War commemorations in Eastern Europe:

These limitations are visible especially when approaching the regions of East Central Europe and especially of South-Eastern Europe, the latter region representing an area largely left out by this field of research until the last decade. The following lines shortly discusses the reasons for this omission, it surveys several features of the region which sets it apart from the cases of Western Europe as well as it presents the array of recent relevant contributions.

There are several reasons why the countries whose territories were affected by the Eastern Fronts and its subsequent political transformations were overlooked by the international scholarship dedicated to the First World War. From a political, military and diplomatic point of view, the area of the Western front concentrated the main causes of the war: the French-German rivalry, the violation of Belgium’s neutrality by Germany in the context of the British-German competition, the entrenched areas where the major battles were fought with heavy casualties in a matter of days and sometimes hours (Marne, Somme etc) while the Armistice of November 11 concerned the remaining fighting powers which also started the war. Therefore, for the practitioners of the political, military and diplomatic history of the first and second generation, the fronts of Eastern Europe were considered of a secondary importance and there is not much

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argument against to be made. In addition, the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 rather shadowed the importance of war experience on the most important Eastern front.

From a scholarly point of view, the importance of France, Germany and Great Britain as belligerents as well as the use of the three international languages, English, French and German, in the international historical scholarship and in accessing the respective national archives reinforced the study of the respective cases. The fall of the Habsburg Empire has also produced an interest in the Viennese archives that are also predominantly in German. Furthermore, even when the language barriers were bypassed, especially following transformations in the international scholarship dedicated to the region after the Second World War, the limited access to the archives, especially during the Communist times as well as the emphasis on the national and state history of the local historians contributed to this lack of attention paid to the war experience of the countries of Eastern Europe. Finally, the lack of regional cooperation that transcends the borders of the former empires well as well the tendency of approaching the national cases only in comparison with the cases of Western countries did not stimulate comparative approaches as well. Therefore, even when somebody would have been interested in the cases of the “small states,” and numerous contributions were already written during the last decades by scholars active in research institutions of Western countries, the cultural and political borders as well as the numerous logistic obstacles contributed to their further omission or downplaying of their experiences’ importance. While the study of

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these small cases requires a degree of skills sometimes higher compared to the study of Western European cases the use of comparative history definitely helps in analyzing these cases in particular and their set of characteristics in relation to the region of Eastern Europe.

However, especially for the practitioners of cultural, social and economic history, the human losses, the social impact of the war and the parallel political transformations in the regions of Eastern Europe that continued to affect several generations of people are no less significant in their magnitude when compared to the experience of the countries of Western Europe. If one would take into consideration the exacerbation of nationalism before and after the Great War, the massive mobilization of human and material resources, the processes of movements and exchanges of populations, and sometimes of ethnic cleansing, as well as the immense material and human losses provoked by the First World War, one may get combined the French, German and English experiences in almost every part of the Eastern Europe.²⁵ One may observe in the recent years a wave of literature dedicated to the Eastern European experiences, some of its results being introduced in the following lines and especially in the last section of Chapter One.

In order to assess the characteristics of the war experience in this region and the way how it contributed to the cultural and political contexts of war commemorations in the respective countries, one may divide these countries in several groups according to

25 Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The establishment of the Balkan national states, 1804-1920 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986, c1977); Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans, Second volume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); John R. Lampe, Balkans into Southeastern Europe. A century of war and transition. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

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their experience of the Great War and its social and cultural consequences. There are the defeated states such as Hungary and Bulgaria; the newly established composite states such as Poland and Czecho-Slovakia and the states such as Greece, Serbia/Yugo-Slavia and Romania where the prewar nationalist and religious traditions were imposed to a great extent upon the newly acquired territories or became the framework where the traditions of the newly added territories were accommodated, many times with major difficulties.

In addition, there are four other characteristics of the region of Eastern Europe that had consequences on the morphology and the substance of the processes of war commemorations. They are going to be detailed in Chapter One as a part of the conclusion of the section dealing with the commemorative practices in this region.

Firstly, the diversity of the political events following the First World War took over the importance of ending the war, when it was the case, and this led to a fragmented if not parochial perspective of the experience of the First World War in most of the countries of Eastern Europe. Armistice Day celebrated in the victorious countries of Western Europe was not shared in all the countries considered as Associated by the Allied Powers (Entante). Secondly, and one of the main reasons for the previous one, the war experience of the generation who fought on the fronts of Eastern Europe did not limit only to the events of 1914-1918 but it included the immediately previous and subsequent military confrontations such as the two Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, the Polish-Soviet war of 1921, the Romanian-Hungarian war of 1919, the Greek-Turkish war of

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1922 and the Russian civil war of 1917-1922. In some countries of the region the experience of each of these wars was approached in a unitary perspective which combined them with the experience of the First World War and integrated as a part of the hegemonic discourse disseminated as a part of the process of war commemoration.

Thirdly, for most of all of them large sections of the society were divided over the war experience since they fought on opposing sites and this had social and especially political consequences. Finally, the majority of the rural population in many of the countries of Eastern Europe led to the dominant position national churches played in framing the processes of war commemoration in several cases.

These peculiarities of Eastern Europe were partially addressed during the last decade by a series of scholars including Nancy Wingfield and Mark Cornwall on interwar Czechoslovakia, Melissa Bokovoy and John Paul Newman on the Serbian-Croatian case(s), Christoph Mick and Julia Eichenberg on the case of Poland. Among them, Maria Bucur played an important role in encouraging and supporting research on the role played by different sites of memory as places for political and cultural competition.²⁶ The results of their research is visible in the last section of Chapter One where the specificity of these national cases as well as of the entire region is surveyed in relation with the cases of Western Europe and Romania. A special issue of Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporaines was dedicated in 1992 to the countries of the region in addition to several

26 Staging the past: the politics of commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the present. Edited by Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2001); Gender and war in twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Edited by Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006)

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others dedicated to the memorialization of the Great War in Western Europe edited under the aegis of the Historial de Peronne, a leading center of research on the social and cultural history of the Great War and its previous and subsequent periods.²⁷ More recently, in 2007, Mark Cornwall organized two conferences dedicated to the topic, at Central European University and at the University of Southampton which brought together this series of established and younger scholars.²⁸

Research on the Romanian case of war commemorations during the twentieth century was carried out by Maria Bucur who introduced the gender perspective within the the Romanian field of historical research and Andi Mihalache of the Research Institute of History “A.D. Xenopol” in Iași.

Focusing on Romania and combining gender studies, memory studies, the study of ethnic and religious minorities with a complex anthropological perspective, Maria Bucur developed a series of studies on the way how the Great War was experienced, interpreted and commemorated by Romanians. She addressed the gendered aspect of heroism as “both policy makers and publicists sought to construct agency as a male prerogative”²⁹ at the time by focusing on the public images constructed for Queen Marie and Ecaterina Teodoroiu. Acutely observing that women’s “persistence, resourcefulness,

27 Guerres mondiales et conflicts contemporaines, Vol. 55, nr. 228, October-December. 2007.

28 A selection of the papers preaented at the ‘Sacrifice and regeneration’ conference on September 2007 is going to be published by Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman (eds.) The legacy of the Great War in East-Central Europe (London: Berghahn books).

29 Maria Bucur, “Between the Mother of the Wounded and the Virgin of Jiu: Romanian women and the gender of heroism during the Great War,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 12, nr. 2, Summer 2000, p.

31.

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and success in surviving [the First World War and providing for their families] were not as spectacular as dying with a weapon in one’s hand but, arguably, just as remarkable,”³⁰ Maria Bucur underlined that representations of the Queen and her actions “affected not only the public perception of the Royal Family but also ideas concerning what were suitable roles for women in the war effort,” the representations of Ecaterina Teodoroiu being separated from what was understood authentic womanhood in a patriarchal and conservative society Romania was at the time.³¹ Further contributions were made on the history of December 1 as a national holiday, on the major characteristics of the war monuments in interwar and postwar Romania as well as on the differences in interpreting and designing war monuments existing among the local communities and the state authorities.³² Using extensively the archive of the Society for the Cult of the Heroes as well as the archive of the Commission for Public Monuments, Maria Bucur analyzed the contest over war commemorations and representations of heroism between the vernacular voices and local practices, especially those of Orthodox women, and the discourse and practices disseminated by central state institutions. This perspective was employed in her book dedicated to the topic, Heroes and victims. In her own words, “my analysis

30 Maria Bucur, “Between the Mother of the Wounded and the Virgin of Jiu…,” p. 39.

31 Maria Bucur, “Between the Mother of the Wounded and the Virgin of Jiu…,” pp. 42 and 46.

32 Maria Bucur, “Birth of a nation: commemorations of December 1, 1918, and national identity in twentieth-century Romania” in Staging the past. The politics of commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the present. Edited by Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield (West Lafayette, Indiana:

Purdue University Press, 2001), pp. 286-326; Maria Bucur, “Edifices of the past: war memorials and heroes in twentieth-century Romania,” in Maria Todorova (editor). Balkan identities. Nation and memory (New York University Press, 2004) pp. 158-179; Maria Bucur, “Of crosses, winged victories, and eagles: commemorative contests between official and vernacular voices in interwar Romania,” East Central Europe, vol. vol. 37, nr. 1, February 2010, pp. 31-58.

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ultimately seeks to privilege the seldom heard voice of average people at the local level, even while acknowledging that the state and other powerful institutions, such as religious establishments, have had greater resources and a continuous will to control the commemorations linked to the two world wars.” For what is relevant to the topic of this dissertation, Maria Bucur’s research surveyed the commemorative practices before and after the Great War, focusing most of all on women’s organizations as forms of civil society involved in creating and establishing commemorative practices at the local levels or in constructing major war monuments such as the Mausoleum of Mărășești. An entire chapter of Heroes and victims deals with the memorialization of the war experience during the interwar period, Bucur underlining again that the contribution of the home front, of women especially, even if they were active as nurses, was largely ignored by the official policy of commemorating the First World War.³³ Focusing mostly on the twentieth century in order to understand why and how Romanian nationalism took extreme forms especially during the Second World War, Maria Bucur left room enough for approaching the nineteenth century roots of the Romanian nationalism and its heritage in the inter-war period, a cultural and political heritage which is visible especially as a part of the process of war commemorations and the focus of this dissertation.

Andi Mihalache pursued a complex endeavor of approaching the idea of historical patrimony in Romania starting with the second half of the nineteenth century. He focused on the growing attention given to historical preservation of medieval patrimony and to

33 Maria Bucur. Heroes and victims. Remembering war in twentieth-century Romania (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 2009), p. 2.

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the creation of public museums and touched upon the case of war monuments in inter-war period in his broader approach of commemorative practices as forms of political legitimacy in Romania. In a creative, personal and rather philosophical style, he surveyed in numerous nineteenth century Romanian literary sources and archival materials the attitudes towards the ideas of hero(ism), (historical) patrimony and youthfullness/recent versus seniority/antiquity, taken as being rather perennial and not conceptual or at least belonging to the Western culture.³⁴ Relevant for this dissertation, Andi Mihalache systematically surveyed the archives of the Commission of Public Monument and discussed the process of war commemoration in interwar Romania as a part of his larger attention paid to representations of death and its associated rituals and museification in modern Romania.³⁵

Finally, my own research on the topic went in parallel to the above, even if it was nurtured and heightened by them. It took a more modest stance being rather chronological and analytical. It started with comparing the urban heritage of Brăila to the

34 Andi Mihalache, “Pentru o istorie culturală a patrimoniului” [Towards a cultural history of the historical patrimony” in Xenopoliana, Iasi, vol. XI, 3-4, 2003, pp. 158-179; Andi Mihalache, “Eroi, morminte şi statui: poetica evanescenţei în secolul XIX” [Heroes, graves and statues: the history of fading historical memory in nineteenth century Romania] in In medias res. Studii de istorie culturală. [In the midst of culture. Studies of cultural history] Edited by Andi Mihalache and Adrian Cioflâncă (Iaşi: Editura Universităţii „Al.I.Cuza”, 2007), pp. 236-256; Andi Mihalache, “Despre bătrânețea zilei de astăzi : statui, monumente istorice și discursuri patrimoniale în România modernă” [The old age of today:

statues, historical monuments and patrimonial discourses in modern Romania] in Dumitru Ivănescu and Cătălina Mihalache (eds) Patrimoniu național și modernizare în societatea românească: instituții, actori, strategii [National patrimony and modernization in the Romanian society: institutions, actors, strategies] (Iași: Editura Junimea, 2009), pp. 157-189.

35 Andi Mihalache, “Eroul colectiv. Semnificaţii civice şi funerare în comemorările primului război mondial” [The collective hero. Civic and funerary aspects in commemorating the First World War] in Mănuşi albe, mănuşi negre. Cultul eroilor în vremea Dinastiei Hohenzollern [The cult of the heroes in Romania during the Hohenzollern dynasty] (Cluj-Napoca: Editura Limes, 2007), pp. 233-261.

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one of Bucharest and with the analysis of street renaming in Brăila in a seminar paper of 2001, it was explicitly formulated in the prospectus prepared for the comprehensive exam of 2006 and it most of all took shape in the paper presented at the above mentioned conference organized at the University of Southampton in September 2007.