Maria Bucur

Treznea: Trauma, nationalism and the memory of World War II in Romania

This essay focuses on the relationship between official and vernacular forms of remembering a mass killing of eighty-six civilians that took place on 9 September 1940 at Treznea, a village in the heart of Northern Transylvania, now part of Romania. This region was at that point in the process of being reoccupied by Hungarian troops after the Vienna Award of 31 August 1940. After 1940, the memory of 9 September remained apparently buried yet powerfully alive for those living in Treznea. Their relationship to the communist regime was shaped by the disjuncture between the official and local discourses about 9 September.This essay analyses both the official commemorative sites (an obelisk and a funeral plaque) and events and the local forms of remembering, from a frieze in the Orthodox Church to oral forms of transmission. In crafting their own interpretation of the events, people in Treznea resisted the official discourse. Yet, starting in the 1980s as their sense of victimization was incorporated in a new aggressive nationalist official discourse, the Romanians in Treznea became more confused in their relationship with the regime. To this day, they still harbour distrust for the officials who visit Treznea once a year for the annual commemoration, while they are also pleased to have their tragedy given official recognition. Such ambiguities have also translated in the narratives told by the generations born after the war, whose own sense of local and ethnic identity has been shaped powerfully by the collective memory of 9 September.

Between the Mother of the Wounded and the Virgin of Jiu: Romanian Women and the Gender of Heroism during the Great War

This article adds new depth to understanding the gendered dimension of the Great War experience on the eastern front by focusing on one of the smaller participants in the conflict and a latecomer to the experience of total war: Romania. Bucur examines how the image of two famous women, Queen Marie and Ecaterina Teodoroiu, functioned to construct normative gender roles and definitions of heroism, at the expense of making invisible the actions of most other women. In this process, notions of patriotism, heroism, and virtue came to reinforce and encode gender divisions in a more well-defined public debate than ever before, as both policy makers and publicists sought to construct agency as a male prerogative. By making this aspect of the war visible, Bucurs analysis also engages the wider question of how Romanian politicians, publicists, and civilians understood the meaning of this total war and sought to mobilize for it.

War and Regeneration: The Great War and Eugenics in Eastern Europe

How were healthcare practices altered by massive violent deaths and the epidemics that decimated European societies between 1914 and 1918? How did states, professional healthcare personnel, and other caretakers choose to learn from this trauma? How have historians reflected on these complex shifts? The centenary of the Great War presents an opportunity to reconsider the legacies of this event that reshaped Europe from a variety of perspectives, among them the changes brought about in the field of social medicine. Using my own research on the history of eugenics in eastern Europe as a starting point, I will focus on several departures in historical research that have taken place over the past decade in relation to this theme and suggest a few other directions for future research.

From Invisibility to Marginality: women's history in Romania

ABSTRACT This essay enhances the broad context in which Karen Offens argument is framed by addressing the question of how the humanities are faring today in relation to academic research and learning. I explore what that context means specifically for womens history and vice-versa into the future. Secondly, I provide a historical overview of how womens history in Romania has developed since 1989. My analysis highlights the slow and uneven shift from complete invisibility to some interest and a small number of excellent books in several areas of research, from demographic to political history of the modern period.

Gender and Citizenship: Difference and Power in the Modern State

T triangular relationship between “gender,” “citizenship,” and “power” as categories for historical analysis has seen a great deal of interest in the past decade.1 Historians interested in feminism and political history in the modern state have shifted the terms of discussion from a focus on suffrage to increasingly nuanced interrogations of what were the parameters of political activism, and what political culture meant when viewed from a gendered perspective, thus understanding politics to encompass a broad array of actions and attitudes that might not have had women’s voting rights at their heart. This opening up of the spectrum of political action and culture was facilitated by focusing on what citizenship has meant in different places under different ideological and legal regimes. Citizenship in this new historiography is generally meant to include not only specific legal obligations and rights of individuals who are citizens of a state. Rather, citizenship encompasses extra-legal parameters defined by policy,