Rescaling memory: Dialogic practices and intergenerational engagement in rural Romania

Abstract

This article illustrates the transformative potential of dialogic memory practices by examining a series of workshops in rural Romania that decentralized memory work by engaging local libraries in intergenerational dialogue. Organized within the Europe for Citizens project Reshaping the Image of Democratic Revolutions 1989, the Romanian initiative shifted attention from national commemorative centers to villages largely absent from dominant narratives of 1989. Librarians emerged as key mediators of remembrance, facilitating encounters between generations with uneven relationships to the communist past, including young participants with no lived experience of socialism. The workshops reveal the dynamics and micropolitics of memory transmission in contexts usually overlooked by memory work, showing how European and national frames are selectively reinterpreted through local concerns and affective remembrance. Rather than producing consensus, these exchanges generate what the article terms centripetal memory dynamics, in which memories are brought closer together through community mediation.

Introduction

“ I cried—it was the first time we talked about this.” Ioana, a middle-aged librarian from Păuşeşti Măglaşi, a village in southwestern Romania, was sharing with me and her librarian colleagues the experience of a memory workshop in her library. For a decade now, this network of librarians has met as part of the EduCaB network to discuss ways in which their underfunded rural libraries could act as true community hubs. Yet the discussions organized in December 2021 about the 1989 revolution, where people shared stories across generations, were different from previous events as they brought an intergenerational public that was provoked to reflect upon the recent past. As the librarians shared, people were eager to talk and to listen to stories that were usually told from elsewhere. From December 21 to 22 every year, the Romanian authorities commemorate the Romanian revolution, which took place in big cities often far removed from the realities of Romania’s rural population, accounting for half of the total, the highest in the EU. Smaller cities sometimes even debate whether there was actually a revolution in their town—as the Romanian New Wave film 12:08 East of Bucharest satirically portrayed. ¹ The countryside had not yet been the protagonist of such stories. In the usual stories of communism, villages appear mostly as the stage of the 1950s collectivization and as sources of the rising working classes—but the broader memory of communism is one of industrialization and urban landscapes. Toward the end of the period, the communist Romanian leader Nicolae Ceauşescu’s rural systematization plan even envisaged a future in which villages would be reduced in number, their population moved to compact and functional agro-industrial centers. The story of before and after 1989 was told mostly from the city, as the rural Romanian world has been largely absent from societal and political debates in the last few decades. ² Yet, in the winter of 2021, in more than 20 villages across the country, memory workshops aimed to put the stories of how rural Romania experienced 1989 into focus. In the words of several librarians, they had an almost cathartic, freeing impact.

Rural Romania has not at all been a theater of the recent memory boom. Aleida Assmann (2015) highlighted the shift from a modernist, future-oriented perspective to what she describes as the “memory frame,” which enveloped much of Europe and many parts of the world. Grounded in moralist and therapeutic concerns, the turn to memory reflects a growing acknowledgment of the enduring impact of historical violence and trauma. Memory is not only a static archive of the past but also an embodied process, transmitted and contested across generations living synchronously (A. Assmann, 2011a). Concomitantly, official rhetoric in many Western countries extolled the virtues of memory culture (Erinnerungskultur), seen as the way to overcome trauma and build a better future (A. Assmann 2015; David, 2020). Nevertheless, the rural Romanian context suggests another scenario, one of weak memory frames and a rather absent intergenerational transmission of memory tropes in regions affected by depopulation and out-migration but also the relative absence of cultural memory transmission mechanisms.

Assmann (2015) called for a dialogic memory, which integrates multiple perspectives on shared traumatic violence and discusses interstate contexts and competing national memories. Robbe et al. (2025) developed “dialogic remembering” as a method for not only analyzing but also activating both relationality and frictions in the process of exchanging memories in groups. Dialogic remembrance does not seek consensus but reveals the plurality of memory tropes. By examining how memory workshops in rural Romania engaged local libraries in curating a space of intergenerational dialogue, this article shifts the discussion of dialogic remembrance toward spatially marginalized lifeworlds. The workshops elucidate the dynamics and micropolitics of memory transmission in under-researched, rural contexts, including what I discuss later in the article as centripetal memory dynamics.

While this special issue examines how “peaceful” regime change often involved traumatic events and symbolic or structural violence, the Romanian experience is itself one of a violent regime change, described and understood by many as a “revolution.” Violence is central to the birth of the new regime in the Romanian case and was narrated as a key element of its legitimacy. In the first decade after 1989, the official emphasis on the revolution obfuscated the histories of repression during the actual communist regime (Stan, 2013). This focus has, in the last decade, given way to a general, vague but powerful state anticommunist discourse coexisting with communist nostalgia among increasing portions of the population (Iacob et al., 2015), concomitant to a raising awareness about the structural violence of the transition (Pehe and Wawrzyniak, 2023). Yet 1989 remained a powerful divider of the past, which the new political elites could overcome simply by declaring a new beginning, a pattern that occurred in the entire postsocialist region. In this context, the article examines how the memory of 1989 in Romania—framed as a uniquely violent rupture between periods characterized by distinct forms of structural and symbolic violence—is articulated at the local level, distant from the centers of political upheaval yet deeply embedded in slower, everyday processes of transformation. It investigates whether this foundational violence is subject to dialogic engagement or remains taken for granted and unexamined, as well as scrutinizes to what extent it constitutes a site of tension, ambiguity, or contestation.

Thirty years from 1989, Romania is a divided, unequal country. While a few Romanian cities are booming, the countryside is lagging behind. The sense of being forgotten dominates these rural areas. The older generations often inhabit places now devoid of working-age people, who have left the villages for waged labor in Italy, Spain, or Germany. They send remittances, build houses in their villages, but rarely return to live in them. This feeling of being left behind, combined with resentment toward the corrupt politics of the center, as well as the local echelons of power, has driven rural communities—and the diasporas emerging from them—toward populist parties, as evident in the 2024 and 2025 Romanian elections.

The article examines a series of memory workshops organized in villages across Romania by librarians, as part of a project funded by Europe for Citizens. The Reshaping the Image of Democratic Revolutions 1989, led by the Croatian NGO Documenta, provided a trans-European perspective on 1989 by incorporating voices from Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries—typically involved in such discussions—with those from a number of Western European countries and, innovatively, with those from the former Yugoslavia. As such, the rescaling of memory work occurred in a general project that itself recentered 1989 on a space not usually associated with it—the former Yugoslavia. Its Romanian iteration also decentered the approach by focusing on villages. Uniquely, the Romanian segment of the project shifted the usual urban-centered focus of memory activism to rural areas by utilizing a network of local libraries and librarians to organize debates on the significance of 1989.

Reshaping the Image of Democratic Revolutions 1989 offers a rich background on dialogic perspectives across multiple fault lines. First, there are the regional fault lines: the Europe for Citizens project sought to juxtapose narratives about 1989 from Eastern and Western Europe. Yet within this east, another rift emerges: the difference between post-Yugoslav and non-Yugoslav experiences of both socialism and its end. Romania also stands apart. Its 1989 rupture was marked by violence and remains an outlier in the dominant narrative of “democratic revolutions,” negotiated, peaceful transitions in Central and Eastern Europe. Second, there is another geographical fault line between rural and urban modes of memory transmission, examined here in the case of Romania. Third, there is the fault line of experience and generations, between those with direct experience and those without.

Akin to Robbe et al. (2025) in this special issue, this article examines dialogic remembering as a process, yet it focuses specifically on generations. In her work, Aleida Assmann pointed to the importance of the communication between generations, which creates what Assmann (2011b) called communicative memory, distinct from cultural memory—the remembrance forms embodied by media, monuments, and archives. In the tradition of Karl Mannheim, sociologists have found that each generation’s unique experiences shape its values, emotions, and consciousness. These generational memories are passed down but are often challenged and reinterpreted by younger generations who reinterpret the past through their own decisive life experiences (A. Assmann, 2021). As such, generational memory transmission is often the subject of contestation. It is precisely the entwining of conflict and relationality that is at the core of the dialogic remembrance framework proposed by Robbe et al. (2025), which makes it a fruitful lens for this study. Through the memory workshops I discuss, diverse generations—from school-age children unfamiliar with the history of communism and the postcommunist transition to the elderly—participated in intergenerational dialogues.

This intergenerational perspective is also very timely with regard to both the current state of research and of contemporary developments. To give just one example, in their analysis of street renaming and monument removal, Rusu and Croitoru (2021) note that the proportion of respondents willing to name streets after either Nicolae Ceauşescu or Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the interwar leader of the far right Iron Guard movement, is significantly higher among those born after 1989 than among those with lived experience of the regimes these figures represent. This raises critical questions: Why do a substantial number of Romanian youth consider such controversial figures worthy of commemoration, and how do they come to evaluate historical periods they did not experience directly? Recent scholarship suggests that such attitudes must also be understood within digitally mediated memory environments. Hoskins (2011, 2016) describes the emergence of “connective memory,” characterized by practically limitless communication among networked participants in remembering the past, which both enables access to vast amounts of information and also exposes users to disinformation. In this context, as Petrescu and Petrescu (2025) show, online circulation reshapes how the communist past is encountered, fragmenting historical knowledge into affective, shareable narratives in which everyone can appear as an “expert.” In the context of the late 2024 Romanian elections, this trend also explains why younger voters—who are also the largest consumers of TikTok—supported a TikTok-viralized candidate who embodies admiration for the Iron Guard while maintaining an orientation toward Russia and national-communism precepts. In the Romanian case, where rural regions are additionally marked by depopulation and uneven access to educational resources, these connective memory dynamics intersect with inherited family narratives and local silences. A key question, then, is what impact direct dialogues with time witnesses, conducted within a dialogic memory framework, may have on this contemporary nostalgia among generations without lived experience, nostalgia shaped not only by generational distance but also by digitally mediated forms of knowledge and disinvestment in formal education.

The article first discusses the main frames of remembering 1989 in Romania, showcasing how the rural areas are reconstituted in a black hole of remembrance for the mainstream memory culture. It then introduces the EU-funded project in the framework of which the rural workshops in Romania were organized and reflects on the methodology and the caveats of a mediated memory corpus and recollected memory. The article then proceeds to discuss the workshops in two parts. First, it analyzes the patterns of memory transmission that these intergenerational dialogues reveal. Second, it examines the content of the transmitted memory, from life in communism to 1989 and its expectations.

Revolutionary memory? Remembering 1989 and Romanian communism

In the context of remembering 1989 across Europe, the Romanian revolution plays a special role. The exits from communist rule were collectively seen as revolutionary and described as such — for instance, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia or, in Germany, the “Peaceful Revolution” (Friedliche Revolution). Nevertheless, the alleged revolutionary nature of the 1989 events was not without its critics. They pointed out that 1989 was about a return to the past, which would make the events in fact counterrevolutionary, as they were against the communist project seen as an embodiment of modernity. Yet this argument was counteracted by the fact that the movements were for democracy, which arguably did not represent a return to the past just before the Second World War, when most CEE countries—with the exception of Czechoslovakia—were ruled rather autocratically. Another narrative trope was that of a return to normality. This normality was equated with the situation in the neighboring West, without any knowledge of how things would have turned out in these countries without the Soviet-installed regimes in the mid-1940s. Habermas himself used “rectifying revolution” to describe 1989. Yet the often-negotiated nature of these transformations led to a challenge to the understanding of the revolutionary nature of the 1989 events. For some, like Hungarian dissidents, this was more of a “regime change” than a revolution (Mark, 2010). Romania’s exit from dictatorship, however, at the bicentennial of the French Revolution, looked and smelled like an actual revolution: It was a violent overthrow of a dictator by the force of the people. Or at least, this is how it looked on TV and how it was narrated during and after the events. It was also the main memory narrative of people who lived it or watched it on TV. Yet the “stolen revolution” thesis—that is, the people in power changed political allegiance overnight and continued to lead the country—or the conspiratorial narratives that it was in fact a coup planted by either the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the USSR or by factions within the communist party, abounded in the decades to come. They constituted counternarratives to the revolution’s sacralized status in Romanian official memory.

The year 1989 became the cornerstone of postcommunist memory in Romania, as the governments that followed emphasized it as a moment of democratic rebirth, while largely avoiding a critical engagement with the nature of communist rule. Consistently, memorials of the revolution sprang up across the country; cities placed welcoming signs with “martyr city” labels next to their names at the entrance to the municipality to emphasize their participation—marked through sacrifice and contribution—at the country’s “liberation,” and annual commemorations in December became key in Romania’s memory calendar.

Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu was one of the harshest regimes in the Soviet Bloc (Tismaneanu, 2003), and while the December 1989 revolution dominates postcommunist memory, earlier persecutions often remained unaddressed due to statutory limitations (Ciobanu, 2020; Grosescu and Ursachi, 2009). As a whole, the communist period was absent from official narratives, including museums unsure how to narrate this past, constituting a “black hole” of Romanian history (Bădică, 2010). Over time, anticommunist discourse became institutionalized through bodies such as the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile (IICMER) ³ and the 2006 Presidential Report (Stan, 2013; Tismaneanu and Stan, 2018). Critics, however, argue that this prevalent discourse stifles emancipatory politics (Chelcea and Druţǎ, 2016) and competes with Holocaust memory (Shafir, 2016). At the societal level, scholars point to the coexistence of parallel memory narratives: A nostalgic turn emphasizing full employment, industrial development, and ample amounts of time and socialization, versus the memory encapsulated in cultural products such as films and publications, which focus on regime crimes and repression, and visits to political prisons such as Piteşti or Sighet ⁴ (Bădescu, 2024; Ciobanu and Şerban, 2025; Marin, 2021). Surveys indicate that up to 40% of Romanians prefer the communist period to present conditions (Rusu and Croitoru, 2021), a phenomenon interpreted less as political longing than as biographical nostalgia for youth or dissatisfaction with the present (Todorova and Gille 2010; Petrescu, 2017). This distinction is particularly relevant for younger generations without lived experience of the regime, whose evaluations rely on mediated knowledge rather than memory. The perception of this growing experiential distance has also been acknowledged in recent historiography. Alina Pavelescu (2024), for example, explicitly addressed her history of the Revolution to a generation that did not witness it, framing the work less as a response to nostalgia than to a widening deficit of historical knowledge.

The differentiation between generations and how they remember is an important analytical category. I propose a generational model based on formative childhood contexts: those still alive but born before 1945 who experienced their early years during the period of political repression (particularly before 1953); those born between 1945 and 1973 who grew up during the relative developmental optimism of the 1960s and 1970s, yet also experienced later the nationalist turn and Ceauşescu’s consolidation of power in 1977; while those born between 1974 and 1986 experienced childhood during the years of acute austerity and shortage (1983–1989), marked by systemic penury and state control over daily life, then experiencing the transition years also marked by economic problems and deprivation. ⁵ Finally, those born after 1986 do not have direct memories of the communist era and the Revolution and rely on family transmission and history teaching for how they relate to the period. In the workshops, it was the latter three generations that were represented, which means that the end of the regime and the transition period were more important to frame their views than, say, the political repression of the 1950s.

With all this wealth of analysis on the memory of communism, discussions on the memory of communism or of 1989 in Romania generally exclude the country’s rural half. Two memory tropes received the attention of researchers early on: the collectivization and decollectivization of villages (Iordachi and Dobrincu, 2009; Kligman and Verdery, 2011; Verdery, 1983, 1999) and the support for the anticommunist resistance in the early decades (Ciobanu, 2014; Dobrincu, 2008). Yet overall, actual projects or work addressing memory in the rural area are scarce. Analyses of 1989 and postcommunist remembrance have overwhelmingly focused on urban centers, and there remains a significant gap in understanding how these experiences are recollected dialogically and how memory circulates in rural contexts today.

The collectivization of villages remains a dominant story of communist rural life. The majority of Romanian villages experienced forced collectivization, and while some mountainous or geographically isolated communities remained outside this system, collectivized rural spaces shaped the everyday experiences of millions. Yet comparatively, the memory of the collectivized village experience per se remains less present in dominant narratives of memory in postcommunist Romania. Discussions around “communist nostalgia” typically focus on the experiences of the urban working class, with towns and cities comprising approximately 50% of the country’s population. In these urban contexts, the collapse of industry and the closure of state-owned factories brought severe deprivation, prompting many to reassess the communist past more favorably in contrast to the insecurity of the present. Moreover, noncollectivized villages—mostly located in mountainous regions—tend to recall the communist period in more ambivalent terms. While residents often lament today the loss of services and public transport available under state socialism, as well as out-migration, these communities have seen some reinvestment through tourism, as well as a wave of migration-connected new construction. However, the majority of rural areas in Romania experienced collectivization, where most people were integrated into collective farms—while some also gained work in the industrial areas nearby. This segment, representing roughly 40% of the population (Kligman and Verdery, 2011), has been largely excluded from broader cultural and scholarly accounts of memory. While recent literary work, for instance, by Dan Lungu, has engaged with rurality and memories, the lived experiences of collectivized rural communities remain largely understudied and underrepresented in the memory landscape, a new black hole of Romanian memory. It is precisely in such areas that several of these workshops took place, bringing forward memories of 1989 in the collectivized village as one main contribution of this article.

Dialogues between regions: The project reshaping the image of democratic revolutions 1989

The memory workshops in Romanian villages were part of the project Reshaping the Image of Democratic Revolutions 1989, which brought together organizations working on dealing with the past from eight countries across the former Iron Curtain divide. ⁶ It was funded by Europe for Citizens, a program of the EU that ran from 2014 to 2020, which supported cooperation projects led by citizens, local governments, and civil society organizations. Promoting transnational dialogue among European citizens about 1989 and its aftermath, the project aimed to raise awareness of the shared experiences across European countries, thereby contributing to a stronger sense of European identity. In addition, it sought to build resilience against contemporary populist narratives that idealize a supposedly “better past.” As such, the project embodied normative, prescriptive ways of remembering attuned to the European memory framework that was shaped in the 2010s, which included a condemnation of communism at the European level (Jones, 2017; Neumayer, 2015, 2018).

At the same time, the project’s multisited structure created openings for friction, dissonance, and dialogic remembrance. ⁷ International forums and public discussions revealed stark differences in how 1989 was experienced and remembered, particularly between countries for which the end of socialism coincided with war and those for which it was framed as a peaceful transition. These tensions were condensed in the short documentary How did 1989 change Europe?—which juxtaposed personal testimonies across regions and highlighted how hope, disappointment, and violence unevenly shaped the meaning of 1989. It structured around several themes: life before 1989, addressing experiences as diverse as Yugoslavs traveling to the West and Albanian isolation; the conflict in the former Yugoslavia versus democratic revolutions; the immediate and lasting impacts of the change; and visions for Europe’s future. The film was used as a common starting point in all local events, including in the Romanian villages.

Education Capacity Building and rural libraries as infrastructures of dialogic memory

The Romanian workshops were organized through Education Capacity Building (EduCaB) in Libraries, a Romanian initiative that reimagines public libraries—particularly in small and often overlooked communities—as vital spaces for democratic renewal, civic engagement, and exposure to diversity. Rooted in the belief that libraries can function as “miniature agoras,” EduCaB empowers librarians to act as community facilitators and curators of critical knowledge. Its methodology emphasizes local democratic practices, which it terms as “small-scale democracies”: everyday forms of participation that bridge the gap between abstract democratic narratives and lived experience. ⁸ From its start in Romania, EduCaB expanded in a series of countries, mostly in the Global South.

This existing network of rural libraries offered a distinctive infrastructure for memory-work. Unlike museums or commemorative institutions, libraries are deeply embedded in local social worlds, with librarians acting as trusted mediators who know both the community and its silences. While rural libraries are generally beset by a lack of funding and power relations with the local authorities, those activating in the EduCaB network co-curated different programs through voluntary collaboration and a sense of a wider community. Building on this infrastructure, the Romanian component of Reshaping the Image of Democratic Revolutions 1989 deliberately shifted the spatial focus of remembrance away from Bucharest and other major cities toward villages largely absent from national memory narratives.

This relocation was not merely logistical but conceptual. By situating dialogic memory practices in rural libraries, the project focused on places marked by depopulation, weak institutional memory transmission, and limited access to cultural resources. It is against this backdrop—European normative memory frames on the one hand and locally embedded but fragile memory infrastructures on the other—that dialogic memory practices in Romanian villages unfolded. The goal was to explore how the memory of 1989 is understood and articulated in places far removed from centers of political decision-making and historical visibility.

Reflecting on methods

My positionality is that of a researcher who led the Romanian part of the project and who deliberately chose to implement the project not in the capital nor major cities, as the other project partners did, but in the rural areas. The reasoning was threefold. First, as already mentioned, there was an awareness of the need for more inclusion of the rural experience in mainstream Romanian memory culture. Second, through the NGO I was involved with, I had access to the existing network of rural librarians collaborating through the EduCaB platform. Third, I lived the first 11 years of my life in a small mountain town with my grandparents before moving to the capital city to live with my parents, which provided an intimate connection to the two different lifeworlds. I have memories of experiencing the 1989 events as a child in that small mountain town. I belong thus to the third generation in the model I proposed, and I talked about this direct experience in the preworkshops with librarians, thus creating a bridge and a sense of mutual sharing, while I refrained from offering any interpretative frames in the meetings before and after the village workshops.

The process began with a preparatory workshop in October 2021, when we met with the librarians who answered the EduCaB call to discuss the aims of the program and the conceptual and organizational framework for the planned events. Given the pandemic constraints, this initial training session was online, which also permitted the access of numerous librarians: 37 took part in this workshop. Subsequently, the librarians organized and facilitated the memory events in their respective villages and small towns, following a general script: Participants first watched the documentary and then engaged in moderated intergenerational discussions. In the documentary, the Romanian case introduced two voices of Bucharest residents who were adults in 1989, but also two people who were children growing up in the countryside, who connected to the ongoing revolution through relatives in the city, a sense of vicarious witnessing common to many in Romania at the time. Participants in the village workshops then discussed the memories of 1989, often using invited time witnesses and occasionally history teachers who were given the floor for short interventions before the intergenerational dialogue. A total of 164 participants spoke at the workshops. The format was consistent across localities, but it also offered the opportunity for open discussions. In some cases, the discussion built directly on the film’s themes; in others, the discussions shifted toward local memory, family stories, or broader grievances, with the memory of communism dominating the discussions more than the memory of December 1989 or the transition of the 1990s. There were also exceptions in places where time witnesses were involved directly in the 1989 events that had taken place in cities nearby. This emphasis was probably motivated by the librarians’ perception that the post-1990 period was more familiar to the schoolchildren, whereas 1989 was treated as a unique event deserving special attention.

The villages and small agro-industrial towns involved in the project reflected a wide range of experiences under socialism and after 1989. Some were collectivized farming communities, others were not, while some were in the proximity of industrial towns and thus featured commuting and salaried labor. Some were multiethnic settlements (including Szeklers/Hungarians and Germans in Albeşti, Turks in Măcin, and Roma in several villages), while others were largely monoethnic. Three of them are today small towns—the older town of Măcin and Titu and Tăuṭii-Măgherăuş, villages that became small towns, transformed by industrialization. They covered all of Romania’s historic regions, with a variety of historical trajectories. ⁹

The librarians played a key mediating role—not only as organizers but also as trusted community figures capable of convening participants across generational lines. These events thus exemplified dialogic memory as a socio-spatial practice: grounded in place, shaped by generational experience, and open to reinterpretation and friction. In line with Robbe et al. (2025), the memory workshops can be seen as dialogic not merely in form but in effect: They created spaces in which difference—of memory, experience, and worldview—could be voiced and negotiated without requiring consensus.

I convened an online discussion with them shortly after the events to gather initial impressions, and again 3 years later to reflect on the activities with the benefit of hindsight. This produced what can be considered a mediated memory corpus. Librarians, in their dual role as curators and narrators, shaped the memory accounts both during and after the events. The material presented here thus represents a form of synthetic memory, filtered through the librarians’ reflections and their own retrospective accounts, and both their and my analysis.

The follow-up aimed not only to examine how the events were remembered over time and what impact they may have had, but also to identify whether the librarians had since organized similar initiatives. One of the outcomes of the initial workshops was a clearly articulated sense of both need and desire among participants to continue such memory-focused engagements.

In this article, I will distinguish between preworkshop meetings, where we prepared the librarians for the sessions (from now on, premeetings); the memory workshops themselves, where intergenerational dialogue took place (from now on, workshops); and postworkshop meetings, aimed at reflection and follow-up (from now on, postmeetings).

In the aftermath of the workshops, the librarians sent me photographs of the events. Aside from images of the discussions—or, at times, of time-witnesses, most frequently elderly men speaking in front of the people watching the documentary—there were also seasonal elements: Christmas trees and almost shrine-like displays of the Romanian revolution, including photo albums. In some cases, the librarians also displayed on visible tables selected books about the revolution, including works by academic authors, military figures, and even, in one case, the mystical writer Pavel Coruṭ. A former Securitate officer, Coruṭ reinvented himself after 1989 as a prolific author, publishing books that extolled the virtues of the Dacians—the ancestral population of what is today Romania. The Dacians had been objects of admiration under Ceauşescu’s national-communist regime and later became central to the fringe Dacomanian movement, which emerged in the 1990s, albeit with older roots, and claimed that the Dacians were the origin of European civilization. Coruṭ’s presence was not merely an infiltration of an obscure figure but rather an expression of the fluidity and ambiguity of the transition period. In the absence of authoritative decision-making in the publishing sector, all sorts of voices and previously fringe ideas proliferated—many of them becoming bestsellers in a country and region where conspiratorial thinking holds strong appeal. Librarians, entrusting power into the published written word, thus occasionally gave the same platform to official history and conspiratorial writing, mimicking the construction of memory narratives at the wider societal level.

Importantly, the workshops themselves were not neutral spaces. The predesigned format—screening a documentary produced by a transnational NGO—introduced external frames of reference into communities with limited prior engagement in public memory dialogue. While the events were conceptualized as invitations for memory exchange, they could also be seen as curated events introducing frames or imposing external memories. The role of librarians and history teachers as authoritative voices bringing forward official memory—as emphasized by the exhibitions and books that the librarians used to mark the events—can thus be limiting. Yet it was the transgression into memorial, personal memories that created the chance of expanding official memory and bringing affect, emotion, and lived experiences. Not all librarians made use of their own personal memories and emotions, but when they did, the platform for opening was enhanced. While some participants adopted the narrative frameworks presented, others challenged or reframed them in light of local experience. This friction—between the content introduced and the memories elicited—reflects the productive tension at the heart of dialogic memory (Robbe et al., 2025), which acknowledges not only consensus and empathy, but also dissent, ambiguity, and contestation.

In this respect, the workshops offer a valuable entry point for examining the micropolitics of memory transmission in underresearched, rural contexts. Attending to these dynamics of curation and situated storytelling not only sharpens our methodological sensitivity to memory work in peripheral settings but also contributes to wider efforts within memory studies to decenter hegemonic narratives and attend to the informal, everyday spaces in which memory is activated, negotiated, and contested. We now turn first to identify the patterns of memory transmission emerging from these workshops, before turning to an examination of the content of these memories, from life under communism to 1989 and its anticipated futures.

Dynamics of Memory Transmission

The metalevel recollected memory

The librarians’ accounts of the workshops serve not only as a record of experiences—both immediately after the events and 3 years later—but also as a reflection of interactions among the librarians themselves. As such, they constitute a recollected memory. They shared stories, responded to one another, built similarities and coherence, and subtly distinguished their experiences. In particular, they contrasted the different nature of life under communism in their collectivized villages, hinterlands, or small towns, sometimes expressing subtle opposition through illustrative examples. The dialogic process thus operated on two levels: the content of the workshops themselves and the interactions, negotiations, and frictions that emerged among participants during these sessions. The analysis that follows draws on these recollections to examine how librarians narrated the workshops, the memories they evoked, and the meanings attributed to them, highlighting the productive tensions inherent in mediated and intergenerational memory practices.

Librarians as memory curators

Throughout the workshops, as in their general practice, librarians played the role of curators of knowledge. In their accounts of their everyday work, rather than offering direct answers, they guide the users through complex historical terrain by providing access to diverse sources and encouraging critical reflection. As one librarian noted, when asked by a teenager whether communism was good or bad, conflicted about what she read about communist prisons and repression and the positive stories of a better life from her grandparents, “I didn’t know how to answer, so instead, I looked for more materials and suggested that she identify both the aspects that had worked and those that were negative.” Recalling the work during communism, in spaces where “the grocery stores were empty and good books were rare,” librarians still worked alongside parents to help children find quality literature. Today, they continue this role by preserving traces of both official and unofficial memory—from organizing events with veterans of the 1989 revolution, as Nicoleta from Titu, to lending out books like Animal Farm in libraries where volumes still contain photographs of Ceauşescu and Elena, as Anca from Albeşti. Yet as the librarians shared in our meetings, such a forum and conversation as the one launched through this project to debate about memory was a premiere in their communities.

Intergenerational engagement and the transmission of memory

The events drew a diverse range of participants, across generations, from schoolchildren to retired people. Students of different age groups engaged in discussions alongside local history teachers and elderly citizens who had firsthand experiences of 1989 and the communist period. ¹⁰ They were well represented, due to the involvement of both librarians and teachers in organizing the events. Due to the timing of some of the events during school time, in a number of cases, the majority of the parents’ generation was missing, which also led to children emphasizing the absence of such conversations or accounts from their parents. ¹¹ Librarians themselves belonged to either the generation born between 1945 and 1973 or that born between 1973 and 1986 thus had experienced firsthand late communism and the 1989 revolution. The discussions provided a unique intergenerational dialogue, allowing younger participants to hear firsthand accounts from those who had lived through the events.

The recollection of the workshops by the librarians in the postmeetings showcased the active participation of various generations in discussions about the past. The accounts reveal an intergenerational exchange where both youth and older witnesses contributed perspectives. Younger participants, whom librarians initially expected to be disengaged as they generally do not show an interest in history, showed an attentiveness that several librarians qualified as remarkable.

The discussions revealed an eagerness to share personal recollections from the older generations, with participants actively building on each other’s memories. Memory transmission thus revealed a dialogic process: “No one stepped aside saying ‘I can’t talk,’ on the contrary, they took up the subject from each other” (Anca). This occurred not only in the workshops themselves, but also in their recollection by librarians, who made comparisons and built on the other librarian participants to create a joint narrative of how the 2021 workshops went: “Wait, wait, as she said, I just remembered something, let me tell you too” (Mariana, Tăuṭii Măgherăuş). This fluid exchange of recollections demonstrated the communal nature of memory transmission and the social creation of memory through collective storytelling.

Yet moments of rupture in both the recollection of 1989 during the workshops and of the first postmeeting brought to life dialogic remembrance in the sense of generating plurality and differentiation in the accounts. Difference of perspectives about the period occurred as irruptions of memory. They were not grand gestures but subtle moments, as the act of remembrance itself was the big friction with the generalized silence and seeming forgetting that exists in the villages between generations.

The gender dimension

In Romania, an important aspect of EduCaB relates to gender: The overwhelming majority of librarians—and all those involved in the 1989 project—are women. The role of librarians as community activators is closely tied to gendered notions of stewardship and care. Many of the invited speakers, on the other hand, were men, often with previous or current positions of power, including the village mayor, school director, or history teachers. This configuration reflects both patriarchal dynamics in rural Romanian society and local power hierarchies, with political leaders being mostly men.

These asymmetries produced a distinctive dynamic between discourses of power and practices of care in the mediation of memory. While male speakers often framed the past through institutional or national narratives—emphasizing political events, leadership, or ideological shifts—the women librarians and female participants tended to approach memory in more intimate, localized ways, emphasizing the everyday. This does not at all mean that their representations were apolitical: On the contrary, several librarians represented their appreciation or condemnation of political actors and ideologies, yet they connected them with the lived experiences of the everyday. Their curatorial practices privileged everyday experiences, emotional resonance, and intergenerational dialogue. This contrast not only reflected gendered roles in public life but also shaped how the memory of 1989 was presented and interpreted—either as a matter of official history or as a living, community-based legacy. In this sense, EduCaB’s framework brought together complementary forms of remembering, highlighting the value of care work in sustaining collective memory beyond formal commemorations.

The gender differentiation was also reflected in the participation of students, with several librarians mentioning that boys were more vocal during the workshops. One librarian said that this was not a measure of a different interest, as girls were also just as interested. Another said that girls were more reserved, while boys asked many questions, including some that took the discussion astray from the topic. These observations resonate with broader research on gendered patterns of voice, authority, and participation in educational and civic settings (Karpowitz and Mendelberg, 2014; Polletta and Chen, 2013), suggesting that dialogic memory practices both reproduce and make visible existing social asymmetries.

Centripetal memory dynamics, homogenization

The structure of premeetings, workshops, and follow-up discussions often produced what I term centripetal memory dynamics: While participants began with disparate recollections, conversations frequently coalesced around a shared mnemonic and affective framework—particularly the hardships of the 1980s. In premeetings and postmeetings, the memories of deprivation—shortages of food, electricity, and heating—were central and emotionally resonant across sites. Yet this apparent convergence masked significant local and social variation. For instance, participants in villages near industrial centers or with access to urban markets expressed different recollections from those in more remote, resource-deprived areas.

These elements of convergence were also featured in the recollections of the workshops. Despite the presence of multiple perspectives at remembrance events, there were indications that narratives about 1989 have become homogenized over time. One speaker, reflecting on the participation of a former communist official in a commemorative event, observed: “I expected him to say something different, knowing his history from others’ accounts. But, surprisingly, he spoke just like the others. He did not have a different tone or story” (Ioana). This statement suggests a convergence in how 1989 is publicly remembered, potentially erasing ideological differences and nuances in personal experiences. The absence of competing narratives may contribute to a more simplified and less critically engaged collective memory. It suggests less that the participants remember things in a similar way, but more that in a social setting, they adjust the narrative to fit the dominant story, either legitimized through being an official story or by it being already constructed as such through collective recollections.

Affective memories and memories of affect

A central trope in the postmeetings was the emotional and affective intensity of the workshops. Librarians consistently recalled these encounters not only as moments of recollection but also as emotionally charged experiences, and several visibly displayed emotions during the postmeetings. Lăcrămioara from Dorobanṭu described both the workshop itself and the premeetings as “a soulful encounter” (întâlnire de suflet), expressing deep gratitude for the opportunity to create a space where emotions could be shared alongside memories. Others similarly emphasized affect, particularly joy, as the first word that came to mind—the joy of having the opportunity to talk about the past.

Affective responses were, however, unevenly distributed across generations. Emotions were most often attributed to those who had lived through communism and the Revolution, while younger participants were described as interested and attentive, yet not emotionally touched by the discussions. As Anca from Albeşti pointed out, she herself was deeply affected, together with many participants over 50: “I myself am a tearful and sentimental person (eu sunt o plângăcioasă şi o lacrimogenă), that is just who I am . . .” She contrasted this with the reactions of children: “The children were attentive, but they weren’t moved, because they cannot understand what it means not to have (Pentru că ei nu pot înṭelege cum este să nu fie . . .).”

These reflections point to a generational divide that is not only cognitive but also affective. While younger participants engaged with narrated pasts primarily as stories to be learned, older generations encountered them as embodied memories shaped by lived experiences of scarcity, fear, and constraint on the one hand and the joy of youth, solidarity, and certainty on the other. In this sense, dialogic memory in rural Romania unfolded not only through the exchange of narratives but also through the circulation—and partial noncirculation—of affect. What was negotiated in these workshops was therefore not just the meaning of 1989, but the emotional weight attached to it, revealing both the potential and the limits of intergenerational dialogue.

The ignorant generation? Generational transmission gaps

The lack of knowledge of the younger generation also contributed to emotions of frustration and anger. Lăcrămioara stated, in disbelief,

I am floored that the Pro generation don’t know who Ceausescu was. When I showed the pictures, literally nobody knew. Honestly. Nobody had heard of the Heroes of the Revolution. I brought materials, I gave presentations—they were all completely disconnected from this event. It’s painful, but real. Our children don’t know their Romanian history, for better or worse. Our children are lost! I feel like screaming.

She evokes a lack of knowledge, ignorance from the generation that she mistakenly calls Generaṭia Pro. ¹² In contrast to that generation, the pupils present in the events are all born after 2000 and have no direct experience of communism. In any case, for her, the explanation is a generational one, yet without situating it in the structural changes of an eroded educational system and the absence of many parents working abroad.

Lăcrămioara’s account stands in contrast with other librarians who insisted that kids have heard at home about the communist period, albeit in a reduced, simplified way. One librarian said, “I expected the children to be inattentive and indifferent, but to my surprise, they were very attentive.” Nicoleta from Titu accounted:

The students were very engaged and responded to the questions, demonstrating that they knew many interesting things—some studied at school, others learned from their parents and grandparents, who experienced the events of December 1989 firsthand, some even participating in them. Some students were critical, while others praised that period.

Some account for the intergenerational transmission of memory as being instrumental to educate children to ask for less: “Some parents try to shake them up a bit, to help them understand that things weren’t nearly as easy for us as they are for them now.” Yet what librarians consistently recall is that even this interest in the past does not connect with affect nor with a real understanding, as for them these stories amount to “a story,” “another world,” “with fantastical elements.” Ioana from Păuşeşti Măglaşi brought to the event the gas lamp she used for doing homework, to show and connect through objects the story of electricity cuts. Consequently, the postmeetings were marked by frictions about the presence of memory transmission itself, which became an issue of debate.

From multiscalarity and pluriterritoriality to the local

The documentary How did 1989 change Europe? introduced to the rural audience of the Romanian workshops a plurality of experiences articulated across different national, social, and historical contexts, offering a deliberately multiscalar and pluriterritorial perspective on the end of socialism. While it juxtaposed voices from various European settings, in the workshop discussions, explicit references to specific national contexts remained limited, with the Romanian segment standing out through the testimony of two young people recalling life in the countryside and their perceptions of fear during the revolution about relatives living in the city. In the rural workshops, this multiscalar perspective was consistently refracted through local experience. Rather than prompting engagement with themes prominent in other parts of the film—such as mobility, travel, or civic activism emphasized in the Yugoslav and Central European contributions—participants anchored their reactions in two elements that were actually voiced most strongly by Romanian accounts in the documentary: material deprivation under communism and the experience of the Revolution. In this way, the documentary’s pluriterritorial framing gave way to locally situated processes of remembering, illustrating how transnational memory narratives are selectively appropriated and reworked in place.

Memory Content: Remembering Communism and 1989

Memory of the revolution versus memory of communism

Firsthand accounts provided deeply personal perspectives on the Revolution, often charged with emotion. For most participants, the Revolution was experienced on TV and through rumors, while for others, the proximity of large urban centers made the events more palpable. Nicoleta, whose hometown, Titu, is not far from Bucharest, recalled being near the military base in Boteni and described the fear as reports spread that Ceauşescu was approaching Titu. Soldiers were sent to defend the Romanian television headquarters, and some never returned.

My father, a railway worker, experienced difficult moments in Bucharest. He didn’t come home for 3-4 days; there were no phones to communicate, we didn’t know if he was still alive. At Gara de Nord, there was shooting, and the bullet marks are still visible.

The librarian shared this both during the workshop and during the postmeetings, adding a personal take on the weight of 1989. While for the Titu workshop, this was resonating with the experience of other participants who were either witnesses or had family who experienced the events in Bucharest, the role of her input in the pre- and postmeetings with the other librarians, hailing from rural areas far from major theaters of the revolution, was that of distinction and authenticity. For the others, the recollections of the experience and the discussions in the workshop concentrated on the memories of the communist period and, to a lesser extent, of the transition. In contrast, Nicoleta was uniquely equipped to talk about December 1989 itself. With a different evaluation of the communist period, which, as she accounted, brought plenty to Titu as an agro-industrial town near the capital, her focus was on the violence of the revolution itself. This created a dialogic moment in the discussions with the other librarians, with a sense of subdued tensions with the participants who spoke vehemently against the communist period as a time of experienced deprivation and disgruntlement.

Remembering the collectivized village

According to the collected accounts in the workshops in collectivized areas, life for those working in collective farms (Cooperative Agricole de Producţie [CAP]) was marked by economic hardship. Unlike industrial workers in cities, who were integrated into the state’s official narrative of progress and received regular wages, social benefits, and access to union-organized holidays, CAP workers experienced a more precarious reality. Remuneration in the agricultural collectives was irregular and largely symbolic. Many recall receiving very little money, if at all, and being compensated instead with agricultural products distributed primarily in the autumn, which complemented what they produced in their small lots. As one former worker put it: “We received very little money and some goods in the fall. The rest of the year—nothing”; “We worked all summer but only received three cabbages and a sack of onions” (Ioana, Păuşeşti Măglaşi). This seasonal and in-kind compensation system left many rural workers dependent, underpaid, and excluded from the forms of welfare that existed under state socialism.

Beyond material deprivation, there was also symbolic marginalization. The CAP workers had little to no access to the coveted “bilete de odihnă” (vacation vouchers), which were commonly distributed to industrial workers through their unions and represented one of the perks of life under communism. Their labor, while essential, remained underrecognized in the official discourse, contributing to a collective memory of being left behind—both economically and socially—by the system that claimed to represent them.

In collectivized villages, people spoke of the trauma of losing their land, animals, and farming tools to state control, with particular bitterness toward the forced nature of agricultural cooperatives (CAPs). By contrast, in villages that escaped collectivization, participants described a different kind of relationship to the land—one marked by pride, care, and a strong moral fabric rooted in tradition. This mirrors the narrative that collectivized villages created a sense of moral looseness where people, to compensate for meager wages, took home agricultural goods from the collective (Marcău and Purec, 2016).

Yet not all memories about collectivized village life shared during the workshops were negative. Some participants, particularly those with waged labor at state farms or institutions, expressed nostalgia for the social stability they felt under the communist regime—especially the guarantee of employment and the integration into productive work. Cultural life in the villages, though modest and centrally controlled, left a meaningful imprint: Old films, village dances, and the local cultural centers and libraries offered young people brief but memorable escapes. Several elders recalled how, despite the hardships, there was laughter and camaraderie at the collective farms, and a sense that people were not alone in their struggles. Finally, some criticized the inequities within the system, recalling how individuals with political connections or party roles had privileged access to goods and services.

Deprivation and economic hardships

Economic struggles during communism emerged as a central trope, particularly concerning food shortages and resourcefulness. Importantly, these memories are almost exclusively connected to the decade of the 1980s, when exporting resources in order to pay the national debt was a political priority that significantly worsened living conditions. Memory accounts rarely evoke other eras, such as the more affluent 1970s, for instance, which has to do with the starting point of discussing 1989, as well as the generational experience of the adults present at the workshops, including the librarians.

I told them what it was like to study by candlelight in winter, after 5 PM when it got dark. Or how we spent hours in line for bread with our ration cards in hand, only to sometimes be told that there was no more bread. (Ioana, Păuşeşti Măglaşi)

Yet some participants recalled relative economic stability depending on their location. In Titu, some remembered having access to more resources due to their proximity to Bucharest and the presence of a chicken farm essential for supplying the capital city. Moreover, the presence of salaried labor at an electrical plant brought other benefits, including paid vacation—something the collectivized villages lacked. In mining areas like Baia Mare, basic foodstuffs were more readily available.

The accounts also suggest the importance of connections and social position. Certain people had access, through networks, to goods otherwise difficult to obtain—memories that are also recalled as connected with acts of solidarity, sharing with others:

Although food was rationed, our family never lacked anything. My father would come from Bucharest with a full sack and supply the whole street. I tear up when I remember it.

This solidarity in moments of austerity was connected not only to networks and access to cities but also to one’s own resources:

Quite simply, on our lane (uliṭă), if—let’s say—someone slaughtered something, they would share it with everyone. Since there weren’t many pigs, as you had to give them to the state.

Villagers recalled that they had livestock or cultivated gardens as a means of getting by. Nevertheless, they did not mention that villages supported city dwellers in the 1980s with basic foodstuffs (and received various goods from urban relatives). While this is an important element in urban memories—where people recall managing by going to the countryside when shops were empty—this trope of being a savior does not seem to emerge in these village memories.

Censorship and political repression

Discussions also highlighted the pervasive control and repression of the communist regime. Participants recalled instances of censorship and the inability to openly express opinions. The climate of fear was palpable, with some emphasizing that, although economic conditions might have been tolerable for certain groups, the restrictions on freedom and lack of prospects for personal advancement were stifling. “You couldn’t dream of anything beyond your assigned place in society,” one speaker noted, underscoring the psychological burden of life under authoritarianism. While economic hardships were tangible, limitations on freedom were equally significant in shaping people’s experiences:

Fear and the lack of a future perspective, because you couldn’t dream of more.

“For my father, the fact that you didn’t have the freedom to say what you thought . . . he would have liked to be able to speak his mind. But you simply weren’t allowed to say what you thought, unfortunately, and that upset him deeply. He used to say that it was very difficult for him to live during that time because he couldn’t express himself freely. . . . And the humiliation that existed at every level. . . . They made you feel small—you weren’t allowed to say that reality was different. You had to repeat what they said. . . . Well, that’s how things were” (Ioana, Păuşeşti Măglaşi).

This encapsulates a broader sentiment of resignation under an oppressive regime, reinforcing how memory work revisits not only material deprivation but also restrictions on personal aspirations. One librarian emphasized that even a man who was a party member now recalled fear and the lack of freedom of expression.

At the same time, accounts of resistance and accommodation coexisted. Several participants recalled listening to Radio Free Europe as a furtive practice of truth-seeking, resistance, and symbolic defiance. Others, however, spoke with appreciation of Cenaclul Flacăra, the cultural program broadcast on Thursday evenings on national radio, remembered as a source of collective emotion and national pride fostered by Ceauşescu’s national-communist ideology (Verdery, 1991). The dialogic remembrance framework is made so that fear and humiliation are recalled alongside moments of belonging, cultural participation, and emotional investment in state-sanctioned forms. While these practices represented different—and even opposing—political responses to the regime, they were nevertheless connected through a shared register of national sentiment. Those who listened to Radio Free Europe saw it as against a regime they perceived as contrary to Romanianness and those who listened to Cenaclul Flacăra as a national expression that Ceauşescu’s regime extolled. In this sense, even antagonistic practices converged around competing understandings of patriotism in a context where nationalism permeated both dissent and conformity.

Making sense of violence

This violent rupture remains central both to public memory and to intergenerational debates about the nature and meaning of 1989. As one participant from Titu reflected:

“Why was Ceauşescu shot? In the West, revolutions were peaceful. Here, everything was disorganized. Maybe we were too embittered.”

This question, frequently posed by younger generations, underscores the distinctiveness of Romania’s revolutionary moment and the difficulty of reconciling this violent outcome with broader European narratives of peaceful transition.

Violence is the key to the revolutionary interpretation of 1989 in Romania. This is also a feature of remembrance. While several remembrance events focused on the deprivations of economic and political rights during communism, a few, such as in Titu, focused on the violence. It featured more prominently in the Titu story also because it was very close to Bucharest. The Ceauşescus were caught nearby, in the head of the county where Titu lies, Târgovişte.

In some cases, army representatives were invited to remembrance events both as witnesses and as heroes. This dual role reflects the army’s ambiguous position during the revolution—shifting allegiance from the regime to the protesters but also being accused of complicity in early repression. As Nicoleta noted:

At the summer school, we invited military officers from Boteni, as I am also the president of the cult of heroes, Titu chapter. They told students, including the youngest ones, 14-18 years old, how they lived through the revolution. It is important to hear the story directly from someone who was there, “at the grassroots.”

This practice of integrating the military into remembrance rituals contributes to a heroic framing of certain actors, while also leaving room for unresolved questions about the army’s role in the initial violence. While the army changed orientation during the events of development, there were accusations that they were the main culprits in the initial moments of the revolution. Moreover, young men serving in the army were among the early victims of death, killed by what was narrated then as mysterious foreign forces.

Nicoleta organized further events in Titu with the presence of the army. “It was a moving moment—we listened to stories about life, about people in the military, about weapons, about wars and revolutions, about PEACE.” In her narrative, the army is undoubtedly about peace; she capitalized it in our communication. The role of the army in Romanian consciousness is significant: The Army and the Church are the two institutions that Romanians consistently rank as those they trust the most, while the parliament, the embodiment of the democracy that allegedly people fought for in 1989, ranks among the last. ¹³

Living the revolution

Many participants were outside the major urban centers where the Revolution unfolded most visibly, their experience mediated through rumors, television, and the voices of neighbors. Some, like M. from Vâlcea County, were present in the midst of events—she recalled with “terrible emotions” being at Sibiu train station as demonstrators seized the coat of arms, the flag, and Ceauşescu’s portrait, burning them in a symbolic rupture with the regime. Her recollection is colored not only by the euphoria of the moment but also by discomfort at the public execution of the Ceauşescus on Christmas Day, an act that complicated the moral narrative of liberation. Anca from Albeşti remembered her son’s confusion when the Pioneer scarf, once given with pomp and enthusiasm, was suddenly withdrawn, a symbolic reversal that, over time, revealed itself as part of a larger spectacle with little tangible benefit.

Expectations of 1989

Across accounts, expectations of 1989 emerged as a central theme, oscillating between hope, fear, and later disillusionment. Those who were children at the time often remembered the Revolution more as an atmosphere than as a sequence of events—a mixture of noise, tension, and adult conversations they struggled to interpret. Others, who were older, recalled a mixture of enthusiasm and fear as the dominant emotions at the time of December 1989. Several spoke about the hope for change, expressed particularly by their parents. However, one librarian from eastern Romania recounted that she feared the revolutionaries would be defeated and silenced, with no repercussions. Another, from close to the border with Hungary, remembered her fear: “I was imagining something terrible, that the city had been destroyed, that all the people were in hiding, that I might never see my parents again.” A librarian from the South recalled: “I don’t think I really understood what was going on. It was clear that it was a riot, but I couldn’t imagine the outcome.”

Others remembered their disappointment about the lack of change. As Maria from Arad county recalls:

I still remember my disappointment after the revolution, when everyone was talking about a “new beginning,” and my child’s puzzlement at seeing among the people of the “new freedom” those who had been the trusted ones, always present beside the ousted “evil dictator.”

Comparative interpretations of the past and present

A recurring theme was the comparative evaluation of life before and after 1989. In contrast with urban memories of the middle classes that often contrast the communist past with a mythologized golden age before 1940, the precommunist past hardly appeared in the accounts, except for brief mentions to contrast ownership of land before communism with collectivization. The comparison was made only between before and after 1989, with the consensus among many participants that, despite the economic hardships of the present, life under communism had been more restrictive and challenging. As one participant summed it up: “People agreed that before the Revolution, things were worse, and now they are better. The final takeaway was that what happened before should never happen again.” Others expressed it more plainly:

Times were hard, and they admitted that no, they would not want to live under communism again—neither they, nor their children, nor anyone. Even with all the difficulties now, things were not okay back then, and it is better now.

However, some accounts complicated this binary by recalling elements of economic stability and social cohesion: “Some even came and said: look, back then we had some money, we could quickly go to the seaside, we could quickly go to the mountains, and we still managed to save some money.” This sense of stability was often linked to secure jobs in industry, which parts of the rural population had. In contrast, memories from the collectivized workforce differed significantly from the urban nostalgia for communism found in postindustrial Romania and elsewhere. For collective farm workers, the money they earned was perceived differently, as both the value and the opportunities it created were significantly lower than in urban industrial contexts.

Ultimately, while some highlighted moments of mutual aid and community, most agreed that economic problems and the lack of freedom of expression were defining features of the communist period. These were experienced differently depending on one’s education, occupation, and expectations: “Economic problems and the lack of freedom of expression were equally present for many, depending on their background and the expectations they had.”

Conclusion

This study has examined the layered, dynamic, and mediated nature of memory transmission in postcommunist rural Romania, showing how it is shaped by emotion, social interaction, and intergenerational dialogue, as well as by convergent and divergent pressures. Building on Aleida Assmann’s notion of dialogic remembrance and Robbe et al.’s emphasis on friction as a productive force, the case discussed here reveals multiple frictions, but which offer potential for bridges: between memory and silence, between dominant urban narratives and marginalized rural ones, and between subtle frictions at the community level, where memory processes are still incipient. Memories of collectivized villages distant from cities appeared to be different than those in more industrialized areas, where salaried labor and rights also create the frames for postindustrial nostalgia that the Romanian urban areas now display.

Several patterns emerged. First, the structure of the workshops often produced what I term centripetal memory dynamics in which dialogues lead to a homogenizing, socialized, and collective memory creation. The workshops also revealed generational and social fault lines in memory, showing how generational experience mediates memory formation, at times in centrifugal ways. Participants who had been children or adolescents in the 1980s often emphasized material deprivation, while older generations evoked the broader political and ideological contours of the regime—including memories of national communism and the cultural narratives promoted through state media. Some remembered the Flacăra magazine or other nationalist symbols not with disdain but with a lingering sense of pride—suggesting the endurance of state-crafted collective imaginaries, even in a context of general disillusionment. The national-communist expressions of Ceauşescu’s late years were delegitimized in elite memory discourse after 1989, but they endured in the popular memory and resurfaced in the 2020s as forms of national pride and a reevaluation of the communist regime as times of national independence and sovereignty to be opposed to the EU. The support for the Romanian far-right party Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) is connected not only with a lack of critical engagement with the country’s fascist movement but also with the nationalist tropes of the late communist period.

Second, the memory of 1989 remains deeply intertwined with the violence of the revolution through different mnemonic forms—from personal testimonies to heroic commemorative narratives and increasingly homogenized collective accounts—highlighting both the persistence of state-crafted imaginaries and the shifting nature of commemoration. The way this violence is remembered varies significantly by generation: For those who lived through it, it evokes strong emotions, while younger generations struggle to grasp its lived experience and emotional weight.

Third, the article shows that the activism of local community engagers seeking intergenerational dialogues provides perspectives for memory-work that bypass commonplace frames and create dialogues between generations, as well as a multiscalar and pluriterritorial perspective. Dialogues situate memory simultaneously across multiple scales—from the village to the nation and Europe—and across multiple territories, linking rural places to sites of migration, exile, media circulation, and transnational references. The oral testimonies collected during the workshops demonstrate that recollections are not static records but living processes, influenced by comparative perspectives, personal emotions, and social encounters.

Fourth, the findings point to three key fault lines structuring memory transmission: first, Regional—between Romania, its Eastern European neighbors, and the broader European frame; second, Spatial—between rural and urban modes of remembering, with rural voices often sidelined; and third, Generational—between those with direct lived experience and those without, whose understanding is mediated by education, media, and commemoration practices. Three frames for dialogic remembering emerge from this analysis: bridging silences, bridging difference, and subtle and unsubtle frictions.

Two final critical implications follow. First, the article underscores the potential of decentralizing memory practices, both spatially and socially, in a context where official remembrance has long been dominated by a narrow repertoire centered on 1989 as a symbolic rebirth—obscuring both earlier episodes of repression and the ambivalent legacies of the postcommunist transition. In the Romanian context, integrating rural perspectives is essential to counter the spatial centralization and urban focus of official remembrance.

Second, dialogic, intergenerational approaches—particularly those facilitated by local activists and librarians—offer promising ways to engage young people and diversify the memory landscape. Lăcrămioara stated, “Thank you for existing!”—referring to our project. Yet the deferring of education or any programs to NGOs, while being celebrated, obscures the broader structural problem of education, including historical education. As other studies have shown—the new generations lack knowledge, and such small programs just reflect the pulse of a society rather than offer solutions on a broader scale. This is symptomatic of the neoliberal turn, where NGO projects supplant, like band-aids and plasters, the faults of the system. The librarians underlined their frustration with the deteriorating educational standards. At the hour of writing, the new Romanian government is aiming to close many rural libraries, thus depriving further villages of places of culture, debate, community building, and memory. This article is dedicated to their resilience.

By attending to these intersections—transmission and absence, consensus and dissension, national and local threads of remembrance—this article argues for a plural and critically reflexive approach to memory and public history. Such an approach can both acknowledge the frictions that animate dialogic remembrance and open space for voices and perspectives long relegated to the margins.