New Europe College Regional Program Yearbook 2001-2002

N.E.C. Yearbook 2001-2002
them is, therefore, an approach conscious of a crucial distance, seen
through eyes which have stepped across the threshold of the destroyed
house and have looked back to remember (mostly with the purpose of
localizing in a proper way) the remnants of the presences that remain
under ruinous cover.
Apart from the metaphorical potential of this image, there are two
presuppositions I would like to emphasize before approaching closely
the relationship between death and vitality in the socialist monuments of
Eastern Europe. Looking back at the monuments of the socialist past is,
as in the Simonides example, a step in the recreation through memory of
things which were not imagined as possibly “dead” before the falling of
the roof; that is, there is a certain shift in the relationship between life
and death in these loci, and a different treatment and attitude towards
them when looking back across the threshold. Death, as encoded and
perceived in these loci, possessed meanings and sense quite different
from that attributed to it after the regime of permanence in the socialist
system of representation had been discarded. It is this core meaning of
death, in particular, enclosed within temporal limits that this paper aims
to trace while keeping at bay the husks of inscriptions and new meanings
that inevitably appear in a post-mortem stage. A second presupposition
that needs to be pointed out is that approaching the monuments of the
socialist past in Eastern Europe represents in itself a mapping of
monumental sites and forms which have visually stuck in our memory
and which, to anybody witness to this epoch, can easily be recognized
as being present there, not completely effaced by the passage of time.
However – and this must be emphasized – “recreation” through memory
does not have as its aim the reconstitution or re-legitimization of socialist
monuments as important elements of the system of representation, nor
the taking of sides in the agora of ideas sustaining or disclaiming the
existence of socialist monuments. Rather, it is a look back to a time
before the representative power of the monuments had come to an end,
a time in which the presences of the monuments, having already lost
some of their vitality, started for the most part to become realities of
memory.
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