Mihail Sebastian’s Journal 1935–1944 accurately reflects the changing historical realities in Romania in general and in the capital city of Bucharest in particular, before and during the Second World War. As a Jewish Romanian writer, Sebastian records a landscape of ideological change that has a clear impact on him as a lawyer, an intellectual and a member of the city’s literary high society. This article proposes a new reading and analysis of Sebastian’s work, by focusing on the close relationship between the writer and the city as a vibrant, organic space. My work introduces a new critical vocabulary to the literary analysis of Sebastian’s Journal, through the use of terminology commonly employed by performance studies. The Situationist practices of walking and drifting, further conceptualised by performance studies scholar Carl Lavery, will be utilised as methods of exploring the visual and emotional richness of Sebastian’s work. The intimate relationship between the writer and the city will be constantly framed by the historical and political realities of the time, ensuring a balanced discussion of both literary achievement and historical witnessing.
Focusing on issues of memory, representation and performativity, this paper will discuss three facets of representing and remembering the Romanian Revolution of December 1989. Firstly, it will tackle the televisual representations of the event, the story of the “live revolution”
and the depiction of the revolutionary narrative through filmic devices. Secondly, this paper will look at theatrical representations of the Revolution and its aftermath, both in Romania (through playwrights such as Saviana Stanescu) and in the UK (Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest). Last
but not least, it will look at the varied ways in which the Romanian Revolution is remembered today, discussing the issue of revolutionary heroes and the process of “forgetting”, which has determined the 21st century relationship between Romania and its revolution.
Examination of regime changes in Eastern Europe reveals significant insights into the development of post-communist politics of memory and commemoration. It also allows for meaningful conversations about events that had been historically ignored or redefined by state narratives during communism, including the active involvement of Eastern European countries in the Holocaust. The Elie Wiesel Memorial House in Sighetu Marmației ( 2002) and the Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest ( 2009), both in Romania, will be analyzed within the larger framework of a current decolonial conceptualization of former Eastern European state socialist regimes, and their cultural and political experiences at the periphery of Europe.
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