This book explores the memory of the Romanian Holocaust in Romanian, German, Israeli, and French cultural representations. The essays in this volume discuss first-hand testimonial accounts, letters, journals, drawings, literary texts and films by Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Aharon Appelfeld Norman Manea, Radu Mihaileanu, among others.

This book explores the memory of the Romanian Holocaust in Romanian, German, Israeli, and French cultural representations. The essays in this volume discuss first-hand testimonial accounts, letters, journals, drawings, literary texts and films by Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Aharon Appelfeld Norman Manea, Radu Mihaileanu, among others.

Mediating Historical Responsibility brings together leading scholars and new voices in the interdisciplinary fields of memory studies, history, and cultural studies to explore the ways culture, and cultural representations, have been at the forefront of bringing the memory of past injustices to the attention of audiences for many years. Engaging with the darkest pages of twentieth-century European history, dealing with the legacy of colonialism, war crimes, genocides, dictatorships, and racism, the authors of this collection of critical essays address Europe’s ‘difficult pasts’ through the study of cultural products, examining historical narratives, literary texts, films, documentaries, theatre, poetry, graphic novels, visual artworks, material heritage, and the cultural and political reception of official government reports. Adopting an intermedial approach to the study of European history, the book probes the relationship between memory and responsibility, investigating what it means to take responsibility for the past and showing how cultural products are fundamentally entangled in this process.

Divided societies, tormented pasts, and unrepentant perpetrators. Why are some countries more intent on vanquishing uncomfortable pasts than others? How do public and often unsightly attempts at memorialisation both fail the victims and valorize their oppressors? This book offers fresh and original perspectives on dictatorship, fascism and victimization from the bloodiest decades in Europe’s, Australia’s and Central America’s colonial and modern history. Chapters include analyses of Francoist memorials in Spain, assessments of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, the forgetting of frontier colonial violence in Tasmania, Romania’s treatment of its Roma populations in the midst of Holocaust memorialisation in Bucharest’s urban development, and whether or not the Holocaust continues to serve as an instructional model or impossible aspiration for cross-cultural genocide memorialisation strategies. In an era of ongoing political, ethnic and religious conflict, and unrepentant insurgent activity around the world, this collection reminds readers that genocidal actions, wherever and whenever they occurred, must be held to account by more than rhetoric and concrete memory. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research.

For many decades, the Holocaust in South-Eastern Europe lacked the required introspection, research and study, and most importantly, access to archives and documentation. Only in recent years and with the significant help of an emerging generation of local scholars, the Holocaust from this region became the focus of many studies. In 2018, under the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure umbrella, the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania organized a workshop dedicated to Holocaust research, education and remembrance in South-Eastern Europe. The present volume is a natural continuation of the above-mentioned workshop with the aim of introducing the current state of Holocaust research in the region to different categories of scholars in the field of Holocaust studies, to students and—why not—to the general public. Our scope, not an exhaustive one, is to present a historical contextualization using archival resources, to display the variety of recordings of discrimination, destruction and rescue efforts, and to introduce the remembrance initiatives and processes developed in the region in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Women and Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges expands the existing scholarship on women and the Holocaust adopting current approaches to gender studies and focusing on the texts and context from Central-Eastern Europe. The authors complicate earlier approaches by considering the intersections of gender, region, nationa, and sexuality, often within specifically delineated national settings, including the Czech/German, Hungarian, Hungarian/Austrian, Lithuanian, Polish/Israeli, Romanian/US-American, and Slovak. In these essays, the communist regimes after WWII often provide a productive framework for studying women and the Holocaust. This truly international volume features contributions by eminent authors, including pioneers in the field, as well as upcoming literary scholars and historians who delve into previously unmapped archives, explore cinematic representations and digital testimonies.

Are there any lessons Romania can teach transitional justice scholars and practitioners? This book argues that important insights emerge when analyzing a country with a moderate record of coming to terms with its communist past. Taking a broad definition of transitional justice as their starting point, contributors provide fresh assessments of the history commission, court trials, public identifications of former communist perpetrators, commemorations, and unofficial artistic projects that seek to address and redress the legacies of communist human rights violations. Theoretical and practical questions regarding the continuity of state agencies, the sequencing of initiatives, their advantages and limitations, the reasons why some reckoning programs are enacted and others are not, and these measures’ efficacy in promoting truth and justice are answered throughout the volume. Contributors include seasoned scholars from Romania, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and current and former leaders of key Romanian transitional justice institutions.

Ionescu examines the process of economic Romanianization of Bucharest during the Antonescu regime that targeted the property, jobs, and businesses of local Jews and Roma/Gypsies and their legal resistance strategies to such an unjust policy.

Reimaginig Utopias explores the shifting social imaginaries of post-socialist transformations to understand what happens when the new and old utopias of post-socialism confront the new and old utopias of social science. This peer-reviewed volume addresses the theoretical, methodological, and ethical dilemmas encountered by researchers in the social sciences as they plan and conduct education research in post-socialist settings, as well as disseminate their research findings. Through an interdisciplinary inquiry that spans the fields of education, political science, sociology, anthropology, and history, the book explores three broad questions: How can we (re)imagine research to articulate new theoretical insights about post-socialist education transformations in the context of globalization? How can we (re)imagine methods to pursue alternative ways of producing knowledge? And how can we navigate various ethical dilemmas in light of academic expectations and fieldwork realities? Drawing on case studies, conceptual and theoretical essays, autoethnographic accounts, as well as synthetic introductory and conclusion chapters by the editors, this book advances an important conversation about these complicated questions in geopolitical settings ranging from post-socialist Africa to Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The contributors not only expose the limits of Western conceptual frameworks and research methods for understanding post-socialist transformations, but also engage creatively in addressing the persisting problems of knowledge hierarchies created by abstract universals, epistemic difference, and geographical distance inherent in comparative and international education research. This book challenges the readers to question the existing education narratives and rethink taken-for-granted beliefs, theoretical paradigms, and methodological frameworks in order to reimagine the world in more complex and pluriversal ways.

Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion reflects the diversity of dramatic writing exploring the past and present of Romania, and takes stock thirty years after the collapse of communism. In addition to plays originally written in Romanian, the collection includes work by German, Hungarian and Roma authors born and/or working in Romania, and brings together plays written during the communist period and its aftermath. The plays included in the collection, edited and translated by Jozefina Komporaly and fully published for the first time in English, demonstrate broad variety in terms of form and content – ranging from family dramas to allegories, and absurdist experiments to modular texts rooted in open dramaturgy – and are the work of both individual playwrights and the results of collective creation. These works share a preoccupation with critically reflecting urgent concerns rooted in Romanian realities, and are notable dramaturgical experiments that push the boundaries of the genre. In addition, these plays also seek novel ways to examine universal experiences of the human condition, such as love, loss, abuse, betrayal, grief, violence, manipulation and despair. This unique anthology celebrates the renewed vitality and variety of writing for the stage after 1990, and endeavours to place Romanian theatre in a forward-looking transnational context. Lowlands ('Niederungen') by Herta Müller, adapted for the stage by Mihaela Panainte (German) This stage adaptation is based on a volume of short stories by Herta Müller written in German in 1982 and focuses on the perspective of a child narrator, by way of a series of episodes that centre on mundane aspects of daily life in a remote village against the backdrop of the oppressive atmosphere of mid-twentieth century Romania. The Spectator Sentenced to Death ('Spectatorul condamnat la moarte') by Matéi Visniec (Romanian) This play is a bitter parody of the Stalinist justice system, which totally disregards the fundamental question whether the accused is actually guilty or not. The Passport ('Kalucsni') by György Dragomán (Hungarian) This play is set pre-1989 in a typical small town in the Transylvanian province of Romania, in which the lives of the various social classes, and the fate of the persecuted and that of those who persecute are closely intertwined. The Man Who Had All His Malice Removed ('Omul din care a fost extras raul') by Matéi Visniec (Romanian) This topical play is a sharp reflection on the voluntary servitude in which we place ourselves, often unawares, in conditions of our contemporary consumer culture, and a fierce critique of increasingly dominant tendencies to abandon moral criteria in political life. Stories of the Body (Artemisia, Eva, Lina, Teresa) ('A test történetei') by András Visky (Hungarian) The cycle Stories of the Body comprises four plays based on real life stories as experienced by remarkable women (including Mother Teresa and Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi), and are connected to various cities including Budapest, Cluj/Kolozsvár, Kolkata and Rome, from the 17th to the 21st century. Sexodrom by Giuvlipen Theatre Company (Mihaela Dragan, Antonella Lerca Duda, Nicoleta Ghita, Zita Moldovan, Bety Pisica, Oana Rusu, Raj Alexandru Udrea), based on a concept by Bogdan Georgescu.(Roma) This is a work of collective creation by members of the Roma Theatre company Giuvlipen, aiming to bring to public attention taboo subjects, to enhance the visibility of Roma performers and to experiment with new forms of theatre-making in a Romanian context.