Oral Histories and Institutional Narratives: Preserving the Stories of the Romanian Communist Past

The Romanian post-totalitarian recount of the communist past embraces various forms: from individual and civic actions to recollect the memories of the past and gather testimonies from the regime’s victims, to institutionalized forms of memory and public memory discourse. The research described in this paper focused on the use of oral history as a mechanism to recollect the past and its effects at the level of the Romanian society: the creation of new institutions dedicated to researching the past, agents of memory, public memory discourse, political class reluctance, mass media, and the resulting politics of memory. The paper shows that this remembrance involves a permanent reconstruction of the past in which different agents of memory are involved, all of whom consequently project their own interests, ideas, and in some cases stereotypes onto their perceptions of the past. Identifying different topics and approaches to past narratives, we argue that the permanent dialogue and openness to others’ stories can offer valuable insights into the remembrance process, especially when traumatic events are involved.

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