The Challenge of Competing Pasts

Education and post-communist transitional justice: negotiating the communist past in a memorial museum

“…The post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have, to various degrees, engaged in transitional justice projects intended to reckon with their authoritarian pasts (Stan 2013a). Such projects have focused on trials of former communist officials, lustration, public access to security service files, property restitution, history commissions, and memorialisation projects, particularly for the victims of repression (Stan 2013a;2013b;Nedelsky and Stan 2015;Ciobanu 2015). Another important (but often overlooked) component of transitional justice is education.…”

Making and contesting far right sites of memory. A case study on Romania

“…The attempt to escape history by presenting the legionaries as victims and Tâncăbeşti as a site of martyrdom has been analysed through the lens of historical scholarship and by additional research on the 1930s–1940s newspapers, with focus on the legionary memory work from the interwar period onward. For analysing the contestation of the site, I have used the files of the case moved against the site in various juridical courts and public authorities in 2012 by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, a governmental cultural institution which has often denounced the attempts of promoting the cult of fallen legionaries in the public space (Ciobanu, 2015: 157). Although I have considered to contact the legionaries organisations to obtain more information on the site, I ultimately decided to step down, in order to avoid the danger that my research become vehicle for the memory entrepreneurs’ narratives.…”