romania revealed

The Shoah in Romania: Time to teach the history.

As Hungary continues its waltz with political anti-Semitism, Romanian citizens should demand a more thorough reckoning with their own history and the Shoah. According to an article in last month's issue of The Economist, many Romanians are still in the dark about their country's past.

The Holocaust wasn't part of Romania's school curriculum until 1998, and until 2004 many textbooks followed the communist line that the killings were something that happened somewhere else. In 2004 the state-backed Wiesel Commission issued a report on the Holocaust, leading to an official acknowledgement that killings and deportations took place on Romanian territory. Since 2005 secondary-school students have been able to take a special Holocaust course.

Yet no history faculty at Romanian universities offers a course on the Holocaust, notes Felicia Waldman, a professor at the University of Bucharest's Goldstein-Goren Hebrew Studies Centre. And so many history teachers graduate ill-equipped to teach the subject.

This is not for lack of historical records or information. In fact, the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive offers an amazing, moving, and very distressing collection of stories. Over 5,264 interviewees relate their experiences in Romania before, during, and after World War II. In total, 3,893 interviewees were born in cities in Romania but emigrated, or did not return, after the war. The USC Shoah Foundation includes rare materials like the 146 interviews in Romania and 129 interviews in the Romanian language.

The Romanian collection can be subdivided into three groups:

1. Survivors from Transylvania, the north western region occupied by Hungary during the war
2. Those from the north eastern provinces Bessarabia and Bukovina who were expelled into southern Ukraine (Transnistria)
3. Those from the Regat or "rump" portion of Romania

The largest part of the Romanian collection includes the 1,803 interviewees who were born in the provinces of Crisana Maramures and Transylvania, an area that had been part of Austria-Hungary until 1918. The majority of the Jewish survivors, including men like Martin Aron, from these areas fell under Hungarian occupation in 1940. Most were deported to local ghettos and subsequently to Auschwitz in 1944. Others, usually male survivors, were sent to work in the forced labor companies of the Hungarian army.

1941-1942 Deportation of Romanian Jews to Transnistria

Some 1,357 interviewees were born in the Romanian interwar provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina, which were annexed by the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940. One year later, in summer 1941, the German and Romanian armies occupied the area and deported most of the Jewish population to Transnistria, the area of south-western Ukraine between the rivers Dniester and Bug that the Romanians occupied until 1944. There, they were kept in often appalling conditions in ghettos, camps, and colonies, and were subject to mass execution, forced labor, and disease. Some managed to avoid deportation and remained in the ghetto in Cernauti.

The 733 interviewees who were born in the Regat, the Old Kingdom area which remained Romania before, during, and after World War II, had very different wartime experiences. The Holocaust history of this region is less well known. While most Jews in the Regat mostly avoided the excesses of the Holocaust, they faced poor treatment at home. A small number of work camps (Cobadin, Craiova, Osmancea, Targu-Jiu) and ghettos (Ismail, Bacau) are discussed. In more than 100 testimonies, interviewees talk about their compulsory involvement in forced labor groups under the auspices of the Romanian army. The archive includes survivors of the Iasi pogrom, the largest massacre of Jews conducted on Romanian soil.

LEARN THE LESSONS:

"The Holocaust in Romania: Uncovering A Dark Chapter", a paper by Iulia Padeanu
"The Banality of History and Memory: Romanian Society and the Holocaust" by Laurence Wienbaum (Jewish Virtual Library)
"Murder of the Jews in Romania" (Yad Vashem)
Dan Sova comes to his senses (The Times of Israel) 
"Legacies of a Traumatic Past in Romanian Jews' Artwork" by Dana Mihailescu
Wiesel Commission (Wikipedia) 
Czernowitz-L Discussion Group with images, memories, and maps 
The Shoah in Romania (romania revealed) 

Derrida and the art of Bucuresti.

Grafitti somewhere on a wall in Bucuresti, October 2011.

Deconstruction is not a theory that simply applies, deconstruction is, I consider deconstruction, what happens, is what happens.

So, you don`t have to, let`s say, rhetorically and dangerously speak of deconstruction when something is destroyed.......

The fact that in some of the works there is no frame, does not mean there is no frame: there is a frame that is not simply circumscribing the work, but which is constituted by the very form so that, we know where to remove the work.

It wouldn`t be any work of art without a frame, especially where there is a market. If you want to identify a work of art and put it on a wall in a gallery or to sell it on the market, you have to have a frame.

There would be no field of art, no history of art, no discourse on art, and no market without a frame.

And then there are artists that attempt to remove, to destroy or to deconstruct if you want, to question the very existence, the very effect of the frame, but then, they have to disappear as artists producing works of art.

The idea of art cannot be, let`s say, constituted or dealth with without some frame.

Excerpted from "Deconstruction Is What Happens: An Open Discussion with Jacques Derrida"

"How not to run a country", says The Economist.

An unflattering picture of Romanian politics emerges from this article in The Economist. An excerpt:

IT LOOKED like April Fool's Day. On Tuesday lawmakers from Romania's ruling Democratic Liberal Party (PDL), including ministers, voted to slash VAT on food and eliminate income tax on pensions worth less than €500. It seemed an odd thing to do, given that the government had raised VAT to its current level only a few months earlier, as part of a deal with the IMF.

Oops. It was an "error", said the finance minister. The MPs had actually thought they were voting to scrap the two proposals. The PDL is now hoping that the president will not sign the bill into law, and is fast-tracking a new draft to "correct" the mistake. The government may also adopt an "emergency ordinance" to fix the problem.

But this latest blunder fits into a weary tradition of dysfunctional policy-making in Romania, where laws often appear to be drafted minutes before parliamentary votes with little thought to long-term strategy or financial impact.

A review of the Romanian government's structures drafted by the World Bank and seen by The Economist speaks of a "prevalence of ad-hoc decision making" and slams the "frequent use" of emergency ordinances that override approved parliamentary laws. Despite plans announced five years ago to measure results against plans, nothing of the sort has taken place, the document reads. There is also no prioritising of policies and "laws are commonly approved without adequate funding."

The review issues a series of recommendations on how to improve national decision-making. Such proposals are nothing new, says Alina Mungiu-Pippidi from the Hertie School of governance in Berlin.

"In the last decade, Romania received a lot of advice, technical assistance and funding to improve its policy formulation and implementation capacity", she says. "Romania's quality of governance might not have induced the 2009-2010 crisis, but it does seem increasingly that it contributed to its severity and duration."

On the Romanian horizon.

+ An ancestor's assistant named Romania. 

+ The Italian ambassador is "forging new links between Romania and Italy". 

+ Meanwhile, four young Romanians are arrested in Italy for robbery.

+ President Basescu says he supports Israel and Palestine as "separate states". 

+ Over 3,000 Romanian Catholics protest the government's treatment in Bucharest.

+ Foreign currencies prove a profitable investment for the first half of 2009.

+ Mark Gitenstein is confirmed as the US ambassador to Romania.

+ Dr. James F. McGrath marvels over the rumor mills in Romania, while I marvel at his suggestions that Romania is a tribal society most akin to what one might find in North Africa. Granted, some Romanians put their stock in unusual and even silly beliefs, but more than half of Americans believed W. Bush bombed Iraq to save us from weapons of mass destruction. For even more silly, ridiculous American beliefs, take a little visit to the Fox News website.

+ CEOWorld has all the details on Nabucco, and the demise of Russia's energy monopoly.

+ Romania's car park renewal program, Rabla, offers opportunities for leasing and buying.

Romania exports a volkisch terrorist to Hungary.

A Romanian citizen from  Sambrias, Szasz Endre Istvan, was placed under preventive arrest for 30 days in Hungary, under charges of terrorism. Hungarian authorities describe Istvan as "part of a far-right movement that carried out attacks against socialist members of parliament." Police believe he was planning a bomb attack on the home of lawmaker Laszlo Esodi. For those unfamiliar with the current scene in Hungary, there have been a number of attacks by right-wing nationalists on liberal politicians. Istvan's name suggests he might be of Hungarian origin. If he was indeed planning such an attack, then he is part of an extreme nationalist movement in Hungary with irredentist claims to Transylvania. 

The Romanian attaché to the Ministry of Interior in Bucharest, Ioan Bente, says the Romanian was arrested on May 15 in Hungary, under charges of terrorism. He was wanted by the police under suspicion that he held suspect materials. Bente believes Istvan did not act alone:

"Some one month ago, the Hungarian police unfolded some raids following several attacks (...) There was an investigations, there was a circle of suspects and the trail led to the home of Szasz Endre Istvan, where authorities found various materials. He wasn’t arrested then. Police arrested him Friday (May 15), while he was in a house in Budapest. The second day, police and the prosecutor presented the case before the court with a proposition for 29-day preventive arrest. The judge allowed the request, thus he is now under preventive arrest for 30 days," Bente explained. 

Additional reasons to believe that Istvan was involved with Hungarian nationalist extremists can be found in a statement by Alin Serbanescu, spokesperson for the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Serbanescu told Mediafax "that the ministry has unfolded procedures for the identification of the citizen through the Romanian Embassy to Budapest, but Romanian authorities cannot intervene because the suspect has not issued a consular assistance request".

Sources: SE Times + Mediafax 

The 20,000 Slovaks living in Romania.

The Slovaks living in Romania make up 0.1% of the population. Since 0.1% is close the percentage of genius minds around the world, I thought I'd feature the Slovaks of Romania.

According to wikipedia, the Slovak ethnic minority numbers about 17,1999 people according to the 2002 census. Most Slovaks live in western Romania, with the largest populations centered in Bihor and Arad counties, where they comprise 1.22% and 1.25% of the population, respectively. The largest concentration of ethnic Slovaks is found in the town of Nadlac, where they make up almost half of the population. Being an officially-recognized ethnic minority allows Slovaks to share one seat in the Romanian Chamber of Deputies with their old friends, the Czechs.

Slovaks migrated to Romania in three successive waves. Most adhered to Roman Catholic or Protestant faiths, though geographic discrepancies exist, with Slovaks from Arad and the Banat being primarily Protestant. Nadlac was the hot-seat for ethnic Slovak identity in Romania. In 1976, Slovakian writers founded the Ivan Krasko Literary Society (now the Ivan Krasko Cultural and Scientific Society) following the publication of Slovak Romanians in Romania. 1989 brought more freedom for the Slovaks with the founding of the Democratic Union of Czechs and Slovaks in Romania, the re-establishment of the Evangelical Lutheran Slovakian Archdiocese, and the opening of the first Slovakian printing house.

For more on Slovaks in Romania:

• Jana Cavojska documented the daily life of these Slovak Romanians in her impressive photos (one of which is featured in this post).
• Eliznik has a chart with precise numbers and dates of Slovak population migrations in Romania.
• "Slovaks in Romania: The Past and the Present" by Ivana Sustekova.
• Ondrej Stefanko's article about Romanian Slovaks published in Plural provided information for this post and deserves attention.
• A thorough post on Slovak-Hungarian relations at Hungarian Spectrum.
• Slovaks from "the lower land".
• Embassy of the Slovak Republic in Romania.

A Romanian-Alabamian's dream come true.

What could a Romanian residing in Alabama possibly desire that would require an invocation of this dual identity? What would satisfy the hunger usually sated by Southern soul food spiced with mamaliga, sarmalute, and ciorba? Where does the dark mustiness of Southern literature nestle comfortably alongside the skittish combustibility of Romanian writing?

Forget the fact that I am a globalized mutt who has developed an intense mistrust of any kennel-- American or Romanian-- and prefers to live in cars where the windows are open. Forget my own misgivings about nationalism, patriotism, self-esteem, and resume voyeurism. Forget everything I've ever said or suggeted about politics and conspiracy and other forms of failed literature. For there is hope and excitement on the Romanian horizon. The Observer Translation Project aims to bridge the language barrier by providing translations of previously untranslated fictional gems. For those who long enchanted by the misgivings of the Romanian pen, this project is an oasis.

A Romanian writer is highlighted in every issue, thus opening the doors of cross-cultural discourse for the discovery of relics and treasures. Apart from translating novels, stories, and essays, the Project includes critical essays and translation notes.

Dip into pathological memory and the nostalgia of the return, the exile's tattoo, the dissident's favorite pair of blue jeans, the stoicism of Soviet toilets, Napoleon in Bucharest, the social stasis facilitated by intellectuals glorifying the ditch as the best abode, token immortalities, the heady drum-beat of a wasted morning, dinners with the devil or the pope, the din inside the artist's head, the cosmic significance of dark bodies, and so much more.

[The photo was taken by Miri Bratu. ]

The re-construction of Romanian civil society.

Romania's gradual evolution from one of the most repressive communist dictatorships to a European market democracy continues to astound many scholars and academics, who cited Ceausescu's complete annihilation of Romanian civil society as an almost insurmountable obstacle to transition. How did civil society develop in the Romanian transition period? How did the narrative of the 1989 revolution adjust to revelations of the National Salvation Front's communist ties? How did the Romanian people find a way to claim the revolution as their own and thereby legitimize the movement towards a European democracy?

Julia Brotea and Daniel Beland's paper, "“Better Dead than Communist!” Contentious Politics, Identity Formation, and the University Square Phenomenon in Romania", traces the Romanian struggle to construct a livable national identity in the wake of communism. The authors attempt to show that "the political identity gained during the University Square Phenomenon and the repertoire for political protest it generated played a decisive role in its aftermath and the naissance of a democratic civil society in Romania".

The persecution of the Greek-Catholic Church under communism.

In a paper for the Nicolae Iorga Institute backed by information from the Securitate archives, Cristian Vasile probed the perception of the Securitate on relations between the Vatican and Greek Catholics in Romania. Vasile offers an introduction to the historical issue:

After December 1, 1948 the Romanian Greek Catholic Church was banned and many of its clergy were injailed under the pretext of political offences or even "spying activity”, whereas their only “fault” was the fidelity to their faith. The Communist authorities tried to break the Greek Catholic faithful’s resistance even through the agency of absurd measures, such as the removal of the Romanian language from the Transylvanian Catholic Latin-Rite churches, for instance. Even after 1965, the Greek Catholics, especially priests and prelats (honourable persons like bishops Iuliu Hossu, Alexandru Todea, Iuliu Hirţea, Ioan Dragomir and Ioan Ploscaru) were considered as “dangerous elements”, and they were put under strict surveillance by the Securitate; they could not leave the country for the sittings of the Second Vatican Council although the Holy See invited them.

Among other things, Vasile's paper looks at Greek Catholic dissidents, including Doina Cornea, Viorica Hesia, Puiu Neamtu, and Maria Angelin. The persecution of the Greek Orthodox Church by the Romanian communist regime marks another sad chapter in the history of Romanian communism. For more on this topic:

• The Romanian Greek Catholic Church has a very resourceful website with lots of information in English.
• Memorandum to the Romanian State from the Greek-Catholic Believers from Romania and from the Entire World, September 2002.
• A document from a meeting in Sibiu 2007 in which the Romanian Orthodox and Greek-Catholic churches are declared "sister churches". 
• Romanian Greek-Catholic Church History through the ages.
• For the specific history of a congregation, the History of St. Mary's Parish and of the Romanian Catholic Church is excellent.
• The Dintre Brazi Church (picture in this post) is the oldest Romanian church in Sibiu.
  

Life in Romania circa 1986 according to Pavel Campeanu.

In1986, Pavel Câmpeanu, a Romanian sociologist who had built his career on support for socialism and who had shared a prison cell with Nicoale Ceauşescu during World War II, smuggled out an article which was subsequently published anonymously by a purported "visitor to Romania" in the New York Review of Books. At the time, it was assumed that the Securitate punished and assasinated dissidents even after they left the country.

The article is significant for its detailed description of the painfully bleak quality of life for Romanians living through the final years of Ceausescu's national socialism. I've excerpted a bit, but the article is well-written and worth reading in full:

One of my friends said that to understand the recent developments I must first consult a decree by the Council of State of the Romanian Socialist Republic issued on October 10, 1981. The exact text ran as follows:

It shall constitute illegal trading activities and, in accordance with the terms set down in the Penal Code, shall be punishable by six months to five years in prison, to purchase from any state commercial center or cooperative store, either with a view to hoarding or in any quantity that exceeds the requirements of a family for a period of a month, oil, sugar, wheat or corn flour, rice, coffee and all other foodstuffs the hoarding of which might affect the interests of other consumers and proper provisioning of the population.

Since then, he said, the situation has changed drastically. Coffee can no longer be bought by private citizens and has been replaced by an ersatz substance disapproved of by physicians, which the public, guessing at the ingredients, has nicknamed "henna." Meat, buttermilk, and bread are rationed in most districts, sugar and cooking oil throughout the country—and the ration is much more generous than the shops charged with distributing them can supply.

Since 1968, it should be explained, Romania has been divided into more than forty districts, each with a Party secretary, who is its supreme head. He is responsible for delivering a quota of food from his district to the central government—a task that must give him bad dreams. For it poses an insoluble problem: if he distributes locally less food than is called for by the plan—as he is virtually obliged to do—he will be popular with the authorities but held in contempt by the people of the district; and if he tries to help the population get more food, he will be unpopular with the authorities. Everyone has a different approach to the same dilemma—for even in the CP no district secretary is quite like another—and this psychological diversity makes for diversity in the distribution of food shortages throughout the country. In Cluj or Pitesti the situation, I was told, is frankly horrible; in Sibiu or Vilcea it is merely wretched. Thousands go from district to district on shopping excursions from which they often return empty-handed.

Romania seems unique in many ways. It is the only European country in which one can be sentenced to five years in prison for buying excessive quantities of food that is generally unavailable to the public. It is also, in my experience, the only such country in which the legal work week is forty-six hours and the urban population often spends three to four hours a day shopping for groceries. In Romania President Ceausescu takes upon himself to compose lyrics for a new national anthem, rather than entrusting the task to a poet. And in spite of a republican form of government of which he is the constitutional head, the president carries a scepter and is grooming his son as his successor.

Workers often spend entire days waiting for raw materials that their factory cannot obtain. If they leave the premises without permission or bring alcoholic beverages, or cigarettes, or lighters, or matches onto the shop floor, they are regarded as having broken the law and can receive prison sentences from three months up to two years (Decree 400 of December 29, 1981, Article 18).

Ceausescu's communist monarchy and the role of jokes in postcommunist history.

Ben Lewis directed a documentary film in 2002, When Propaganda Ruled: Nicolae Ceausescu, King of Communism, intended to put Ceausescu's theatrical propaganda skills center-stage. For those interested in the personality cult developed by Ceausescu in the 1970's and 1980's, this film is a gold mine. It documents the absurdity of life under the Ceausescu personality cult, including grimy and humiliating details of daily rituals and symbolic rites. According to this film, newspapers were required "to mention his name 40 times on every page" and "factory workers spent months rehearsing dance routines for huge shows at which thousands of citizens were lined up to form the words Nicolae Ceausescu with their bodies".

Lewis used Ceausescu's own archive of propaganda films to make this documentary, and the truth therein is stranger than fiction and more mind-numbing than the cliche-infested chatter of cocktail parties. In an interview with the BBC, Lewis discusses how he got the idea for his more recent film, Hammer and Tickle: The History of the Communist Joke, while hanging out in Romania with his friends listening to the many jokes they told to pass the time. He notes that the atrocity of communism is best understood through the humorous ways in which people dealt with it:

"First I observed that there was this anonymous body of literature in communist countries, namely the jokes. Then I asked former citizens of communist states if they remembered the jokes. They all replied with a tangible passion and enthusiasm, that these jokes were important to them. They told me ones I hadn't yet heard spontaneously, and told me how they used to spend evenings round the kitchen table telling each other political jokes. That convinced me that the jokes were important - they not only had a significance as historical documents, they had an emotional significance to the people who told them. I don't know if communism 'depends' on humour but it is, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, a humour-producing machine. The absurdities of communist economic theory, and the obvious gap between what the state said was happening and what people were experiencing in their daily lives, was in itself absurd and ridiculous and therefore humorous. As one interviewee told me "Reality contained jokes, and the jokes contained reality."

Lewis fascination with the communist joke led him to write an essay, "Hammer and Tickle" (pdf version), for The Prospect, in which he reveals some fascinating history:

In 1950-51, a group of Harvard anthropologists undertook one of the most influential research projects of the postwar era. The US government wanted to find out how Soviet citizens might react if the US invaded Russia. So the academics interviewed thousands of displaced Russian citizens living in camps in Germany. When asked to describe what Soviet society was like, the refugees told jokes: "Did you hear the one about the sheep who tried to leave the USSR? They were stopped at the border by a guard…." "Why do you wish to leave Russia?" the guard asked. "It's the secret police," replied the sheep. "Stalin has ordered them to arrest all the elephants." "But you aren't elephants." "Try telling that to the secret police."

In the 1950s, the New York Times Magazine would devote the odd page to jokes from the Harvard project. From the 1960s onwards, volumes of communist jokes were published in paperback form in Europe and North America. Willy Brandt was a renowned communist joke-teller, but there was one western politician who took the jokes more seriously than anyone else: Ronald Reagan. He ordered the state department to collect the jokes and send them to him in weekly memos. As a result, Paul Goble, head of the Balkan desk in the 1980s, assembled a collection of 15,000 communist jokes. Reagan often used Goble's gags in his speeches and negotiations. When Gorbachev came to Washington, Reagan told him a communist joke, later boasting at a press conference that he had laughed. The joke, which made fun of the communist theory that a transitional era of socialism was preceding the communist utopia, went like this: Two men are walking down a street in Moscow. One asks the other, "Is this full communism? Have we really passed through socialism and reached full communism?" The other answers "Hell, no. It's gonna get a lot worse first."

Here is a YouTube bit on the communist queen Elena from Lewis' movie. And here is Ben Lewis on the Internet Movie Database.

Doina Cornea's Securitate file.

The Securitate files remain a complicated and dark part of recent Romanian history. In 2002, Le Monde published an article about the selective opening of the files. In this article, they profiled Doina Cornea's experience with her own files:

"I’ve always liked a cigarette with my coffee,” Doina Cornea continues. “At one point, I was contacted by a young African who was studying in Romania. He told me how much he admired me, and offered to carry my protest letters to the West. Each time he came to visit me, he would bring a packet of coffee, something you didn’t often see at that time. I suspected this young man was up to something, and my husband told me to stop accepting his gifts. But I always took his coffee. For a year, I drank coffee which I imagined was paid for by the Securitate, and had a lot of fun sending their informer off on wild goose chases. It turns out I was right. When I was able to read my file, I found reports the student had written about me. Sometimes he would exaggerate so as to look good. This is typical of informers. They make certain things out to be bigger than they are, so as to seem invaluable to their bosses.”

It was in April 2001 that Doina Cornea made her first request to see her secret police file. She had to jump a series of bureaucratic hurdles, but eventually, 28 voluminous files were opened to her on condition she go consult them in Bucharest, more than 400 kilometers (250 miles) from where she lives. “It’s been tough,” she admits. “My pension isn’t big enough to pay for frequent trips to Bucharest, or to pay for all the photocopying I’d have to do. I don’t think I’ll live long enough to read all they wrote about me.”

In spite of the revelations of human deception occasioned by her files, Cornea is glad she made the decision to see them.

“I’m happy and at peace. The past hasn’t spoiled my friendships. I still see friends who know that I know. We don’t ever speak of this, but I think all Romanians should go see their own file and get to know themselves better, because we can’t move forward by hiding behind lies.” The truth hurts, though. The truth is that the Securitate would not have succeeded in its totalitarian enterprise without the help of many ordinary Romanians. The secret police with its 20,000 or so officers could never have kept watch on several million people. The Securitate’s secret, so to speak, was its ability to recruit some 600,000 informers from among the men and women in the street. According to a study done by the Romanian Political Prisoners Association, 39 percent of the informers were university-educated, while 37 percent had finished high school. An even more troubling statistic: Just 1.5 percent of the collaborators were paid and 1.5 percent were blackmailed, while fully 97 percent were motivated purely by “political and patriotic feeling.”

In an interview with Ziua last year, Cornea noted that Romanians have gotten used to being ordered around. The post-communist period has been more difficult because everyone is a little "lost" or disoriented, searching for a leader or a scapegoat. Cornea also shares her perspectives on Romanian politicians, monarchy, and civil society in this interview. She does not appear to have suffered for seeing her Securitate file.

Perhaps the emigre situation is different. Every year, as we purchase our tickets to visit Romania, my mother struggles with the decision of whether to request her files. She is sure that the files will be damning, for a defector in 1979 was nothing if not an enemy of the communist state. Selfishly, I hope that this year, she will make the appeal. My interests are impure-- I am fascinated by history, seduced by the prospect of first-hand accounts of the communist bureaucracy, haunted by dreams of bygone totalitarianisms.

10 links on restitution in Romania.

1. Anna Maria Nitoi, "Victims of Communism Cash In", The Diplomat, October 2008.
2. Eugene Tomiuc, "Former Monarch Wins Restitution Claim", Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, 30 June 2005.
3. Andrew Cusak, "The Restitution of Romanian Castles", 27 January 2006.
4. "Romania loses a dozen property restitution lawsuits in European Human Rights Court", International Herald Tribune, 12 February 2008.
5. "Four-fifths of Bucharest restitution claims remain unresolved", The Diplomat, October 2008.
6. Wolf Theiss, "Changes enacted to real estate laws", International Financial Law Review, September 2005.
7. Karin Popescu, "Logging and land restitution threaten Romania's forests", Reuters, 15 July 1998.
8. Fondul Proprietatea. 
9. "Property Restitution: What Went Wrong in Romania?", SAR Policy Brief No. 34, September 2008.
10. Lavinia Stan, "The Roof Over Our Heads: Property Restitution in Romania", Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, June 2006.
    

"Anti-nostalgia links".

"On the level of historical insight and political thought there prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilizations is at a breaking point. Although it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in others, it can nowhere provide the guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors…

The conviction that everything that happens of earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden that our century has placed on us — neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality — whatever it may be…

We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain."

I thoroughly enjoyed chasing the "anti-nostalgia links" posted at O'Connor's Opinions-- enough, in fact, to start working on an anti-nostalgia links list of my own. Hat tip to the O'Connors for the inspiration. And due respect to Hannah Arendt for the above-listed quote from the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism (a.k.a. my guidebook).                                      

• "The Gulag Archipelago in Romania: The Story No One Has Told Before" by Sandro Magister. This includes information garnered from the Vatican.
• Memo from Henry Kissinger to President Nixon on May 15, 1973 urging "high priority" relationship between US and Romania.
• "Behind the Facade of the Ceausescu Regime" by Vladimir Tismaneanu for RFE/RL
• The names, the short sentences describing their fate, the condemnations, the many who simply disappeared.
• The archives of Romanian state television in the 1970's.
• The Museum of Communism, created by one of my favorite people in Arlington, Virginia.
• Cum era? Cam asa: Memories of Romania's Communist Years edited by Calin-Andrei Mihailescu with excerpt at link.
• Bless This Prison video from Fundation ICAR.
• "Pioneers Forever" by Vasile Ernu.
• "The Legacy of Elena Ceausescu" by Catherine Lovatt for Central European Review

Donald Dunham's dissertation on Romanian art.

The Romanians are a social phenomenon. As a nation among nations, they are westerners evolved in the East. They are Latins surrounded by Slavs. They are Romans two thousand years away from Rome. They are contemporaries re-produced on Trajan’s Column.

They are peasants with the utmost in sophistication. They farm instinctively, but are suspicious of machinery. They speak a language like Italian but the majority of their words are Slavonic. They are superstitious but religious at the same time. They are astutely intelligent, but refuse to be intellectual. They submit to invasion but preserve their identity. They support great wealth and extreme poverty. They produce striking beauty yet can live in filth.

As a collective personality, the Romanians are Oriental in their souls although Latin on the surface. Their patience is almost unending but they are quick to explode in argument; they are peace-loving yet would disintegrate without controversy. They are passive but strong in their resistance; spontaneously adaptable, still difficult t influence. They are romantic but never escape from reality.

They are charming yet cruel in their ridicule, warmly emotional but calculating, generous yet concentrate on the ‘main chance.’ They are opportunistic but lose interest after they have gained the advantage; they seize the moment, still adopt the long view.

The Romanians are a people of colorful contrasts and extreme extremes, born in classic times, ravaged by barbarians, indentured to the Turks, dominated by the Byzantines, the Greeks, dictated to by the Hungarians, Poles, Austrians and others, seduced by the French and not recognized as a country until 1878. Yet they emerge with a character that defies this confusion, that is definitely, emphatically, unmistakably Romanian. This character was born of a Dacian shepherd and a Roman lass, whose progeny became dwellers with nature itself, epicureans with earthy values and a tough constitution.

It developed in composition and grew in strength under the invasions of waves of barbarians. Slavs were added to the original Dacians and the Roman colonizers. Christianization was extended in Wallachia and Moldavia by the Byzantine Church and intrigue was introduced as a science by the Greek ruling emissaries of the Sublime Porte. With the intrigue came the Greek culture of the mind – the analytical clarity of the Mediterraneans – which evaporated as Greek, as it was quickly absorbed as Romanian. Following this permeation came the magnetic seduction by Paris and the synthetic adoption of French-Western artistic values, by those classes who would afford to visit the “Rive Gauche” and return.

Today you find the cult of the mind imbedded as an element of character in all classes second only to emotional spontaneity as a national characteristic. The Greeks were more successful than the French because they came to Romania and did not make Romanians come to them, and because their main influence was middle class and thereby could infect those classes both above and below them. The French appealed to aristocracy; the upper and wealthy classes of Romania went to Paris yearning to prove themselves by Gallic standards, perhaps eventually to return to the country of their birth to demonstrate their cultural acquisitions.

It was 1947. The Soviets were stationed in Romania under the auspices of the Allied Commission.

Donald Dunham wrote his doctoral dissertation for Professor George Oprescu, who, at the time, was secretary of the International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. The subject of his dissertation, Rumanian Profile: A Study of National Character as Reflected in the Visual Arts, dove-tailed with the assumptions of the European nation-state. It was submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Letters on May 20th, 1948. Dunham introduced it as follows:

Rumanian Profile is a study of the character of the Rumanian people as reflected in their visual arts. It is based on the contention that man is better analyzed by his artistic achievements than by his behavior, that the history of art in many respects is a more exact commentary on a country than its political history.

Dunham provides a brief history of the Romanian nation and then begins to examine the relationship between a people and their national arts. He looks at the artistic traditions of the Romanian elite as they developed under Greek-Byzantine influence (particularly in architecture) and under French influence during the 19th century (particularly in painting). He explores parallels between the Romanian national painter Nicolae Grigorescu and the American expatriate James Whistler. Dunham contrasts the elite traditions with the peasant traditions, using embroidery as the medium for describing peasant art.

While Dunham deals richly with the artistic traditions of Moldavia and Wallachia, he does not touch upon the traditions of Transylvania. Dunham excuses this on the grounds that Moldavia and Wallachia, the original provinces of unified Romania, "possess the essential ingredients while the other areas are culturally on the periphery". However, in a conversation with Ernest H. Latham, Jr., Dunham suggested that the real reason for this exclusion was that his status as an American diplomat in the postwar period made it impossible for him to get permission to travel to Transylvania and other regions. He didn't want to write about architecture and art which he was unable to view in person. In this sense, his dissertation failed to adequately portray the relationship between the Romanian "national character" and its artistic traditions.

Despite its limitations, Dunham's dissertation is remarkable in the fact that it was "the first American doctorate conferred in Romania", according to the roundtable convened with that title by the Association of Friends of the United States in June 1995. It exemplifies the role of history as inculcator of national values and creator of national identity. Dunham's appreciation for Romanian people and culture might sound a little expansive to modern ears, but it is an excellent historical document.

An excerpt from his dissertation dealing with Wallachian architecture and Byzantine influence is available online courtesy of Plural magazine. The excerpt quoted at the beginning of this post is also available from Plural.

9 great articles on the Romanian revolution.

1. "Romania's Bloody Revolution" by William Horsley for BBC News
2. "The Glorious Revolution" from Radio Romania International
3. "The Role of Religion in the Romanian Revolution" by Earl A. Poe
4. "The Political Regrouping of the Romanian Nomenklatura during the 1989 Revolution" by Raluca Grosescu
5. "Romania's Revolution of 1989: An Enduring Enigma" by Donald G. McNeil Jr. for The New York Times
6. "Whose Revolution in Eastern Europe" by Michael Eliot Howard for Harper's Magazine
7. "Politicienii si revolutia din 1989"
8. "What Should Be Required Viewing for Anyone Interested in the Romanian Revolution of 1989 (or Denial Takes A Bloody Bow" posted by Richard Andrew Hall (including tons of links, video footage, and information)
9. "The Revolutions of 1989: Causes, Meanings, and Consequences" , a paper by Vladimir Tismaneanu

Norman Manea's "Compulsory Happiness".

If happiness is a choice, then what does it become when compelled? Norman Manea's collection of novellas, Compulsory Happiness, toys with "the institutional optimism" required by a systemic application of communist ideology whose results insist, contrary to physical evidence, on the best life for everyone. These four novellas were written in Romanian during the deepest murk of the Ceausescu dictatorship. One was published in Romanian in 1981, the others in German in 1988 or 1989. They were first collected in a single volume in French.

The novellas do not follow the conventional plot scheme. Instead, the reader is invited inside the head (or perhaps only inside the room) of a person/s living in fear, intellectually bound by an ideology so inconsistent that insanity is not a plea but a mentality. Manea writes with the clean-cut despair of Kafka, but, unlike Kafka, manages to address human relationships and the external world with nostalgia. There are no conclusions or plot resolutions-- only a hovering, contagious terror that poisons the thoughts, loves, relationships, and hopes of its citizens.

In "The Interrogation", a young woman prisoner is tortured and starved as the secret police attempt to get information about her intellectual associates. However, when it is decided that the Plenipotentiary will meet with her, the prison wards immediately feed her caviar and insist that she begin to behave "normally", or at least offer the pretense to "normalcy", for the Plenipotentiary, despite his big name, is very sensitive to that which lies outside the realm of the normal. During the meeting, the Plenipotentiary asks questions and then tells the young prisoner that he is appreciated because his reports come to "an optimistic conclusion, the compulsory optimism, the institutional optimism" required by a system with the pretension to absolute control.

"Composite Biography" takes Ceausescu's infatuation with control to its absurd conclusion-- an systemic attack on "chance", or luck, which does not play into official plans. The novella is lengthy, but the most interesting part occurs when a Comrade proposes that the winners of national lotteries should no longer be selected by lot but, instead, "chosen from deserving citizens" to "avoid the injustices caused by chance". Here we get a frightening view of the central-planning mindset taken to its logical extreme. At this extreme, even luck (not to mention nature) is an enemy of the state, especially if this state mandates happiness.

According to the Comrade, this is "ideologically consistent with the concepts of dialectical materialism regarding the world, life, and the active role of man, who is not subject to fate, but is the master and creator of events".

Did the end of communism usher in a rightful heir in fatalism? After all, if Romanian communism, which purported to uproot fate and empower man, was revealed as a sham, what was left to believe? Clearly the communist experiment dealt a blow to the idea of human agency and responsibility, particularly in creating and sustaining a culture which repeatedly denied both. In "Composite Biography", for example, the protagonist suffers from a "generalized syndrome" which he witnesses in others. He believes this syndrome is due to an inability to make, do, or be anything anymore, since everything is decided by others. The Party members are "Puppets" dancing on their pre-ordained strings; the non-Party members are silent shadows, not real or strong enough to assert physicality. The ultimate goal is "to control chance"-- the become the gods which have been dethroned.

Of course, there is more.... just not in my words:

• The best bio I've found on Manea so far is this one.
• "A Lasting Poison", an article by Manea in which he remarks upon Milan Kundera's claims that communism never happened.
• "Norman Manea on the lasting poison of Stalinism" via podcast.
• Unlike Herbert Mitgang, I think the word "satire" is far too flimsy and loaded with Western regalia to do Manea's work justice. Instead, i prefer to say that he draws on the tradition of using the absurd to convey the problems of meaning and life under totalitarianism.
• Don't miss Michael Shafir's "The Man They Love to Hate: Norman Manea's 'Snail House' Between the Holocaust and the Gulag" in PDF format.

A cornucopia of thoughts on Romanian fatalism.

Nae Ionescu gathered a group of despairing young men about him and began to theorize. These men would later speak about the impossibilities of speaking to everyone around them.

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Mircea Vulcanescu died insisting that there could be no true revenge-- that no action possessed the power to create a hero, that the struggle for freedom was its own prison. The communists arrested him in 1946. Convicted as a war criminal, he was sentenced to 8 years in prison.

Fellow prisoners told the story of his death: he and a group of 12 other convicts form his cell were all punished to stay naked, without any clothes or chairs, in a very cold and wet cavern in the prison's dungeon, for reciting poetry (poetry was very popular in prisons that communists used to condemn people just for being intellectuals; it was one of the few resorts of resisting the mental torture). An young man fell to the floor, risking to die of a lung disease, and Mircea Vulcănescu practically forced him to stay on top of him, rather than on the wet stone floor, and thus saved his life. He said: "I'm an old man, how can I let a young man like you die?". Yet he was only 48, an age many do not regard as "old". Soon after this, the young man was better, but Mircea Vulcănescu developed pneumonia, and soon after he died. His last words to the world were: "Do not avenge us!"

His death, of course, remains unavenged. As he wished.

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Constantin Noica believed Romanians fell under the spell of determinism. Some things were fated.

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Stan Farnya sees an organic connection between Romanian fatalism and the rise of what he calls the "new fascism". From the fomer fascism of the Ionescu school to the "new fascism" stands a great gulf. But Farnya sees the seeds. And he believes the soil is well-nourished.

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The Filter, citing the Romanian response to a pile of rotting meat, can't see the fatalism for the trees. 

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The Union for the Reconstruction of Romania, goes so far as to limit membership to applicants who do not subscribe to the tenets of "Romanian fatalism". Members argue on sidewalks about the complacency of the pensioners perched on park benches.

If people only undertook those initiatives whose success was guaranteed we would all still be living in caves and pick fruit with sticks. The only guarantee we have is our name and reputation. You can believe us and come with us to take action to solve the many problems our country faces or sit on the fence to see what happens and wait for guarantees. Skepticism is a legitimate attitude but, unfortunately, not at all constructive. This precise attitude of the people allowed the political class to degenerate to the parasitic stage it is in today. Sociologists call this a "self-fulfilling prophecy". This means that if you strongly believe that something, good or bad, will happen then the chance of that event to happen significantly increases. The explanation is very simple: what you believe will influence the way you act and your attitude influences the events around the particular event. In our particular case, skepticism and fence-riding generates inactivity and negative thinking which in turn makes one see more the mistakes than successes which in turn produces inactivity and more inactivity. But changes don't come by magic, they need activism and energy. So the initiative will fail: bingo! You were right! "Just another political party, did I not tell you?" Isn't it wonderful to be always right? Even if it serves no purpose? This is the Romanian fatalism at work and it has already turned us into a spectator nation.

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In An Ontological Definition of the Romanian National Identity, Mihaela Alexandra Pop cites Vulcanescu's view that Romanians tend towards a "theophanic" identification rather than an individualist one-- they accept what comes as part of the universal order in which struggle is just the other side of foolishness. Rather than nourish a Protean self-understanding, Romanian folk tales and stories reward the man who sits back and thanks God for the troubles in life, as well as the freedom from responsibility for the outcomes.

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An executive study entitled "The Evolution of Mentalities in Eastern Europe and the Future of the European Project" from a summer school session asserts:

Romanian intellectuals such as Mihail Sebastian, Emil Cioran, Panait Istrati have described Romanians sometimes as fatalistic but also slightly megalomaniac, subdued, endowed often with a low self-esteem and a tendency to blame others for their mishaps. Romanians often see themselves as having good humor, as being optimistic and hospitable people.

One of the big thinkers at this session was Mircea Malitza, who served as Ceausescu's ambassador to the USA in the 1980's. Malitza knows a lot about the Romanian national psyche, and how Romanians can be broken into a thousand tiny pieces, so tiny that the edges fray. Malitza was a good servant to the communist regime. And fate was on his side. He now maintains an illustrious career as a member of the Romanian academy and an expert on Romanian national identity.

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Z. Ornea looks at Cioran's contribution to Romanian fatalism via his book, The Transfiguration of Romania. Ornea quotes Cioran extensively:

Truths sprung from compliance are not a matter of glory. No historic act was borne by wisdom; wisdom can only be manifest in sub or trans-history. Wisdom can be the negation of history, for it is distance taken from life, whereas history reinforces it. The daily truths of Romanians are paralyzing. They tend to strip man of any responsibility. Fatalism is an a-moralism of evolution. I can well understand the drives of individual and internal fatalism, translations of the dynamism of the inner demon, but it is a deviation and an anthropological blasphemy to cede to times… The fatalism of our people is a curse we shall have to rout in thunder. To the heart shall the lightning strike us. I want another people! The centennial plague that has befallen the Romanian is skepticism… A skeptical soul is not a creator as any structural skepticism implies exhausted sources, original sterility… Romanian skepticism – superficial in its scope and the nature thereof – is nonetheless deep-seated by its enrootment in the popular soul.