Remembering Communism

Maria N. Todorova is a Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Augusta Dimou is Gerda Henkel Research Fellow and Visiting Fellow at the Department of Cultural Studies, Chair of Comparative European History and Culture at the University of Leipzig. She is a historian specializing in contemporary comparative European History with a regional focus on Southeast and East-Central Europe. Stefan Troebst is Historian and Slavist; Professor of East European Cultural History, Leipzig University.

Based on an interdisciplinary approach, the book examines the mechanisms and processes that influence, determine and mint the private and public memory of communism in the post-1989 era.

Contents: Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Similar Trajectories, Different Memories PART I. THE STATE OF THE ART OF EASTERN EUROPEAN REMEMBRANCE 2. Experts with a Cause: A Future for GDR History beyond Memory Governance and Ostalgie in Unified Germany Thomas Lindenberger 3. The Canon of Remembering Romanian Communism: From Autobiographical Recollections to Collective Representations 4. How Is Communism Remembered in Bulgaria? Research, Literature, Projects 5. The Memory of Communism in Poland 6. Remembering Dictatorship: Eastern and Southern Europe Compared PART II. THINKING THROUGH THINGS: POPULAR CULTURE AND THE EVERYDAY 7. Communism Reloaded 8. Daily Life and Constraints in Communist Romania in the Late 1980s: From the Semiotics of Food to the Semiotics of Power 9. "Forbidden Images"? Visual Memories of Romanian Communism Before and After 1989 10. Remembering the Private Display of Decorative Things under Communism PART III. MEMORIES OF SOCIALIST CHILDHOOD 11. "Loan Memory": Communism and the Youngest Generation 12. Talking Memories of the Socialist Age: School, Childhood, Regime 13. Within (and Without) the "Stem Cell" of Socialist Society PART IV. WHAT WAS SOCIALIST LABOR? 14. Remembering Communism: Field Studies in Pernik, 1960 - 1964 15. "Remembering the Old City, Building a New One": The Plural Memories of a Multiethnic City 16. Workers in the Workers' State: Industrialization, Labor, and Everyday Life in the Industrial City of Rovinari 17. "We Build for Our Country!" Visual Memories about the Brigadier Movement PART V. THE UNFADING PROBLEM OF THE SECRET POLICE 18. How Post-1989 Bulgarian Society Perceives the Role of the State Security Service 19. The Afterlife of the Securitate: On Moral Correctness in Post-communist Romania 20. Daily Life And Surveillance in the 1970s and 1980s PART VI. THE "CULTURAL FRONT" THEN AND NOW 21. From Memory to Canon. How Do Bulgarian Historians Remember Communism? 22. Theater Artists and the Bulgarian Authorities in the 1960s: Memories of Conflicts, Conflict of Memories 23. Bulgarian Intellectuals Remember Communist Culture 24. "By Their Memoirs You Shall Know Them": Ivan and Petko Venedikov about Themselves and about Communism 25. Cum Ira et Studio: Visualizing the Recent Past PART VII. REMEMBERING EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS AND THE "SYSTEM" 26. The Revolution of 1989 and the Rashomon Effect: Recollections of the Collapse of Communism in Romania 27. Remembrance of Communism on the Former Day of Socialist Victory: The 9th of September in Ritual Ceremonies of Post-1989 Bulgaria 28. Remembering the "Revival Process" in Post-1989 Bulgaria 29. Websites of Memory: In Search of the Forgotten Past List of Contributors Index