A Museal Turn: Negotiating Memory in Romanian History Museums before and after the Fall of the Wall
A Museal Turn: Negotiating Memory in Romanian History Museums before and after the Fall of the Wall

Summary/Abstract: In his Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson describes the creation of narratives of the past, necessary for the formation of the national state, as dependent on acts of both memorializing ‘origins’ and forgetting moments that could be labeled as traumatic for the community. However, it is in the joints of history that forgetting and memorializing are strongly negotiated. The aim of this article is to discuss ways in which memory is negotiated in Romanian contemporary history museums with a view to creating specific narratives, such as the communist one before 1990 and the anti-communist ones after the fall of the wall Iron Curtain. Through apparent amnesia, in the past, museums memorialized only those moments that supported the communist politics of creating an imagined unitary communist nation. The traumatic moments of the anti-communist revolt of 1989 were expected to cause, besides the formation of new narratives, the ‘recovery’ of past collective and individual memories, which should have led to the re-writing of the past and the reorganization of the museum. However, there was seems to be not only a slow and partial recovery of past memories, but also, and more importantly, an unexpected hiatus in the re-organization of the history museum in which the recent history of the last fifty years is, paradoxically, left suspended.

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