Les vingt ans du postcommunisme roumain : L’espace public et les mémoires du communisme

Abstract

In the aftermath of 1989, Romania faced the challenge of dealing with its communist past. Th e responses to this civic pressure varied and were dependent on a number of factors: the degree of attachment ofthe population to the former regime, the existence of an emerging civil society, the way the regime collapsed, as well as the “contextual factors” like the “privatization of nomenklatura” (Helga Welsh), the presence in the new state structure of what Th omas Baylis called the “lower nobility of the communist era” (the neo-communists), and the specific economic and social issues of the transitional period. Amnesia, active oblivion, the “privatization” of memory, the hypertrophy of memory, new mythologies are just a few of the strategies for dealing with the communist past that have emerged in the last 20 years. Promoting an “offi cial public memory” of communism as an “invasion”, declaring the former regime as being “illegitimate and criminal,” adopting compensatory laws are some of the other more concrete reactions within the field of struggle over the memory of communism.