundwork for what it meant to communities and individuals to deal with the massive deaths and traumatic experiences of the war. In chapter 4, I turn to the institutionalized means of commemorating World War I. The War in Eastern Europe To understand the magnitude of the process of burying and mourning the dead, one has to ἀrst understand the nature of World War I in eastern Europe. In the United states and western Europe, the iconic symbol of the war is the trench in which soldiers lived, fought, rotted, and sometimes went mad. This static image, which many historians of Germany, France, and Britain have identiἀed as quintessential for understanding the unprecedented nature and impact of World War I, is ill suited for understanding what happened to millions of soldiers from Vienna to c onstantinople, in terms both of their experience and of the practices of burial and mourning when the casualties started to mount. The war in the East moved more unpredictably back and forth along thousands of miles. It was still a war of attrition of both lives and resources, mourning, Burying, and r emembering the War d ead 51 but the wartime experiences of both soldiers and civilians were quite different from those on the western front. The eastern European participants came into the war at different times, as early as the summer of 1914 and as late as June 1917(Greece). Populations of different ethnic and linguistic groups fought side by side in the Habsburg and to some extent r ussian empires. These soldiers sometimes found themselves facing enemy armies with which they shared more, culturally and linguistically, than with some soldiers in their own army. This was the case with Italians, Poles, r...