Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on one important aspect of post-communist reality in Albania, namely the ways Albanians experience, remember and/or forget the period of communist regime. My analysis focuses on a recent phenomenon, i.e. the growing number of published memoirs about life under communist rule.

Paper long abstract:

The main aim of this article is to analyze a recent in post-communist Albania, namely the growing number of memoirs written by intellectuals, political prisoners, former activists of the communist regime, army officers etc. It is like almost everybody, who lived under communist regime has a story to tell, and thus a book to publish. Seen in the context of recent explosion of memory in Europe this phenomenon is not specific at all, but the time of appearance and intensity call for a closer analysis.

Apart from economic hardship, political instability and social unrests, the case of post-communist Albania is specific also due to the, as I call it, collective social amnesia about the communist experience, which dominated in the public discourse for more than a decade after the change of regime in 1991. The half of the next decade has seen a growing tendency to write about communist experience. Many oral testimonies, memoirs, documentaries, and journalistic accounts have appeared, but been historians have remained silent. Only recently there have appeared few historical works on communism. What are the reasons behind the lack of activity by professional historians and the explosion of telling history by amateurs? Are these two phenomena related to each other, and how if at all? What were the reasons behind social and collective amnesia of the 1990s and the explosion of memory in 2000s? Through analysis of few memoirs and their contextualization I try in my paper to answer to these questions.