Oneness and Otherness in Florin Manolescu's Romanian-German Diary – Cu ochii pe mine / Watching myself

Abstract

Florin Manolescu's diary published in 2010, Cu ochii pe mine / Watching myself, is representative for the post -totalitarian Eastern traveler to the West as it can be defined as a memoir writing coping with the great totalitarian History and its autobiographical fictionalization instrumented by the uprooted authorial mask. The conflictive relationship between oneness and otherness lies at the core of the diarist narrative, focusing now on identity re-negotiation as the Romanian writer experiences the Western adventure during his stay in Germany.After the fall of the totalitarian regimes, the 'peripheral' literature from Eastern Europe experiences a reidentification process by use of the mediating confessing discourses which, under the diarist formula, convey a special type of lived History now re-written by the authors who have confronted the West in the post-totalitarian age. It is the case of the Romanian writers who have left the communist enclave after December 1989 and 'lived the European dream' embedded into a self-reflexive narrative. Through the autobiographical writing, they relate to the totalitarian epoch carried out by their own personal memory as well as by the memory of the Text itself, thus making up the interiorized facet of the Great history now re-lived within the writing act. These types of texts are symptomatic for the need of overpassing the complex of the dominated / tortured marking the literary productions emerging from the ex-communist cultures. The concept of cultural frontier, as Monica Spiridon points out, defines an 'elementary spatial structure, serving as geopolitical discontinuity and as marker, landmark, operating in three registers: real, symbolic and imaginary' (our translation) (Spiridon, 2006). The diarist writing functions as an interface of inter-mingling cultural frontiers, the writer finding himself caught between two different fictionalised projections -the native culture displaying traces of Memory empowerment (the ghost of the omnipotent ideological Centre) and the newly-experienced Western culture which generates identity-focused re-definition. Thus, the