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Uneasy Heritage: Remembering Everyday Life in Post-Socialist Memorials and Museums

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Abstract

This chapter examines the representation of state socialism in three post-socialist states: Romania, Hungary, and Germany. It argues that the relationship with popular memories of everyday life within the dictatorship is an “uneasy” one, which provokes varied responses. In Romania, the state socialist past is constructed as an alien ideology imposed upon the Romanian people and which has little to do with national self-understanding. In Hungary, state-mandated institutions incorporate material culture only as part of a narrative of totalitarian repression and control. In Germany, memorialization of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has begun to incorporate the experiences of “ordinary” East Germans; however, the concept of the “everyday” is (re)interpreted to allow it to be absorbed into the dominant representation of the GDR as totalitarian dictatorship. This uneasy relationship with popular memories of state socialism—be it in terms of ideology or everyday life—risks a “disinheritance” of certain social groups and highlights the particularly politicized nature of heritage construction in post-transition societies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I take the term “state-mandated” in reference to heritage from Beattie 2011, who attributes the concept to Sabine Moller.

  2. 2.

    For an overview, see Benton 2010.

  3. 3.

    Unless otherwise stated, all translations from German and Romanian are my own.

  4. 4.

    Details of the exhibition are taken from field notes made during a visit to the museum in August 2010. The description of the exhibition is based on its features at this time.

  5. 5.

    See also Mark 2010, p. 90. Light (2001, p. 1068) notes that the history of state socialism is also bracketed in narratives attached to the Palace of the Parliament, with a direct line being drawn from Romania ’s pre-war democracy to its post-socialist political system.

  6. 6.

    The description of the exhibition is based on material gathered during a visit in August 2010.

  7. 7.

    For an alternative interpretation, see Sayner 2011, p. 146.

  8. 8.

    Leaflets encased in a metal container, which was fired across the Berlin Wall . Details of the exhibition are taken from field notes made during visits to the museum in August 2012, and February and August 2013.

  9. 9.

    Details of the exhibition are taken from field notes made during a visit to the museum in July 2014. The description of the exhibition is based on its features at this time.

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Acknowledgments

The fieldwork for this research was generously supported by the Leverhulme Trust in the form of an Early Career Fellowship.

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  1. Department of Modern Languages, Institute for German Studies, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Sara Jones

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  1. University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    Mike Robinson

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Helaine Silverman

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Jones, S. (2015). Uneasy Heritage: Remembering Everyday Life in Post-Socialist Memorials and Museums. In: Robinson, M., Silverman, H. (eds) Encounters with Popular Pasts. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13183-2_13

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