Volume 64, Issue 3

In Romania, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism triggered a testimonial drive that shifted from early concerns with victimhood, justice, and retribution to seemingly apolitical revivals of everyday life under socialism. Drawing on a range of memoirs of socialist childhood published over the last decade by an aspiring generation of Romanian writers, this article examines the role of public intellectuals in articulating hegemonic representations of the socialist past. To understand both the enduring power and limits of such representations, the author argues that published recollections should not be read only for their (competing) perspectives on the past, but also for the sociopolitical effects they have in the transitional present, where they facilitate the socialization of emerging writers into the ethos of the postsocialist intelligentsia. Exploring the tenuous relationship between dominant intellectual discourses and social memory in postsocialist Romania, this article aims to throw light on the tensions at the heart of broader processes of democratization, diversification and commodification of social memory in Eastern Europe.

This article analyses ‘Project 1990’ (2010–2014) as an example of ‘art of memorialisation’. The project included twenty temporary artistic interventions on the empty pedestal of the former statue of Lenin in Bucharest. The author compares this example of art of memorialisation to other memory strategies found in the Romanian public space after 1990. Building on James Young’s concept of anti-monument, ‘Project 1990’ questioned the ways in which communism is remembered in Romania, and how the transition to democracy, in the opinion of many of the exhibiting artists, failed. This curatorial project is a good example of the aestheticisation of memory—that is the anti-nostalgic and ironic treatment of symbols of the past, among which Lenin himself.

This article relies on the author’s own diary, kept between 1993 and 1994, in an effort to study how the violent breakup of Yugoslavia impacted identities of ordinary people. As it was written by a child from a mixed (Muslim-Croat) marriage, the diary, when properly analysed and contextualized, offers a way to study ethnicity as a process. In employing an unorthodox methodology in demonstrating how, as a 14-year-old, he was both marked as mixed and embraced Bosniak nationalism to the point of (risking) radicalization, the author moves the discussion of Yugoslav mixed marriages beyond the polarized and static portrayal hitherto characteristic of the debates around this topic.

This article is based on the life stories of about 100 women and men born in the 1920s and 1930s in Bulgaria. The stories were elicited in oral history interviews enquiring into their lives under the communist regime. The starting hypothesis was that, in the absence of a shared public narrative about the socialist past, as is the case in present-day Bulgaria, people would struggle to make sense of their lives during the time of socialism and have difficulty producing meaningful autobiographical accounts. The article explores the narrative strategies the interviewees adopted to let them present their lives as meaningfully seamless and coherent, despite the change in frame of reference. Four such strategies are discussed: sameness (unbroken loyalty to the former regime); biographical revisionism (distancing the self from the regime but retaining loyalty to the ideology); reversed temporality (privileging the past); and steering away (focusing on private life while ignoring its context).

Erhard Busek, former special coordinator of the Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe, assesses the present European crises—the refugee crisis, the financial crisis, the Greek crisis, the Ukrainian crisis, the Brexit crisis—from a Southeast European perspective, and from the perspective of one who has worked substantively toward the stabilization of the postwar societies of the successor states of Yugoslavia in the 2000s. This stabilization process has been a long and arduous task, albeit one that has borne fruit in spite of all the remaining fragilities. It would be a great mistake to forfeit what has been achieved, and not to take the achievement as a lesson for meeting the present challenges: developing a real conflict and crisis management process is a worthwhile endeavor.

The Brexit vote was not simply a rejection of the European Union but also of a politics based on calculated self-interest or reasoned idealism. The author outlines how the referendum came about, provides crucial background information, and analyses its results. The reasons for the success of the Leave campaign are concisely presented, including the role of parties other than the Labour and Tory parties and that of the media in promoting, instead of critically assessing, a campaign characterized by exaggerated, even false claims. In his outlook towards the future, the author focuses on the UK/EU relationship and the internal constitutional crisis the Brexit vote has created and the dangers these pose for (further) destabilisation both of Britain and Europe.

On the initiative of the Balkanologenverband e. V . (Association of Balkanologists), on 22 June 2016, the day before the ‘Brexit’ referendum, various experts on southeast European history and politics at Humboldt University in Berlin discussed the effects of the current crises on Europe’s southeastern periphery. In response to the dramatic events of the refugee crisis of 2015 the region oscillated between alienation from and rapprochement towards the European Union, and it has become evident that European integration has become an ever more questionable attraction for the states in the region. The participants in the discussion describe the situation after the closure of the so-called ‘Balkan route’ in March 2016 as hovering between a fragile stability and stagnation.

In this article, the author takes the reader on a tour of recent publications and exhibitions on the architecture of socialist modernity in Yugoslavia. She presents a vivid discussion of the most interesting and worthwhile examples of this architecture, as well as their architects and designers. Her survey takes in the hotel resorts along the Adriatic coast, post offices, children’s homes, museums, theatres, and memorial sites. It also covers special items, such as the K67 kiosk and the folding chair Rex , both of which—like the hotels and other buildings, with their manifold references to contemporary modernist architectural styles—ive up to world-level design standards.