Remembering Romanian Communist Times. New Insights on the Banality of Evil
Remembering Romanian Communist Times. New Insights on the Banality of Evil

Summary/Abstract: Analyzing two recent books in which prominent Romanian writers (Ana Blandiana and Gabriel Liiceanu) recount their lives during communism, we intend to reflect on how literary memoirs (written in very different forms) deal with the (recent) communist past and its troublesome heritage – not only for Romanian culture in general, but also for surviving individuals. Both authors under discussion attempt to come to terms with an evil they confronted daily in their regular lives; the questions they pose focus not only on “how that was possible”, or “how evil could be lived through on a daily basis”, but also on “how those stories are to be told” nowadays, to a reader growing more and more estranged from that past, and how those personal lives can get a more general, historical, meaning, through literature.

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