Everyone a Victim: Local Practices and Political Consequences of War Remembrances in Post-1945 Romania

After World War II, local commemorative practices and communist regime ones intersected and interacted with each other to give rise to a victimist discourse about Romania’s official role and personal experiences of its inhabitants during World War II.  This complex process included coercion from the top by the party hierarchy, as well as avoidance, misreporting, as well as resistance to such directives on the part of local populations.  This paper disentangles aspects of this process, placing emphasis on the ways in which existing religious practices and specifically variations based on regional, ethnic, and gender elements contributed to the dazzling variety of commemorative displays and rituals that have survived until today.  The point of this paper is to question the significance of the official discourses and commemorative practices in relation to the reality on the ground and to show the impact of this mythologization on the use of such commemorations after 1989.   One question to answer is why there are official regulations and established commemorative discourses about World War II that acknowledge the role of Romanians as a perpetrators in the war and the Holocaust, while a great deal of resistance remains on the part of much of the population and also intellectual elites in engaging in questions of guilt and responsibility for the horrendous violence of World War II.