Heroes and Victims

Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania

Maria Bucur-Deckard, Maria Bucur, MariaBucur

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780253353788
• eBook ISBN: 9780253003911
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• 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