Georgescu, D; (2016) Between trauma and nostalgia: the intellectual ethos and generational dynamics of memory in postsocialist Romania. Südosteuropa , 64 (3) pp. 284-306. 10.1515/soeu-2016-0026.

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Abstract

In Romania, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism triggered a testimonial drive that shifted from early concerns with victimhood, justice, and retribution to seemingly apolitical revivals of everyday life under socialism. Drawing on a range of memoirs of socialist childhood published over the last decade by an aspiring generation of Romanian writers, this article examines the role of public intellectuals in articulating hegemonic representations of the socialist past. To understand both the enduring power and limits of such representations, the author argues that published recollections should not be read only for their (competing) perspectives on the past, but also for the sociopolitical effects they have in the transitional present, where they facilitate the socialization of emerging writers into the ethos of the postsocialist intelligentsia. Exploring the tenuous relationship between dominant intellectual discourses and social memory in postsocialist Romania, this article aims to throw light on the tensions at the heart of broader processes of democratization, diversification and commodification of social memory in Eastern Europe. In Romania, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism triggered a testimonial drive that was understandably dominated by victims of communist oppression and concerned with justice and retribution. Arriving in the wake of decades of state dominated public discourse, the flood of testimonies documenting state repression aimed to counter the official ‘falsification’ of communist history, revealing the violence of the Stalinist decades. Memories of early postwar violence thus converged with fresh recollections of the economic deprivations and indignities of the 1980s to strengthen the authority of personal experience, particularly the experience of suffering and victimization, in bearing witness to the recent past. That drive to record testimony fed into an emerging public discourse which, in its most forceful articulation by intellectuals and politicians, cast the communist past as a traumatic national experience. By comparison, the past decade has witnessed a gradual shift from early concerns with political repression, justice, and retribution to revivals of the social, cultural, and everyday experiences of late socialism. If the scope of social memory has widened to include everyday life, so has the chorus of public voices, which features artists, film directors, or bloggers alongside a cohort of aspiring writers, who spent their childhood and youth in Ceaușescu’s Romania (1965–1989) and came of age after the collapse of his regime. Not unlike the public intellectuals of the 1990s, this young generation draws on the authority of personal experience to join the public debate with collectively authored memoirs of childhood, youth, and family under socialism. How has this new generation of intellectuals changed the parameters of the debate about the socialist past? Who are their readers, and what do they tell us about the impact of intellectual discourse on social memory? How can an analysis of the production, promotion, and public consumption of their memoirs illuminate the wider processes of democratization, diversification, and commodification of social memory in postsocialist Romania and Eastern Europe? In addressing those questions, this article approaches the remembrance of communism as ‘an ongoing process of understanding, negotiation, and contestation’, on which the dynamics of the ‘transitional’ present have as much of a bearing as the past, if not more so.1 I argue that, although ostensibly focused on the socialist past, memoirs of socialist childhood are distinctive products of current political and economic dynamics as well as of social aspirations. Published memoirs reflect not only their authors’ competing ideological orientations and visions of the postsocialist present, but also wider concerns about marketability. Most importantly, they have concrete effects in the present, enabling the socialization of aspiring writers into the ethos of the postsocialist intelligentsia, an ethos that ascribes to public intellectuals tremendous powers of moral leadership and civic responsibility in teaching Romanian society how ‘to master’ the communist past. Public debates around this recent autobiographical wave were framed by pervasive representations of communism as collective ‘trauma’ or fears of its retrospective idealization in popular manifestations of ‘nostalgia’. Examining the political and cultural role of these representations, I approach ‘trauma’ and ‘nostalgia’ as ‘categories of practice’, i.e. as politically charged conceptions about memory deployed by social actors, rather than as ‘categories of analysis’ that could effectively illuminate the processes of postsocialist remembrance.2 To understand how ‘trauma’ and ‘nostalgia’ emerged as the poles of a discursive field on the function of memory, I also consider the transnational dynamics—whether the transferable German model of mastering the past or the impact of regional phenomena such as Ostalgie—that enhanced their symbolic power in national debates. My analysis will begin by examining the emergence of a hegemonic framework of remembrance of the socialist past in the contentious climate of political struggles of the 1990s

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