ABSTRACT
This section summarizes the empirical and theoretical findings of the book. It emphasizes the lessons learnt from the Romanian case in understanding how lived experience of trauma and political suppression is transformed into remembered history. It is argued that the memory of the Stalinist era has become a principal source of a mnemonic base for the reconstruction of a national identity over time in the context of the abrupt transition from communism and the inevitable political vacuum it left. But an oversimplified remembering of this history could easily result in an essentialized version of historical memory rooted in ethnocentrism, Christian-Orthodoxy, and a patriarchal masculinism as fully incompatible with democratic values. From a theoretical perspective, given the focus on multiple and diverse memories of specific social groups and categories, this study can be described as a contribution to the sociology of memory. However, as the acts of remembering are examined in relationship to the processes involving the democratic transition, conceptual frameworks from the field of transitional justice are referred to. In fact, this interdisciplinary approach relies on a wide range of primary and secondary sources (memoirs, historical archives, interviews, and ethnographic observation) and on the methodological tools of different disciplines, including history, social psychology, and political science.
