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Heroes and Victims
Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania
Maria Bucur-Deckard (Author)
9780253221346
Paperback / softback, published 20 November 2009
376 pages, 24 b&w illus., 2 maps
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.5 cm, 0.544 kg
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.Volume 16 Issue 2 2011 [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. In this impressive study of Romanian memory from 1877-78 to 2007, historian Bucur demonstrates that Western-centric narratives cannot adequately explain eastern European experiences. . . . Highly recommended. [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. [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. 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.33.5 Sept-Oct 2010
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.
Contents Introduction: Memory Traces: On Local Practices of Remembering and Commemorating Notes
Preface
Acknowledgments
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
Selected Bibliography
Index