A Different Kind of Anniversary - 20 Years Since the Death of Ceausescu

In contrast with the last article on Stalin....

Somewhere, I recall reading that collective memories begin to take shape some 20-30 years after a traumatic historical event has taken place, because it is the time necessary for a generational shift to occur.

From: BBC News

Romania marks sombre anniversary

By Nick Thorpe
BBC News, Bucharest

The people of Romania are marking the 20th anniversary of the 1989 revolution which brought down Nicolae Ceausescu.

Small commemorations have been held at cemeteries and sites associated with the revolution in several cities, including Bucharest and Timisoara.

President Traian Basescu referred to more than 1,100 people who died during the revolution, as he was sworn in for a second, five-year term in office.

He told parliament the full truth was not known about the bloody uprising.

Those responsible for the deaths had not been punished, he added.

Speaking of the people killed in 1989, Mr Basescu said: "Their sacrifice was the foundation stone of today's democratic institutions."

He made his speech in the House of the People, built by the former dictator Ceausescu, which dominates central Bucharest.

Only a handful of top army and secret police officials were ever put on trial over the events of the revolution.

Two army generals began a 15-year sentence only last year.

There is a sense in Romania that the revolution is disappearing into the history books - and that gives a new urgency to this year's celebrations.

They come as a BBC investigation has disclosed that many Romanian orphans who came to international prominence in the 1990s after the end of communist rule are still in institutional care and living in appalling conditions.

The report uncovered widespread evidence of neglect, with some patients left bed-bound and lying in their own faeces.

Many of the thousands of unwanted babies who were left in state orphanages under communist rule are now in adult institutions.

The Romanian government says it is committed to upholding the rights of those with disabilities.

130th Birthday of Joseph Stalin - "Let's remember the good times"

The "money quote" from this tidbit is the final line. Wow. You can't get much more blatant than that when talking about amnesia and politics. Now might be the time to mention that this sort of request to forget does not just involve erasing the sins of former dictators, but also, those of former democratic leaders. Amnesia is an ideologically-neutral practice (not sure if "practice" is the right word here, but it will do for now).

From: The New York Times
Russia: A Celebration of Stalin
by Clifford J. Levy
published December 21, 2009

The Communist Party celebrated the 130th birthday of Joseph Stalin on Monday with an appeal for people not to bring up the more unseemly aspects of his record. Stalin is a polarizing figure in Russia, still popular for winning World War II and industrializing the Soviet Union while reviled for the purges that killed or displaced millions of people. On Monday, the Communists sought to focus on the achievements, lining up in Red Square to lay flowers on his grave, above. “We would like very much on this day for the discussion about any mistakes of the Stalin era to stop, so that people can reflect on the personality of Stalin as a creator, thinker and patriot,” said Ivan Melnikov, a senior party official.

On the failed search for Federico García Lorca

For those of us that have been following the case of "Lorca's grave," the news today that the Spanish poet's burial site has turned up NOTHING is quite disappointing, though it should not be entirely unexpected. For years, Lorca's biographer, Ian Gibson, has insisted -- along with others -- that the site contained Lorca's remains, and the sign officially marking the location ("Lorca eran todos") drew many visitors each year. Gibson first learned of the grave's purported location from a man known as "Manuel el comunista," who claimed to have buried the poet here. Today, it would appear that that testimony has proven faulty.

Certainly, I can understand and respect, particularly on a scholarly level, Gibson's passion for locating the poet's remains. After all, Gibson has dedicated his life's work to Lorca. However, I am unsure what locating Lorca would mean, particularly because the poet's family has, up until recently, opposed excavation of the site. Would finding Lorca mean, simply, giving the poet a symbolic, dignified re-burial? Would it mean re-writing what we know about his final days? Would the so-called "Lorca case" serve to illustrate the challenges faced by forensic anthropologists and archaeologists in other locations throughout Spain? Would it shed light on victims' families, and the bureaucratic nightmare many of them face when trying to locate, exhume and identify their loved ones?

I am a lover of Lorca's poetry and drama, as well as his essays on "duende" and flamenco. But my interest in this case has to do with the following points:

• the evolution of a "site of memory"
• tourism and sites of memory
  
• the intersection of personal and collective memory
• Lorca as a representative "victim" of the Spanish Civil War (and especially, an icon of the left)
• the contested excavation site and the media portrayal of the case
  
• the other, less visible men purportedly buried with Lorca
  

From: BBC News

Spanish dig fails to find Lorca

Excavations aimed at finding the remains of Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca have drawn a blank, officials say.

The dig produced "not one bone, item of clothing or bullet shell", said Begona Alvarez, justice minister of Andalucia.

Lorca was murdered at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 by right-wing supporters of Gen Francisco Franco.

The site on a hillside outside Granada was believed for decades to be a mass grave of civil war victims.

Correspondents say the failure casts doubt on whether the poet's remains will ever be found.

The two-month excavation near the town of Alfacar - carried out under tight security - had been requested by relatives of other men believed buried at the spot.

It was one of several aimed at locating those still missing from Spain's bitter civil war.

"No remains of human bones have appeared or other signs belonging to civil war graves," a report by archaeologists at the University of Granada said.

Ms Alvarez said the soil was only 40cm (16in) deep, making it too shallow for a grave.

Lorca was 38 when he died, murdered by fascists for his left-wing views, Republican sympathies and homosexuality.

He is best known for tragedies such as Blood Wedding and his poetry collections Poet in New York and Gypsy Ballads.

For a much more detailed report in Spanish, click here.

Conference Call for Papers - Trauma and Testimony

From: cfp.english.upenn.edu

UPDATE] NEXUS 2010--Trauma and Testimony
full name / name of organization:
NEXUS
contact email:
dmcgloth@utk.edu

NEXUS—An Interdisciplinary Conference
Trauma and Testimony
University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Thursday, March 18-Saturday, March 20, 2010
Web Address: http://web.utk.edu/~nexus

Plenary Speakers: Cathy Caruth (Emory Univeristy) and Julia Levine

This conference seeks to explore the relationship between trauma and testimony, and in particular the therapeutic possibilities and potential problems that testimony entails. Testimony is the term used in trauma studies to talk about the process of articulating or expressing one’s trauma for an “Other” as a crucial step in recovering from the trauma. Dori Laub argues that trauma destroys the possibility of both the internal and the external “Other” and so the traumatized individuals exist in a space of both knowing and not knowing their trauma.

As an interdisciplinary conference, we welcome submissions from relevant fields and disciplines. Abstracts (250-300 words) are invited on a broad range of topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Representations of shared traumatic events (the Holocaust, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, etc.)
•Ethical issues of truth versus “creative license” in representation
•The role of both the speaker and the listener
•The limits of representation
•Whose history is it, anyway? First-person testimony vs. bearing witness from the “outside”
•Testimony and Therapy—the therapeutic value of telling one’s story
•Testimony and Justice—the Truth and Reconciliation Commission experiment
•Bearing witness using contemporary media (the Shoah Foundation, blogs, etc.)
•Testimony and Action—Telling as a Catalyst for Change
•Collective Suffering and Collective Guilt—the historical and ethical limits of trauma and testimony
•Interdisciplinary Studies—Trauma as experienced through the prisms of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other categories of identification
•Trauma and the Law—Issues of victims’ rights
•Papers written on literary and/or artistic representations of trauma
•Creative submissions
•The future of trauma studies

Individual papers or panel proposals will be considered.

As this is an interdisciplinary conference, please feel free to submit proposals which speak to your academic interests, even if they do not fit neatly into the categories listed above.

Please submit abstracts to Dennis McGlothin (dmcgloth@utk.edu) or Teresa Lopez (tlopez@utk.edu) by January 15, 2009.

New Book - Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory

I always get particularly excited when a publication comes out with "postmemory" in the title. I wrote my dissertation on postmemory in contemporary Spanish literature and film; however, I drew largely from the field of Holocaust Studies in my discussion of the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

"Postmemory" is a term popularized by -- and most associated with - Marianne Hirsch, although it was also deployed by Andrea Liss in Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust. I am not positive, but I do think Liss used the term first -- albeit in a slightly different manner -- which Hirsch acknowledges. Hirsch defines postmemory as "the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events taht they can neither understand nor re-create" ("Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy," 8). In addition to Hirsch's formulation, Holocaust Studies scholars have created a large, rich body of work on "second generation" cultural production, with "second generation" referring broadly to the descendants of Holocaust survivors (and yes, at times, also to the descendants of perpetrators).

At some point, I will dedicate another post (or several) to the concept of "postmemory" itself, which has recently come under fire in Beatriz Sarlo's Tiempo pasado. Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusión (to read an excellent review in English of Sarlo's work, see here). For now, I will limit this post to the mention of the following new book from Routledge:

Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory

By Brett Kaplan

Series: Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

List Price: $95.00
Add to Cart

* ISBN: 978-0-415-87476-2
* Binding: Hardback
* Published by: Routledge
* Publication Date: 31/08/2010
* Pages: 192

About the Book

How do the spaces of the past stay with us through representations—whether literary or photographic? How has the Holocaust registered in our increasingly globally connected consciousness? What does it mean that this European event is often used as an interpretive or representational touchstone for genocides and traumas globally? In this interdisciplinary study, Kaplan asks and attempts to answer these questions by looking at historically and geographically diverse spaces, photographs, and texts concerned with the physical and/or mental landscape of the Holocaust and its transformations from the postwar period to the early twenty-first century. Examining the intersections of landscape, postmemory, and trauma, Kaplan's text offers a significant contribution to our understanding of the spatial, visual, and literary reach of the Holocaust.

Romania's Secret Police

This seems to be a day full of news on repressive secret police forces and the miles of files they left behind. For more on Ceausescu and Romania, click here.

From BBC News:

Romania's state terror legacy lingers

By Oana Lungescu
BBC News, Bucharest

Twenty years ago, communist regimes collapsed one after the other like dominoes across Central and Eastern Europe.

The last one to fall, in a bloody revolution, was Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. But communism has left a poisonous legacy in the vast archives of the secret police, the dreaded Securitate.

Inside a sprawling military compound at Popesti-Leordeni, on the outskirts of the Romanian capital Bucharest, grey metal shelves are stacked with bulging grey files. There are more than two million files on 20km (12.4 miles) of shelves.

Germina Nagat calls it "an evil library". As the chief investigator for the
Mrs Nagat spends a lot of time poring over the files.

"You can find anything," she says. "It's a story of human guilt, human weakness, sometimes courage."

Boiled bark

What Ioana Voicu Arnautoiu has found here is an incredible story of defiance.

A concert violinist, she was born in a cave in the Carpathian mountains. Her parents were partisans, part of a small desperate band that resisted the communist takeover in the 1950s.

They held out for nine years - surviving sometimes on boiled bark - before the Securitate hunted them down.

Now it is the Securitate's own records that are revealing Ioana's family history, in 85 thick files and a collection of black-and-white photographs.

One shows her mother climbing out of the cave and going down a ladder, carrying baby Ioana under one arm like a doll.

Before her father was executed, the Securitate took a last photograph of his gaunt face, with dark, haunted eyes. Her mother died later in prison.

Ioana was spared. Aged two, she was taken to an orphanage and adopted by a loving family. She grew up without knowing who she really was - until Communism fell and the archives opened.

Her story might be unbelievable - if the Securitate had not archived everything so thoroughly. What in some ways is even more unbelievable is the extensive records on those who did not actively resist.

Blackmail

Almost anything could be a reason for opening a file, Germina Nagat explained: "Persons who had relatives abroad; persons who used to tell jokes; persons interested in studying foreign languages."

By the 1980s, about one in 30 Romanians was a Securitate informer, including 10-year old children.

Some did it out of conviction, some were blackmailed. Most were offered something - a rare opportunity to travel abroad or better career prospects.

Like so many Romanians, I too had a file. In 1983, a Securitate officer tried to get me to spy on people I knew in exchange for a passport to travel abroad, and cancer drugs for my father. I said no.

When I asked to see that file five years ago, I was told it could not be found.

But the bulk of the archives was only transferred to the CNSAS before Romania joined the European Union in 2007. And recently, my file also surfaced.

Strictly secret

It was with some trepidation that I went to the CNSAS headquarters to read it.

The first surprise was that it came not in one, but two volumes. And it started much earlier than I thought - roughly at the time I became a student of English and Spanish at Bucharest University.

In one report, dated April 1983, a Securitate captain wrote that I refused to sign a written pledge to inform. The next page, marked "Strictly Secret" was signed by his superior.

It is a list of measures to be taken for my surveillance, including bugging my phone calls and intercepting my letters.

I suddenly recognise my father's minute handwriting in a letter to a friend abroad that I never knew he had sent.

It was duly photocopied, together with both sides of the envelope. The file contains many of my own letters. Some passages were underlined in blue or red pen by the Securitate.

The second volume is more of a shock. It contains 138 pages with transcriptions of phone-calls, including with my mother and my then-boyfriend. What we mostly talked about was my father's illness and his impending death.

All those conversations replay in my mind, as I go through dozens and dozens of transcriptions, all written in longhand by what appears to be a whole army of Securitate scribes.

The file ends in December 1985, several months after I had been allowed to leave Romania and just as I started working at the BBC's Romanian Service in London.

As the archives show, another arm of the Securitate continued to monitor me, along with many other exiles working for foreign broadcasters, until the last days of 1989...

Bullet in the head

To see the file at last is liberating, but deeply unsettling. So many strangers photocopied my letters and transcribed my phone calls - and for what?

But opening the archives is unsettling for others too. "These files aren't mine or yours, they belong to the state," said Dumitru Burlan, a retired Securitate colonel who was Nicolae Ceausescu's chief bodyguard.

At the CNSAS, chief investigator Germina Nagat believes that these dark secrets have to be exposed.

She and her colleagues regularly uncover evidence that some of those who collaborated with the former secret police are now senior judges, politicians and top civil servants.

"They have a hidden agenda - resistance to reforms," she said. "To violate the human and civil rights every day, that was their job. And now [they] have to do the reverse!

"How can you do this? You cannot be a ballerina after being an elephant!"

Romanian courts are dealing with some 700 cases of alleged Securitate collaborators in high places, but so far judges have ruled on only three.

There may be many Communist-era elephants out there still trampling on Romania's fledgling democracy.

You can hear more in State Secrets , Oana Lungescu's two-part documentary on the
starting on 10 December.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8401915.stm

Published: 2009/12/10 09:55:42 GMT

Germany and the Ghosts of the Past

Note: for more on the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, I recommend the film The Lives of Others (link to the right, under "Film and TV").

From: The New York Times

December 10, 2009
Letter from Europe
Ghosts of Past Haunt Politics in Germany
By JUDY DEMPSEY

Last week, the past caught up with the German state of Brandenburg. Several legislators belonging to the Left Party, the successor to the Communist Party, admitted to collaborating with the East German secret police. Astonishingly, their past had never been an issue in the 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

That began to change when Matthias Platzeck, the popular Social Democrat premier of this poor state, decided three months ago to drop the conservative Christian Democrats as his coalition partners in favor of the Left Party. He said the Left could no longer be stigmatized, especially since it had won 27 percent of the votes during elections last September.

As soon as the coalition was sworn into office, the facts began to creep out. Seven of the 26 Left Party legislators had worked for the Stasi. Some have since resigned. Others are sitting it out. Not Mr. Platzeck. He called for a reckoning with the past. “Since 1990, there has been no systematic Stasi check of any deputies in the Brandenburg Parliament,” he told Parliament last Friday. “We must admit, and I, too, must personally admit, that this was a mistake.”

It was the Social Democrats who since 1990 have governed this state, mostly in coalition with the conservative Christian Democrats. During much of that time, the premier was Manfred Stolpe. He had been a leading member of East Germany’s Lutheran Church and as such had regularly met Stasi agents. Despite repeated allegations, Mr. Stolpe denied he was an informer. But as premier, he never asked questions about the credentials of the legislators or civil servants.

Nor, for that matter, did Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. Jörg Schönbohm, until recently Brandenburg’s conservative interior minister, did not even check the background of the police. Documents released earlier this year showed that hundreds of them had been full-time Stasi officials or informers during the Communist era.

“It was a cartel of silence in Brandenburg,” said Ulrich Mählert, historian at the government-funded Foundation for the Reappraisal of the Communist Dictatorship in East Germany. “It was about realpolitik.”

The revelations in Brandenburg have repercussions for Germany’s Social Democrats, in opposition since a catastrophic defeat in federal elections last September. The party now will have to decide what alliance, if any, it wants with the Left Party in order to challenge Mrs. Merkel’s coalition of conservatives and Free Democrats in 2013. One thing is certain: if the Social Democrats choose an alliance on the federal level with the Left, the past of each Left legislator will be scrutinized. As in Brandenburg, that could leave a very poisoned political atmosphere.

The existence of the secret police files continues to fuel a debate not only in Germany but across Eastern Europe. Even some who opposed the Communists say that keeping the files open will taint the political class because they can be abused for political purposes. Others say politics will never recover from the poison if the files are kept shut away.

“If you do not open the files fully and place them under independent control, the system will remain poisoned,” said Monica Macovei, a former justice minister in Romania who fought against corruption and the continuing influence of the Securitate, or secret police. “Former collaborators are not the people to build a democracy.”

Romania’s files were only opened in 2005 — 15 years after Germany’s and the Czech Republic’s. Only a handful of the two million files have reached the courts. The political parties decide which cases to pursue. Even then, judges are not always independent. “There are so many networks where people protect or blackmail each other,” Ms. Macovei said. “That is why I cannot agree to say ‘enough is enough’ when it comes to the issue of closing the files.” Ms. Macovei, despite — or perhaps because of — her commitment to openness, was fired weeks after Romania joined the European Union in 2007. She is now a conservative member of the European Parliament.

The situation is not much better in neighboring Bulgaria, where successive governments since 1989 have done little to keep former collaborators or secret police agents from holding top government jobs. When it was disclosed a few years ago that President Georgi Parvanov was an informer, there were some calls for his resignation. He is still in power. There are no sanctions barring former collaborators from holding public office. Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who was elected last July, has vowed to adopt tougher measures in order to end corruption and strengthen democracy. Progress has been slow.

“The political elites are not trusted,” said Daniel Smilov, program director of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia. “But there is a growing consensus that former secret service agents should be kept from public office. There is also a need for a thorough analysis of the past.”

Yet there is always the fear that the files will be used for partisan goals.

Alexander Smolar, president of the independent Stefan Batory Foundation in Warsaw, said that when Poland’s Communists and Solidarity agreed to share power in 1989, members of the Solidarity leadership opted for reconciliation instead of a witch hunt against their former persecutors.

A law was passed in 1997 requiring officials holding public office to declare whether they had worked for the secret police. It involved about 22,000 people. Four years ago, the conservative-nationalist government led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski (and a former Solidarity activist) sought to widen the net to include up to one million people.

“The whole issue has become highly politicized and poisonous,” Mr. Smolar said. “There are names of innocent people in those files because the secret police and informers wrote down how much they wanted to recruit them. The past is so complex.”

It is also very ambiguous. Despite that, back in Brandenburg, Mr. Platzeck has opted to confront the past — for the victims. “We need a Brandenburg in which nobody has the impression that he may be permanently pushed aside, excluded or forgotten,” he said last week. “This concerns, explicitly and foremost, the victims of East Germany’s Communist Party dictatorship.”

E-MAIL jdempsey@iht.com