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.
By:
Maria Bucur-Deckard
Imprint: Indiana University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 235mm,
Width: 155mm,
Spine: 25mm
Weight: 28g
ISBN: 9780253221346
ISBN 10: 025322134X
Pages: 376
Publication Date: 20 November 2009
Audience:
College/higher education
,
A / AS level
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Unspecified
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
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).
Reviews for Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania
"""Heroes and Victims demonstrates not only how individual, local, and national discourses of remembrance have operated in the complex geopolitical and ethnic world of 20th-century Romania but also how and why post-communist Romanians and others in the 21st century have moved to a post-memory discourse."" Melissa Bokovoy, University of New Mexico ""An important book by one of the major emerging voices in east European studies."" Charles King, Georgetown University"
