Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania

Heroes and Victims explores the cultural power of war memorials in 20th-century Romania through two world wars and a succession of radical political changes--from attempts to create pluralist democratic political institutions after World War I to shifts toward authoritarian rule in the 1930s, to military dictatorships and Nazi occupation, to communist dictatorships, and finally to pluralist democracies with populist tendencies. Examining the interplay of centrally articulated and locally developed commemorations, Maria Bucur's study engages monumental sites of memory, local funerary markers, rituals, and street names as well as autobiographical writings, novels, oral narratives, and film. This book reveals the ways in which a community's religious, ethnic, economic, regional, and gender traditions shaped local efforts at memorializing its war dead.

In this impressive study of Romanian memory from 1877-78 to 2007, historian Bucur (Indiana Univ.) demonstrates that Western-centric narratives cannot adequately explain eastern European experiences. Romania's specific territorial development and its diverse religious and ethnic composition determined identity construction and commemorative practice, which granted Orthodox ethnic Romanians a privileged position over minorities (Hungarians, Germans, Jews, Catholics, Protestants) throughout the period. Bucur illuminates the gendered aspect of remembering by investigating who remembers and what is considered worthy of remembrance. She argues convincingly that the state (whether monarchical, fascist, or communist) consistently attempted to regulate and instrumentalize commemorative practices, yet it could not compel adherence at the local level. This led to a disjuncture between official and vernacular memories of WW I and WW II and, in the communist era, to the development of counter-memories (i.e., counter to official narratives). Romanian memory of war stressed the heroism and suffering of ethnic Romanian soldiers and silenced the memory of women and minorities; topics such as violence committed by Romanians and the Holocaust were all but ignored until the postcommunist period. This excellent study analyzes commemorative rituals, monuments, literature, film, and memoirs to great effect. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries. -- ChoiceG. F. Schroeder, St. John's University/College of St. Benedict, Minnesota, August 2010

"An engaging read, written in an elegant style accessible to both academics and non academics, this volume will be of interest to historians, scholars of Romanian history and politics, as well as anthropologists and sociologists alike." --European Legacy

"An important book by one of the major emerging voices in east European studies." --Charles King, Georgetown University

"[Bucur] is to be congratulated on a superb piece of scholarship which both sheds light on existing questions and raises important new ones. As such it can be recommended to teachers and researchers alike." --European History Quarterly

"[A] historical tour de force, compellingly written and powerfully demonstrated.... Bucur's truly illuminating study explores the Romanians' tortuously dramatic efforts to accomplish a long-delayed coming to terms with their past." --Slavic Review

"[T]this is an ambitious book that effectively straddles disciplines, historical eras, and analytical levels. The data are remarkably comprehensive for such a difficult theme. Bucur's narrative tells a complex story that few historians of Eastern and Central Europe could handle in such a sophisticated manner." --Canadian American Slavic Studies Indiana University Press Indiana University Press

"This is an ambitious and important contribution to the field of European memory studies and the study of war and its commemoration in the twentieth century." --Women's Studies Intnl Forum Indiana University Press

Maria Bucur is John W. Hill Chair in East European History and Associate Professor of History at Indiana University Bloomington. She is author of Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania and editor (with Nancy M. Wingfield) of Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (IUP, 2006).

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

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

1. Death and Ritual: Mourning and Commemorative Practices before 1914

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

3. Remembering the Great War through Autobiographical Narratives

4. The Politics of Commemoration in Interwar Romania, 1919-1940: Dialogues and Conflicts

5. War Commemorations and State Propaganda under Dictatorship: From the Crusade against Bolshevism to Ceausescu's Cult of Personality, 1940-1989

6. Everyone a Victim: Forging the Mythology of Anti-Communism Counter-Memory

7. The Dilemmas of Post-Memory in Post-Communist Romania

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index