Yesterday I was downtown at Piatsa Universitatii. It was a grey day, cold and damp. But the booksellers were out, as usual.
There are about a dozen of them, their tables stretched along a couple of hundred meters west of the Piatsa along Bulevar Elisabet. They sell secondhand paperbacks and hardcovers, and textbooks, and old maps and magazines. Unfortunately, almost all of it is in Romanian; but it's still a nice place to spend half an hour.
And occasionally one finds something in English.
This time it was a book called The Dangers of Distorting History. It was a hardback, obviously a collection of historical essays by Romanian historians.
I had a sinking feeling as soon as I picked it up: in appearance and format, it was all too familiar. It looked exactly like one of the collections of nationalist history essays that I'd seen in Serbia: ugly hardback books full of badly written articles badly translated, with titles like "Bosnia: The True Story" or "Economic Motivations for the NATO Aggression Against Serbia".
And sure enough. It was a collection of nationalist Romanian essays, dating from 1987.
(Why the similar appearance? I really don't know... but it was distinctive: same sort of binding, same sort of paper, even the same typeface. Go figure.)
I stood for a few minutes and flipped through the essays. They were even worse than I'd have thought. Without exception, hard-line Romanian nationalist stuff. Romanians good, Hungarians bad. Romanians descended from the Romans. Transylvania always ours; Hungarians alien interlopers. Turks bad, Bulgarians bad. Dobrudja always ours. Romania the center of culture in the region; Romanians the heroic wall against the Turks.
There was a Communist gloss to it: some stones thrown at German fascism, a distinct silence on the topic of Bessarabia, which was then the Soviet Republic of Moldova. (Ceausescu approached this issue with great delicacy, because a Romanian claim on Bessarabia would deeply annoy the Soviets, and might also open the door to a Hungarian claim on Transylvania.) And, of course, multiple references to the great Chairman and President, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his enlightened policies.
But overall, it was fairly raw old-fashioned chauvinism; and the primary target was the Hungarians, and the danger of Hungarian "revisionism". The "Danger of Distorting History", in the title, was clearly the danger of any history that didn't say Transylvania was Romanian, should be Romanian, had always been Romanian, and that Romania had been the victim of centuries of Hungarian aggression and oppression.
Well, Ceausescu didn't like the Hungarians much. And although his regime had all the trappings of Communism -- hammers and sickles, constant references to "society", the "new man", and "socialist achievements" -- in a lot of ways, it looks more like fascism than Communism. (Not that Communists couldn't be crazy-bad nationalists, of course.)
Anyhow. Another depressing aspect of this book was that it had fifteen or twenty different authors writing and co-writing chapters. I don't know the Romanian academic world too well, but I would bet money that many of them were prominent historians and other academics. It was dismal to think about honest historians being forced to write this stuff in order to keep their jobs; but then, it was even more dismal to think that they might have done it more or less enthusiastically.
And, of course, I was reading this standing just off Piatsa Universitatii, within sight of the Hotel Intercontinental and the monument to the murdered protestors of 1989. The dangers of distorting history: yes, indeed.
I didn't buy the book, by the way. Probably I should have; it was interesting as a period piece, and cost only a couple of hundred thousand lei. But it was just too damn depressing.
Maybe next time.
Posted by douglas at December 23, 2003 12:32 PM