The afterlives of communist things: Archiving feeling in post-communist Romania

Communist memorabilia – more of the same?

Ordinary scenes can tempt the passerby with the promise of a story let out of the bag.

Matter can shimmer with undetermined potential and the weight of received meaning.

(Stewart, 2007: 23)

In the wake of 1989, communist objects became ‘junk’ as Romanians were eager to shed any remnants of the past, a process very similar to the ‘veritable orgy of historical revisionism, of writing the communist period out of the past’ (Verdery, 1999: 46) that was supposed to usher in the country’s aspirations to reconnect with the ‘west’ as fast as possible. Material remembrances of communism in Romania have been tantamount to the prison cell, the squalid apartment building, the inedible or scarce food.

However, the tables have turned since the 2000s, and communist junk has become communist memorabilia, to some extent due to online memory practices afforded by the increasing popularity of social media. It is by now a foregone conclusion of material culture studies that ‘[…] objects change in defiance of their material stability. The category to which a thing belongs, the emotion and judgment it prompts, and the narrative it recalls, are all historically reconfigured’ (Thomas, 1991: 125). Affective attachment to objects changes not only historically, of course, but also varies synchronically depending on the forms of mediation and the affective protocols that various memory actors select, be they top-bottom or bottom-up. As public discussions about the recent past in Romania mainly converge around the ‘memory as justice’ narrative, less attention has been paid to ‘grassroots heritage practices’ (Giaccardi, 2012), which run parallel to the discourse of cultural memory ‘stakeholders’ such as governmental research institutes. ¹ As compared, for example, to the established body of scholarship on ostalgic remembering ‘through things’ in the German context (e.g. Arnold-de Simine, 2011; Bach, 2002; Berdahl, 1999; Berdahl and Bunzl, 2010; Betts, 2000; Boym, 1994; Saunders and Pinfold, 2013; Veenis, 2012), Romanian vernacular heritage practices are still brushed aside as ‘mere nostalgia’ (Berdahl, 1999) or, on the contrary, deemed morally irresponsible and potentially dangerous and have received little scholarly attention (see Mihalache, 2014; Petrescu, 2014). What readily gets excluded by employing the ‘politics of mereness’ approach (Herzfeld, 2010) is that communist material culture can open various paths for identity construction and intergenerational transmission of memory. The diverse affective engagements occasioned by the material and symbolic recycling of communist material culture are seen here as revealing a shift in mnemonic practices and a discovery of new uses for the past. As Dominic Boyer poignantly emphasized, there is a recurring need to ‘recognize and represent the dialogical gossamer of idiosyncratic references, interests, and affects that are channeled through nostalgic discourse’ (Boyer, 2010: 20), of which engagements with ‘the social lives of things’ (Appadurai, 1986) and the way they are mediated constitute an important part. The underlying contention of my argument is that abiding to a condemnation of – perhaps ill-identified – nostalgia keeps reinforcing a dominant paradigm for addressing the material culture of communist Romania. In Peter Apor’s (2010) words,

The relationship of the present […] to the recent past is established through a peculiar practical activity simultaneously concerned with the construction and destruction of things. The fate of themes in the public discussion of contemporary history seems to be bound to the assignment of objects. (p. 3)

If a reflexive approach to historical events relies intrinsically on reinterpreting experiences in relation to material traces, then the question is which objects are considered apt negotiators between present and past by whom and how is their materiality mediated? What competing affective and political attachments to the recent past coexist in contemporary Romania and how are they expressed through heritage practices? In the spirit of Brown’s questions – ‘what claims on your attention and on your action are made on behalf of things? […] How does the effort to rethink things become an effort to reinstitute society?’ (Brown, 2001: 9–10) – this article investigates the remediation of communist ‘things’ through three entry points into the web of competing affectual attachments to the past in post-communist Romania: the Sighet Memorial Museum, the online musealization of communist memorabilia in two blogs and the investigation of the social lives of communist brands and those of the people involved in their production in the documentary Metrobranding – A love story between men ² and objects (Vlad and Voicu, 2010). These instances of remediation of communist objects have succeeded each other, now coexisting in Romania as divergent discursive formations. The Sighet Memorial came into existence gradually, slowly filling up the former prison space with exhibits and information panels. The fact that everyday objects were among the last to be added is indicative of how a perceived need to counter nostalgia surfaced in the 2000s. The 2000s mark the start of online grassroots heritage initiatives, with the blogs I analyze here being the first and to this date most comprehensive online archives to be set up. They are now part of a burgeoning thematic ‘web sphere’ (Schneider and Foot, 2005) of generational, material memories of communism. I include them here and not others because they are the most explicit earliest attempts to archive and catalogue communist memorabilia in a museum-like fashion. The documentary Metrobranding released in 2010 was in itself marketed as part of this nostalgic remembrance of material traces but distances itself from online nostalgia in bringing a new perspective on the social lives of communist brands. Therefore, my selection of sources is relevant both in tracing a succession of various memory discourses that build on each other and in disentangling the way they echo each other in the present, in their different political attachments, mediations and generationalities. What generational attachments are constructed in post-communist Romania around communist things? What role do materiality and mediation play in the configuration of these attachments? These questions have guided me in my selection of case studies and form the empirical backbone of the following sections.

Due note should be made of the fact that my analysis of Sighet Museum in this article draws on the DVD virtual visit as made available by the museum as well as on the museum website (The Virtual Version of Sighet). The references to the two blogs included here are part of a sample collected between 2013 and 2015 as part of a broader cross-media research project on memories of communist childhoods.

Shameful debris – communist things in prison

The Sighet Memorial Museum is a mainly privately sponsored initiative receiving very little contribution from the Romanian government, ³ but enjoying support from the Council of Europe through the Foreign Affairs Committee, ⁴ which focuses almost exclusively on the memory of communist victims and the members of the anticommunist resistance (Bădică, 2007). Embodying the dominant narrative ⁵ about the communist past – one focused on its totalitarian, illegitimate character and its political victims – the museum occupies the building of a former political prison and uses text and photographs displayed on panels inside the former cells to represent the experience of political prisoners, repression, sovietization, the transformations of the party-system in the wake of 1945 and a host of other forms of injustice and violations of human rights mostly focusing on the period 1945–1965. Belonging to all intents and purposes to Paul William’s category of the ‘memorial museum’, Sighet purports to prove that ‘memory alone can be a form of justice’, to quote its founding member, Romanian writer Ana Blandiana. In a country which generally shies away from dealing with the heritage of communism (Light, 2000), the Sighet Museum stands as a singular example, which partly explains its rather narrow approach to the past.

It is quite striking that in a museum context dedicated to constructing an experience of traumatic attachment to the past and deep emotional engagement with the victims of political violence, there should be rooms dedicated to ‘everyday life’ ⁶ and ‘communist kitsch’ (Figure 1). ⁷ According to Williams (2007b), memorial museums are characterized by rather scarce collections, a direct result of them representing the obliterating force of orchestrated violence, which entails that ‘The injured, dispossessed and expelled are left object-poor’. The Sighet Memorial Museum is a case in point as it includes memorial art, spaces for meditation and prayer and a presentation mode which seeks to inform through text and photographs about the uncollectable evidence of repression in communist Romania, which reinforce the ‘sense of intimate violence’ (Williams, 2007b) that dominates the space of the former political prison. According to Williams (2007a), these ‘cool’ objects that are explicitly didactic, operating according to a show-and-tell logic and which have functional illustrative qualities ‘may flatten the story into a historical “book on the wall”’ (p. 34). In many ways, this is what happens in many of the rooms of Sighet Memorial. Including everyday objects in the exhibition was obviously an attempt to bring in ‘hot’ objects which ‘can be made to speak emotionally due to their high capacity for personification’ (Williams, 2007a: 34; Figure 2).

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Figure 1.

View of Room 76 – everyday life at Sighet Memorial.

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Figure 2.

Display of everyday objects from communism at Sighet Memorial.

However, given the emotionally laden space of the former prison, devoting even a limited space to everyday objects might seem like an odd choice. Paul Williams warns that ‘constructing the imprisonment experience by forcing together alienating and empathetic objects and interpretive devices that would never have coexisted while it was being used for punishment may strike us as unnatural’ (Williams, 2007a: 89); displaying the banal materialities of everyday life in this case appears to be twice removed from the experience of Sighet as a space of repression and violence. Not so much, however, considering the fact that the museum starts from the assumption that communism created ‘people without a memory – a brainwashed new man unable to remember what he was, what he had, or what he did before communism’. ⁸ The description of Room 76 – everyday life as featured on the museum website and in the physical space – reinforces this subject position by claiming to display

[…] characteristic objects, images and sounds, by the commonplaces, customs, uniforms, models, slogans, popular songs, taboos, and mentalities that accompanied the life of the majority of Romania’s population, those who did not live behind bars, but were allowed the ‘freedom’ of a life under surveillance outside the prison walls.

Thus, the memorial museum narrative operates synecdochically, bleeding outside the confines of the prison walls and re-signifying the communist bric-à-brac into icons of a generalized incarceration. The way communist things are displayed is very relevant in this sense: Room 76 uses the same presentation mode as in the other rooms but adds a partial reconstruction of a communist living room (book case, telephone, vacuum cleaner, radio and pick-up) and two transparent display cases in which things are thrown randomly and without any labeling. This image is quite striking as it treats objects from communism as junk, anonymous debris displayed in quasi-garbologist fashion. A real-life-sized photograph of a queue outside a grocery together with a collection of shopping carts and egg cartons is meant to echo the documents and newspaper cut-outs focused on food rations. The issue of illegal abortions is also part of the documentation on display in the room. The few scattered objects are, therefore, framed within a sociality of trauma, deprivation and uniformization of poor living standards. Ana Blandiana’s poem, Totul (Everything), ⁹ provides the overall comment on the display strategies and the general curatorial concept of the room by listing, ironically, the material markers of ideological deceit:

[…] Trams from time to time, queues for flour

Weevils, empty bottles, speeches

Elongated images on the television

Colorado beetles, petrol

Pennants, the European Cup

Trucks with gas cylinders, familiar portraits

Export-reject apples

Newspapers, loaves of bread

Blended oil, carnations

Receptions at the airport

Cico-cola, balloons

Bucharest salami, diet yoghurt […]. (Blandiana 1984)

This treatment of the material culture of communism is representative of the dominant narrative about the communist everyday in which the queue, the ‘children of the decree’, ¹⁰ poverty and humiliation are the accepted tropes of remembrance. The amalgamated, fragmentary and cast-off display of communist things in Sighet serves to support these tropes of remembrance, confirming the general victimhood of the population that has been the crux of almost all post-1989 representations of the past. While the emptiness of the cells where pre-war political leaders were incarcerated posits the object-less trauma of political repression, the noise of amalgamated things in Room 76 is meant to emphasize the futility of everyday life in communism, destabilize the material markers of banal, ordinary affects and re-attach them to the trauma contained in Sighet Memorial and in the discourse about the recent past more broadly.

Blogging things, (re)collecting generation

With the advent of social media in the 2000s, an alternative curatorial practice has emerged, one in which the jettisoned junk of communism has been given a new lease of life and has been used to construct very different identity narratives. The Romanian online sphere has seen a proliferation of blogs or series of blog posts dedicated to collecting and cataloguing photographs of communist era paraphernalia ranging from product labels to toys, textbooks and children’s literature to foodstuffs and clothing items. Two blogs were specifically dedicated to grassroots curation of communist memorabilia: latrecut.ro (‘past tense’; Vasile, 2006), set up in 2006 by Cristian Vasile and meant to archive ‘naïve memories ¹¹ from the red period’, and etimpu.com (‘it’s time’; Anon, 2010), set up in 2010 under anonymous administration. The former soon became quite popular, with several interviews of the founding blogger ¹² featured in mainstream media. Functioning as online encyclopedias of communist material culture, these blogs have become quite authoritative photographic archives, whose stream of posts was quite intense up to 2011/2012, when regular posting stopped. As the earliest most popular examples of grassroots heritage of communist memorabilia, they have sparked off other such entries on personal blogs and, more recently, similar practices on Facebook, where the ‘cultural biographies’ (Kopytoff, 1986) of communist things and privileged knowledge thereof are being written into a generational discourse (Figures 3 and 4).

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Figure 3.

Screenshot of section on ‘School supplies’ from the blog etimpu.com .

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Figure 4.

Screenshot of section ‘Games and toys’ from the blog latrecut.ro.

While the narrative of Sighet Memorial focuses on the traumatic collective identity of Romanians as a people in dire need of having their memory restored as a way to deal with faltering processes of transitional justice, the online mnemonic and curatorial practices reveal a different form of identity construction – one which foregrounds generational identity as extricated from traumatic remembering and directly connected to the many objects that are photographed and archived online in clear categories. These practices could at first glance be seen as enacting a sort of collective amnesia in which objects are re-signified as counterfactual evidence against the grim realities of communism, props in the construction of ‘an “artefactual” history in which a variety of social experiences are trivialized or marginalised’ (Urry, 2002: 161). However, a closer look at the actual engagement with the material culture on display on latrecut.ro, for example, reveals that the biography of objects, sensory memories and political attitudes are quite thoroughly negotiated.

Generational identity construction is strongly present on these blogs, carried out either in separate posts with an exclusively linguistic dimension or associated with visual triggers. For instance, one post by a commenter whose ID might point to the year of birth, ‘1981’, opens a discussion thread, entitled ‘A fost frumos/It was beautiful’, by stating, ‘Thank you to my generation, the 80s generation, for simply existing. I know it might sound stupid, but I am proud to have been born then and to have had a childhood different from that of 2000s kids’ (1981, 2007a). This original post leads to a thread of comments which involve diverging opinions from various generations. One of the comments stands out for its explicit engagement with current memory politics and its counter-narrative move against dominant discourses on the recent past:

You should’ve experienced childhood in the 70s when the food was cheap and Romanians could travel within their country. […] The period 1965–1980 was one of abundance that Tismaneanu ¹³ and his Gang want to hide from today’s youth (as ordered by Basescu ¹⁴ ). (Calinbatranul, 2007a)

Comments showing such reflexivity about the politics of memory in Romania are few and far between, but what is remarkable is that even this sort of reply falls back on material engagements: ‘it’s true that the clothes were ugly and we had wretched tin toys, but people were happy and peaceful’ (Calinbatranul, 2007a). Coming from one of the most active participants, this comment shows that what is a stake is not so much an aesthetic exoneration of communist material culture, but a repetition of familiar material frames to retrieve a shared sense of cultural intimacy. The initiator of the thread replies with a startling repositioning vis-à-vis the communist period, despite the initially expressed generational pride: ‘In the 80s I think we unfortunately lived through the horrors of pure communism. But some lived their childhood back then. From this point of view … it’s good there are happy memories as well’ (1981, 2007b). 1981 admits to having her opinions formed by reading the work of Neagu Djuvara, a prominent Romanian historian and anticommunist, thus revealing the heteroglossical character of generational identity construction, where multiple discourses coexist: an anticommunist stance toward the system as well as an existential nostalgia for childhood and generational pride. Another participant in the discussion makes a comment which is yet more revealing about the re-evaluations of the autobiographical past:

After the Revolution I went through a phase where I mourned my stolen childhood, which seemed like a complete lie. But I wouldn’t want to erase any of my experiences. I think they shaped my sensibility. Today, when I think about it, it seems like I lived another life, one I didn’t get to say farewell to. (Catimi, 2007)

This comment comprises at a micro-level the reassessment of the political past filtered through a generational and material ‘rewriting’ that is emerging in Romanian public discourse. Tellingly enough, the commenter comes to this conclusion after having referred to her parenting experience and the nostalgia she feels for the sensory engagements with the scarce and therefore magical sweets of her childhood.

One of the most popular posts on latrecut.ro is entitled ‘Generation X’, a veritable manifesto that has been intensely circulated on social media and which relates generational identity to the bridging of communism and capitalism through material culture. The ‘latchkey generation’ or ‘generation x’ is ‘the last to have used coin phones, but the first to play video games’. With a rich list of things and everyday rituals associated with childhood and teenage years, it is supplemented by the contributor’s own memories, as well as those of the 50 commenters. The importance of this ‘nostalgic letter’ as it is called by the anonymous writer is rendered obvious in the following comment:

just as I was thinking that we ended up a generation of losers, you gave me every reason to think that in the end we are winners because we managed to carry this country into the next century where the older generation won’t make it and the young don’t know what the past was like. (Hedes, 2006)

While most comments show a deeply emotional engagement with the material culture of communism, others retain a more distanced gaze. Commenting on an iconic brand of the 1980s–1990s, Calinbatranul (2007b) wonders: ‘Was the Turbo chewing gum available during Ceausescu’s times? Or are people mixing up memories from the 90s and 80s? I’d say they’re two distinct periods. This blog should be organized by decade: 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s’. What could be implied by this ‘professional’ attitude toward archiving communist material culture is that there is an expectation that blogs carry out the musealization of everyday life during communism according to rigorous temporal yardsticks, much like offline museums would. Nostalgic attachments are thus accompanied by a type of do-it-yourself (DIY) ethics of the unprofessional but dedicated archivist (Baker and Huber 2013).

The evocation of things triggers variegated emotional and political attachments, disputed by direct reference to the sensory experience of communist objects. One commenter points out, in reply to the inclusion of Turbo chewing gum in the material culture of the 1980s: ‘No, we had a square chewing gum of sorts. But that’s a nasty memory, so the Turbo chewing gum wins’ (all_ex_aou, 2007), launching an accusation that positive sensory experiences are cherry-picked to serve the purpose of constructing a positive image of the past in what he considers to be utterly anachronistic fashion. The same commenter also brings forth the issue of generational memory wars:

From what I see, all your comments are about one thing: you’re born in the 60s and you’re the coolest. Maybe some did not live through the whole dark period, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have the right to pleasant memories from the old age. (all_ex_aou, 2007)

This is indicative of the centrality of a sense of ownership over the recent past, directly connected to knowledge of its material culture. The ‘right to remember’ surfaces time and again in the comments, irrespective of whether it is stated with nostalgia, skepticism or purported objectivity. Knowledge of the objects’ social embeddedness in communist Romania was quintessential for daily survival, especially during the decade of dire scarcity and decreasing quality of basic necessities, when creative tactics for procuring and making do with ‘things’ were put into place. This knowledge, of which ‘generation x’ is the last stronghold, was so enmeshed with their formative years as to render the objects’ and the people’s biographies inseparable, leading to the need for ‘a reappropriation of symbols that establishes “ownership” of symbolic capital’ (Bach, 2002: 547). Stemming directly from material (re)collections, this right to bear witness contrasts quite sharply with previous discourses, which focused on testimonies of the criminal nature of the communist regime, particularly of what has been called the ‘obsessive decade’ of the 1950s and mostly from cultural or political elites, who professed their duty to remember.

While latrecut.ro invites a regular number of commenters, the same cannot be said about etimpu.com. Boasting 2,275,773 views, etimpu.com is definitely more of a visual archive than a space for shared impressions and textual engagement. The blog’s ‘About’ section clearly states its purposes and goes to great lengths to distance itself from any presupposed political intention:

the blog is not dedicated only to those who spent part of their lives in communism, nor does it attempt to praise or sweeten this dark period in Romania’s history. What matters most is remembering that period and not the political regime or doctrines of the time.

The blog aims to serve some pedagogical purpose too, ‘giving young people the chance to create some image of the past way of life’. Its focus is on collecting memorabilia, and the author states that ‘what is important is reflection and this is how the content and the intention behind the blog should be regarded’.

Carefully labeling each photographed object and arranging them in serialized categories, the author performs a meticulous act of curation. As opposed to latrecut.ro, there is little to no textual framing of the objects or autobiographical reminiscing and no invitation to engage with the photographs. This perhaps explains the conspicuous absence of verbalized memories, although surely the millions of views stand as evidence of non-verbal engagement with the blog. While at first glance this stands in stark contrast with the community feeling of latrecut.ro, if we think of the alleged 30,000 new monthly visitors the latter boasted in 2009, ¹⁵ the tens of comments per post seem less impressive. This gives an inkling into the possible reception of these blogs as online museums that one casually browses through, only occasionally signing the guest book and jotting down impressions.

The ‘collected’ (Olick, 1999) memories aggregated in a discourse on generational identity have resurrected communist iconic brands in a social media afterlife. Helping to crystallize the structure of feeling of a discursively constructed generation, brands prove to be ‘saturated with sensibilities of a particular time to the point of embodying them’ (Kravets and Orge, 2010: 220). A brand is therefore ‘not simply a vehicle for shared meanings, but it can portray and stand for a generation, endowed with an anthropomorphic power of agency […]’ (Kravets and Orge, 2010: 220). In the process of brand iconization, ‘identity myths’ (Holt, 2004: 8) are predicated onto brands; these identity myths refer directly to generational values and knowledge. It is not only established brands that become involved in this process of contagion but also mundane ‘no-namers’, such as the milk or the seltzer bottle.

The affordances of the blog make it ‘a medium both of stored cultural memory and of communicative remembering. […] a mediated remembering community’ (Jones, 2013: 400), where both textual and visual modes combine. The ‘blurring of archive and network, cultural and communicative memory, and written and spoken forms’ (Jones, 2013: 401) leads to new forms of engagement with the past that fixate it and at the same time open it up for debate and contestation. Affording verbal engagement with the curated objects, latrecut.ro functions as a museum-in-progress as well as oral history project that ‘cultivate collective intimacy through shared impressions’ (Boyer, 2010: 20) and contribute to the construction of generational discourse. It offers itself as a space where the objects can be visually consumed anew, with evocations of their initial consumption patterns reframed in a seemingly continuous present of remembering. These are not shabby objects being displayed, there is no wear and tear to be seen and they are not photographed in their environment; in a way, the visual semiotics of these blogs borrows both from the product catalogue and from the museum exhibition. Hijacking the general format of the blog, which is predominantly textual, latrecut.ro and etimpu.com make full use of its visual affordances and storage capacities, creating overwhelming archives of communist material culture and communities of memory.

It is through mediated materialities of communist memorabilia that ‘intimate publics’ (Berlant, 1997) emerge around collecting practices that archive visual traces of disappearing objects and the ordinary affects (Stewart, 2007) that surround them. Functioning as ‘repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception’ (Cvetkovich, 2003: 7), these museum blogs reassign meaning to communist objects in a strikingly different fashion from the traumatic enframing in Sighet Memorial Museum. This sharp distinction might beg questions about the ethics of memory practices, questions that have been asked and answered many a time according to the binary logic of nostalgia versus trauma in post-communism (Végső, 2013). Particularly with the association between childhood memories and nostalgia, a trivial, banal practice signaling the waning of historical consciousness, the juxtaposition between the memorial museum narrative and online mnemonic practices seems to instantly condemn the latter. I hope to have shown, however, that post-communist affect and communist materiality dovetail in ways that go beyond the mindless reproduction of temporally exotic commodities.

Documenting absence

While the explosion of social media generatiographies brings the 1970s–1980s generational discourse to the fore, the documentary Metrobranding ¹⁶ – A love story between men and objects focuses on a previous generation, the 1950s–1960s generation (Figure 5). Directed by a team of young film makers, it traces the iconic ‘monobrands’ produced in communism by interviewing the people involved in their production and documenting their material, social and autobiographical engagement with the products: the Ileana sewing machine, Drăgăşani sneakers, Mobra motorcycle and Pegas bicycles (recently redesigned and brought back on the market), Relaxa mattress (a surviving brand) and Fieni light bulbs. It interestingly does so, however, from the perspective of its 1980s generation directors, who interview the characters in the documentary while trying to trace the disappearing objects, acting as archeologists of the recent past. The dedication at the end, ‘To our parents’ is telling as to how memory and postmemory dovetail in this documentary about objects. This is not the postmemory of trauma, however, but rather one of the ‘structure of feeling’ of the 1950s/1960s Romanian working class that only now becomes intelligible to the 1970s/1980s generation. What to the child was a normalized environment, framed by the parents’ social insertion in communist working-class culture, to the adult becomes a quest for rediscovering a lost collective experience through a new perspective: tracing the elusive object.

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Figure 5.

Poster of the documentary Metrobranding – A love story between men and objects.

In the midst of the symbolically consumerist rediscovery of previously discredited communist material culture in social media, Metrobranding provides a sobering counterweight by looking at the intricacies of discontinued production, decline of mono-industrial towns and the impact this had on people’s biographies. In the documentary, the focus is on tracing the once-famous brands through desolate factory buildings and interviewing seniors who seem misplaced and rendered useless themselves. In this sense, we are dealing with a mediated absence of communist material culture, the only extant brand being the Relaxa mattress. Online, the opposite seems to be the case: there is a surfeit of iconic objects; a vibrant retrieval, recycling and display of ‘communist things’; and a mediated hyper-presence. In Metrobranding, the perspective switches from the consumption to the production end of the cultural biography of communist things. While the visual archives on blogs amass anonymous objects side by side with recognizable if forgotten brands, the documentary pursues the monobrands of communism that once signified metonymically and interrogates their interrupted cycles of production. The presence of objects online is shaped by the particular temporality of the medium as ‘digital media have complicated the temporal dimensions against which we measure our sense of presence in-the-world, and increasingly blurred this with our sense of presence in the-media, and also presence-in-memory’ (Hoskins, 2011: 25).

The visual abundance of communist things uploaded, shared and circulated comes in sharp contrast with the representation of objects in Metrobranding. Here, the once-famous Drăgăşani sneakers are represented as a vanishing signifier of a lost world. The directors get a former factory employee to find the famous model 1001, and he goes to great lengths to oblige but to no avail. ‘These sneakers are extinct like the dinosaurs’, he concludes as the camera shows a pile of mismatched pairs of sneakers half-covering the face of the man who once worked to produce them. A scene showing him cleaning a sneaker in the bathroom sink to reveal the brand name on the sole is emblematic for how objects are represented in Metrobranding: shabby relics of a lost world. The same goes for the once highly popular national bicycle brand, Pegas: former factory employees rummage through a shed which stores rickety bikes to uncover a Pegas bike that is then tested by a professional cyclist. The Drăgăşani tennis shoes get tested by children playing football on a side street, who quickly dismiss them as uncomfortable. Their qualities are then restored by a handball team coach who declares them ‘Better than anything on the market today’. His authority is, however, then undermined when he is asked about the etymology of ‘tennis shoe’, and he has to look it up in the dictionary. The shabby, rickety materiality of communist things in Metrobranding is of a radically different kind than the incriminated objects on display at Sighet. While the latter might well be the debris that Klee’s angel of history is contemplating – the awe-inspiring reeling in reverse of utopian progress – the objects in Metrobranding bear within them the marks of the transition, the failure of a promised future that never happened and the cold facts of the present. This is quite different from Sighet’s narrative, focused on ‘debunking a future that was to be’ (Williams, 2007a: 162), imposing ‘a defeat of that future’s past’ (Williams, 2007a: 162), therefore precluding the ‘distributed personhood’ (Gell, 1998) that objects might stand for. Metrobranding, on the other hand, is intent on piecing together, albeit temporarily, the personhood of its interviewees.

Although the directors generally take a respectful, only occasionally tongue-in-cheek attitude toward their interviewees, an ironic streak continuously exposes the ambiguities of the people’s relationship with the objects they once produced and valued. A strange mixture of alienation and closeness surfaces in almost all the interviews. The tenderest episode is the one about the Fieni light bulb. A former engineer reads out a clumsy reflective essay he wrote on the meaning of light, showing how the product of his work was invested with meaning, reflecting back on his status and value as an individual. The former general manager’s confession, which ends the documentary, is startling. Recounting his last visit to the former factory ¹⁷ where he spent 24 years as a manager, he says, ‘When I went there two years ago I saw there was nothing left and I passed out. An ambulance took me to hospital’. Contrary to expectations, however, nostalgic feelings toward the former political system do not creep in on any of these the snippet accounts. On the contrary, the interviewees make ironic, almost self-sabotaging comments: ‘In Ceausescu’s times we must have used more candles than our parents. If we read the news, we believed we were living in the light years’, comments the former engineer.

While for the latchkey generation communist brands and memorabilia ‘have acquired a new life, and thus a new validity as the material witnesses of a discourse community that bases its identity on the shared knowledge of the everyday experiences as consumers’ (Blum, 2004: 232), the previous generation seems deprived of autobiographical redemption that might be facilitated through the rediscovery and revaluation of the objects they once produced. The type of emotional attachment to the past that dominates the documentary is one of intense faith and pride in the quality of the brands and a desperate, if modest gesture toward asserting the value of past lives. The directors’ investigative efforts to look for the lost and ‘loser’ brands of communism thus counterbalance the fervent rediscovery that is constructed online by their generation and facilitates intergenerational transmission of memory among otherwise disconnected social and age groups – on one hand, the interviewees and the director and, on the other hand, the imagined audience.

The communist ‘things’ displayed online are in many respects commodities, attracting popularity and social capital for the blog owners, circulated in an ‘affective economy’ (Ahmed, 2004) where generational pride is the currency. Metrobranding mediates them as singular, run-down objects, marked by an inability to act as prostheses for fully legitimizing life narratives. The vanished childhood object retrieved online in the overwhelming visual archive brings with it a rediscovered sense of worthiness and a collective sense of shared intimacy. With its detective mise-en-scène, the documentary exposes the vanishing object that one can see disintegrating or slipping away together with the communal feeling and professional biography of its producers. These different mediations involve specific strategies of representation that produce complementary if different discourses about communist memorabilia. In both these instances, however, objects act as go-betweens facilitating an implicit dialogue between different generations: between those who ‘produced’ them as adults working in factories and those who ‘consumed’ them as children, between the contemporary ‘latchkey generation’ debating parenting practices and the transmission of values and the generation for whom communism is history, not lived experience.

Conclusion

These different mediations and genealogies of communist things expose the intricate, multifarious layering of material memories in post-communist Romania. Far from being objects of indiscriminate longing, this article has shown how the flotsam and jetsam of communism can facilitate alternative re-evaluations of the recent past and reconstructions of individual lives as well as intergenerational communication. In this sense, this article is a contribution to emergent interest in generationalities and material memories of communism in Southeastern Europe, where recent research identifies compelling reconfigurations of generational identity in connection with communist heritage, in digital or other contexts (see Haukanes and Trnka, 2013; Todorova, 2014).

If things are ‘temporalized as the before and after of the object’ (Brown, 2001: 5), then the thingness of the exhibits at Sighet serves to fixate an arrested latency as well as an ideological excess. Framed as the material banality of an evil political system, they are meant to embody the murderous utopia of communism. In the two instances of grassroots heritage of communist material culture, things have been shown to tell a different story about Romanian communism – one that also focuses on their past future and halts their complete discarding to examine the values and biographies attached to them in a way that is more tentative and therefore more accommodating. This politics of ordinariness is, I argue, meant to counterbalance dominant narratives, which preclude attempts at nuancing attachments to the past, by assimilation with a sociality of trauma. Changing media practices, generational discourses and social life cycles of things enter into complex dynamics further complicated by changing politics of memory. To avoid monolithic representations of post-socialism, these need to be analyzed bearing in mind the shifting, coexisting temporalities of post-communism, as this article has exemplified.

Archiving ordinary affects, these mnemonic practices signal a need for a revaluation of individual biographies, for re-articulating valuable experiences of growing up or attaining professional maturity in a compromised political system. How does one tell such stories without entering ethically dangerous terrain? For the time being, it seems that the way is through things and around them. Whether there is potential for constructive dialogue between emerging and established narratives about Romania’s communist past that do justice to the variety of past experiences and their usability in the face of present and future pressures remains to be seen, but it seems that material culture will play a central role in it.