In order to accomplish the goal of approaching and explaining the topic of this dissertation, a structure of six chapters was envisioned. Chapter One circumscribes the topic of this dissertation in a long-term comparative perspective, both historical and geographical, by placing the Romanian case not only in the Eastern European context but also in the global context. Chapter Two analyzes the cultural context and factors that made possible the process of war commemorations in Romania by taking a long term historical perspective. Chapter Three deals with the social context of war commemorations in interwar Romania by focusing on the demographic and social consequences of the First World War and on the most important groups and actors involved in the process of war commemorations. The following three chapters detail the war commemorations taking place in interwar Romania at three levels, Chapter Four surveying the policy of war commemorations as it was conceived, debated and promoted by the political center, Chapter Five focusing on the construction of war monuments as an intersection of this policy and the individual participation and as the result of the activity of different professional groups directly involved in promoting war
87 Stacy Boldrick and Richard Clay, “Introduction” in Iconoclasm. Contested objects, contested terms.
Edited by Stacy Boldrick and Richard Clay (London: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 2: “iconoclasm, here taken to mean different destructive or transformative behaviors and attitudes toward sculpture, artifacts and other materials.” Along many others, these authors use the term of iconoclasm to define a variety of contexts where artifacts are destroyed or suffer unauthorized modifications.
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commemorations and Chapter Six surveying sources relevant for understanding the variety of perspectives at the individual level. Each of these six chapters sheds light from a different perspective and on a different aspect of the process of war commemorations in inter-war Romania. For each of them extensive introductions and conclusions were written so they could be read independently of each other on the one hand and to explain their part in the structure of this dissertation on the other hand.
Chapter One contextualizes the Romanian case of war commemorations in a long term historical perspective and in a larger European and global perspective. Analytically structured and descriptive in its nature, it does so not necessarily by aiming to detail the information related to the processes of war commemorations in Western Europe, United States and the countries of the British Commonwealth. Instead, aiming to indirectly answer the question to what extent is the Romanian case illustrative to and distinct from the processes of war commemorations in Eastern Europe and in Europe and the rest of the world, this chapter focuses on several variables that are partially approached in a comparative way: the cultural continuities that are linked one way or another with the paradigm of nationalism and are relevant for studying the process of war commemoration such as the concept of (military) heroism and the construction of the national historical memory through arts, literature and public monuments; the role of the institutionalized religion and of the popular forms of mourning of the dead; and the social consequences of the First World War and their subsequent administrative, cultural, political and social policies aimed at coping with the problems of cultural demobilization. The three parts of
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this chapter discusses these variables in the decades prior to the war and their presence in interwar Western Europe as well as in interwar Eastern Europe.
Chapter Two surveys and explains the cultural context of war commemorations in Romania. The cultural discourse that framed the interwar process of war commemoration was articulated during the nineteenth century and it continued to frame the public sphere until the middle of the twentieth century and even later. This chapter discusses the articulation of the Romanian historical memory during the nineteenth century through literature and arts and its association with the concept of the (military) heroism. This historical memory justified Romania’s entry in the First World War and the concept of (military) heroism was used for cultural mobilization before and after the First World War as well as a part of the policy and the politics of war commemoration. The chapter surveys the factors that favored the extension of the concept of heroism to public monuments in order to make understandable the larger context for building war monuments before and after the war as well as the social actors involved in the process.
Not only as an illustration of these dynamics but also in order to underline the cultural continuity of war commemoration before and after the Great War in Romania, it discusses at length the articulation and the forms of memorializing the Romanian participation in the Russian-Turkish War of 1877-1878, a participation celebrated ever since in Romania as ‘the war of independence.’
Chapter Three discusses the social context of war commemorations in interwar period by focusing on the social and political consequences of the First World War in
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Romania, on their role and participation during the war and on the dynamics of some of the affected social groups, the war disabled, war orphans and war widows, during the interwar period. It surveys the events related to the Romanian participation in the First World War in 1916-1919 and the financial and demographic costs of this participation. It discusses the apparent lack of political activity of war veterans in interwar Romania and the relationships with the land and political reforms of the early 1920s and the granting of war pensions and of a series of other facilities. It also shortly presents the creation and the activity of the National Office for the War Disabled, War Orphans and War Widows that was put in charge of taking care of the groups of people most visibly affected by the war during the 1920s and the 1930s. These groups including military officers, teachers and priests took part in the politics of war commemorations either as a way of justifying their own contribution during the war or as simple observers.
Chapter Four surveys the policy of war commemorations as it was promoted by the political elites and by the administrative bodies in charge of its supervision. It surveys the legislation of 1920, 1927 and 1940 through which this policy was articulated with their most important parliamentary debates. It discusses the activity of the administrative body in charge of taking care of war cemeteries and of supporting the construction of war monuments and other forms of memorialization, The Society for the Graves of the Heroes Fallen in the War. It analyzes the most important site of war commemorations (The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in front of the newly created Military Museum) and the national day established for remembering those fallen during the war, the Heroes Day
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which coincided with the Ascension Day. It also describes the activity of the Commission for Public Monuments established and active during the 1930s in supervising the numerous war monuments created as local sites of war commemorations as well as the creation of the Arch of Triumph in Bucharest as the second major site of commemorating the First World War and the creation of Greater Romania.
Chapter Five discusses the dynamics of constructing war monuments during the interwar period as the best indicator of the implementation of the policy of war commemoration by the professionalized groups mentioned earlier in this introduction.
This chapter analyzes the general characteristics of these war monuments by focusing on their regional and statistical distribution, their iconography, costs and authors, an analysis which rather reveals a similarity of cultural background of the actors involved in this process in spite of their regional, ethnic and religious diversity. Different sections deals with the war monuments constructed in Muntenia, Dobrogea, Moldavia and Transylvania, Banat, Bukowina and Bessarabia as well as the fate of all these war monuments in the subsequent decades when Romania was under a Communist political regime.
Chapter Six discusses the process of memorializing and commemorating the war at the individual level. It attempts a “history from below” by focusing at the most important examples of literature dealing directly or indirectly with the war experience either on the warfront or on the home front. Most of them were written during the 1920s and they seem to have been widely circulated. My chapter does not attempt an aesthetical
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discussion of this literature but it approaches it from the point of view of this circulation, in spite of lack of the data related to the number of sold copies, by focusing on the main themes that are observable. A second section of this chapter discusses the public participation at the inauguration of war monuments during the interwar period as well as at the yearly celebrated Heroes’ Day.
The final Conclusions survey the main questions and features of this dissertation and presents the gains of the research brought in. War commemoration was the peak of a tradition articulated mostly as a part of the cultural and political heritage of the Old Kingdom, a tradition greatly reconfigured by the experience of the First World War with its social, cultural, economic and political consequences. The historical memory articulated most of all during the nineteenth century around the purpose of the cultural if not political unity of all the speakers of the Romanian language and through the political idiom of nationalism represented the larger cultural basin against which the policy of war commemoration was articulated before and especially after the First World War. The (military) heroism was the model of behavior privileged through the state sponsored institutions of public education and military training before and after the war, it framed from a cultural point of view the process of war commemorations during the interwar period and it had been absorbed as a part of it too. Public and war monuments are the most visible indicators of the impact of this concept of heroism being however the conjugate result of a series of factors including the cultural and institutional construction of the modern state, the spread of public education, the expansion or the reconfiguration
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of urban areas and the democratization of the public sphere. The policy and the politics of commemorations represented the intersection of these long term cultural trends with the dramatic social consequences of the First World War followed by the voting and the land reforms promised during the war. The set of state-sponsored and state-organized public processions aimed at gaining legitimacy for the organizers and at conferring social cohesion to the rest of the population but it rather followed the dynamics of popular mourning than it set them in motion in spite of the educational aspect intended.
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Chapter 1.