Paper short abstract:

The 1989 Romanian revolution was experienced both as transforming and traumatic. Using synaesthesic testimonies on those days the paper highlights the liminality of the revolution-as-lived, and its symbolic dimension, while critically examining narrative patterns of the revolution-as-told.

Paper long abstract:

Bloody violence of the 1989 founding event of the Romanian post communist democracy was experienced both as transforming and traumatic. There was a sacrificial dimension of the violent death until the dictators' fall, which was subsequently used as politically legitimating of the new leaders who came to power.

This paper develops an ethnographic analysis based on interviews with some people who went out then into the streets. It attempts on the one hand, to capture the dramatic atmosphere of the street movement during those days and, on the other hand, to reveal recurrent themes and patterns in the narratives on revolution, since the revolution as lived and as told are inextricably intertwined. It stresses the highly liminal character of the revolution as experienced, and its symbolic dimensions, spreading lights on the existential dilemmas and the harsh reflexivity triggered then by the momentous of December 1989.

Beyond conventional historical or political science analyses of the 1989 Romanian revolution, which has been seen as a rather atypical part of the Central and Eastern European collapse of communism, an ethnographic account on those events would shed light on quite different specific aspects. It would focus thus on the symbolic strategies which people spontaneously developed in order to face violent death, hopes, great fears, on peculiar experiences of a new sense of time and space, on new types of gender and generational relationships, as well as a genuine sense of community. The essentially new experiences were instinctively expressed through rituals and symbols. The time of deep crisis, revolution instantly revived old recurrent historical myths, which were subsequently manipulated for political use. That was a time when people dramatically revaluated their whole lives, a moment which turned into a crucial autobiographical reference point of before and after.

At that time, in Romania, after almost half a century of totalitarianism, going out into the street meant far more than an ordinary act of protest. It became a crucial, existential choice, and a catharsis. It was a radical, irreversible decision to take the risk of facing death, by confronting the repressive forces, until the Ceauşescus' fall, and afterwards the unknown 'terrorists'' threat. Testimonies speak about a strong, irrepressible sense of either/or, of the end and the simultaneous beginning of something hoped for, even if indefinitely. As the tense alternative to go out or to stay home was ultimately a crucial existential choice, many people made it, either instinctively or after a long, painful deliberation. The city space was, therefore, symbolically reconfigured by the mental boundaries between the street - as an open space, dangerously exposed, a space of risk-taking and contestation of political regime- versus the home- as a closed space of fear, of escaping reality. That opposition admitted a third possibility: the pavement as a limbo, a transitory space of insecurity, anxiety, and indecision. Apparently safer, the state of being in between proved to be actually the most unbearable for many of the middle age generation. Moreover all these options bore generational and gender aspects.

Testimonies of those days, especially those recorded immediately after the events, are filled with such vivid, almost synaesthesic descriptions of the atmosphere in the streets, of collective gestures, patterns of interactions, as well as precious insights into very personal experiences and inner conflicts. Nonetheless, beyond the analytic description of the revolution-as-lived, the paper aims at critically examining the discursive practices of revolution-as-told, by situating these narratives within a broader context of the work of collective memory of the Romanian revolution during the 16 years elapsed since then.