Memorials of Abuse: The Holocaust, Communism, and Memorial Ritual in Romania

Abstract

This article examines the memorial architecture of abuse in Romania, from the Memorial of the Victims of the Holocaust in Bucharest (2009) to the memorials built after 1989 for the victims of communism, and reads them against the commemorative practices that give them meaning. The first part analyzes how the communist regime converted the existing memorial landscape: it preserved the interwar mausoleums as forms but rewrote their narrative, replaced the Orthodox commemorative calendar with ideological dates, relocated inconvenient monuments, imported a Soviet monumental aesthetic in which the present itself became memorial time, and turned the Mausoleum in Carol Park into a necropolis of the party elite. The sculpture camp at Măgura and the monument at Moisei are discussed as two exceptions within this regime, one a memorial without a referent, the other an open, non-material architecture of hieratic figures. The second part turns to the post-communist memorials at Sighet, Aiud, and Cotroceni, and to Dorin Ștefan's two Brâncuși projects, which memorialize a work rather than an event. The third part argues that the Romanian memorial retains a latent sacred function, expressed through the integration of chapels and Orthodox commemorative services, and that this distinguishes it from the secular, pedagogical memorials of Western Europe and the United States. The persistence of two ritual ecologies, the urban state ceremony and the rural parish commemoration, and the recent proliferation of provincial busts without ritual function complete the analysis. Working paper (preprint). English version of a text first written in Romanian by the author; translated and edited for this deposit, with corrected references. Not yet peer reviewed. Comments and citations welcome; a journal version may follow.