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“Deșteaptă-Te, Române!” the Social Life of the Hymn of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 During the Communist Era

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“Deșteaptă-Te, Române!” the Social Life of the Hymn of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 During the Communist Era “Deșteaptă-te, Române!” The Social Life of the Hymn of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 during the Communist Era MA Thesis in European Studies Graduate School for Humanities Universiteit van Amsterdam --- Author: Matthias Ruijgrok Student number: 10461639 --- Main Supervisor: dr. Sudha Rajagopalan Second Supervisor: dr. Artemy Kalinovsky June, 2015 1 Contents Preface...................................................................................................................................... 2 Introduction.............................................................................................................................. 4 Chapter 1: Awakening; the popular narrative............................................................................ 9 Chapter 2: “Deșteaptă-te, Române” and nationalism................................................................. 16 Under Communism........................................................................................................ 19 Chapter 3: “Deșteaptă-te, Române” and public temperament.................................................... 25 The Brașov revolt of 1987............................................................................................... 28 Chapter 4: “Deșteaptă-te, Române” and sociability.................................................................... 35 Chapter 5: “Deșteaptă-te, Române” and education.................................................................... 43 Conclusion................................................................................................................................. 51 Bibliography.............................................................................................................................. 54 Appendix................................................................................................................................... 57 2 Preface When exactly my own “journey” with Romania’s present day national hymn “Deșteaptă-te, Române” commenced, I cannot pinpoint. Already when I started studying History at the University of Utrecht in 2010, Romania had attracted my specific interest. This only deepened when I took the opportunity to study Romanian at the University of Amsterdam and subsequently enrolled twice in the Romanian summer school program organised by the Romanian Cultural Institute, aimed at education in Romanian language and culture. Somewhere along this string of events I had become acquainted with “Deșteaptă-te Române” as the hymn of the Romanian revolution. I thought of it as an interesting feature of the revolution, a song that proved such a strong symbol. Continuing my studies at the University of Amsterdam in the MA program East European Studies, I was determined to pursue a thesis research with a subject relating to Romanian history. It was not until I enrolled in a course on cultural pastimes in (Soviet) Russia, given by Sudha Rajagopalan, that “Deșteaptă-te Române” came into sight as a possible subject. From the way I knew the song by then – as a revolutionary song that was forbidden in Communist Romania – I started to wonder how Romanians had learned about it, and how it had been popularly remembered despite its official prohibited status. This thesis is the result of that one simple question and the ensuing flow of information resulting from the research, which often challenged the ideas I had prior. The song proved to have passed through an interesting trajectory during the Communist era, which differed vastly from my initial expectations. I can quite honestly say it was an exciting and highly rewarding journey to uncover the life of “Deșteaptă-te Române” during the Romanian Communist period. Acknowledgements For the realisation of this research, I was very fortunate to have received the assistance of many people, both friends and persons which were (previously) unknown to me. Hence I wish to express my sincere gratitude towards all those who helped me with the project. First of all, I want to thank my fantastic supervisor Sudha Rajagopalan for her advice, assistance and encouragement throughout the project. My work could also not have been realised without all the people with whom I had the pleasure to conduct an interview, so my sincere thanks to Silvano Budacea, Maria Bucur, Ionel Piruscă, Valer Rus, Daniela Ulieriu, Vlad Ulieriu, Mihail Avramescu and Cristina Madgearu. I have been reliant on a lot of others too, who were prepared to do a lot of networking for my project, helped me with identifying the right direction for my research, or were involved with the surveys. Even though their efforts did in some cases unfortunately not lead to actual results, my 3 gratitude nevertheless goes to Camelia Crăciun, dr. Alex Drace-Francis, Ion Caramitru, Mirela Balaban, Ana Borca, Monica Budacea, Yvonne Helmich, Bart van Rossum, Nicole van Rossum, Rucsandra Pop, Alina Floroi, Marius Stoianovici, John Bucur and Mihaela Miroiu. I would furthermore like to thank my former Romanian teacher Dana Niculescu for helping me with some translations, and I am especially grateful to my friend and colleague Matthew Signer, who put great effort into proofreading my final work and provided me with countless useful comments and corrections. Last but not least, I want to thank my family for their support throughout the years. - Matthias Ruijgrok, June 29, 2015 4 Introduction “Deșteaptă-te, române, din somnul cel de moarte, În care te-adânciră barbarii de tirani! Acum ori niciodată croiește-ți altă soartă, La care să se-nchine și cruzii tăi dușmani!” (Awaken, Romanian, from the sleep of death, Into which you have been sunk by the barbaric tyrants! Now or never, create a new fate for yourself, To which even your cruel enemies will bow!) 1 Quoted above is the first strophe of the current Romanian national anthem, ”Deșteaptă-te, Române!” (“Awaken, Romanian!”), a song with strikingly strong ties to the revolutionary events of December 1989, and the toppling of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Communist regime. These first four bars bear a particular importance. These were the very lines sung repeatedly during the revolutionary uprisings that started in the city of Timișoara on 16 and 17 December of that year, and which would spread all over the country in the following days.2 These events I will refer to as the “revolution”, despite ongoing debates whether it actually was a revolution,3 as this does not concern my research. ”Deșteaptă-te, Române!”, as a poem originally titled “Un Răsunet” (an echo), was written in 1848 by Andrei Mureșanu. The composer Anton Pann is generally credited for the music, though the melody used for the song had a great popular circulation at that time.4 During the revolution of 1848 in Romania, which aimed at independence and unification of the Romanian regions, it was first sung 1 The first strophe of ”Deșteaptă-te, Române!”, quoted from Vasile Oltean, Imnul Național „Deșteaptă-te Române!” – scurt istoric (Brașov, 2005). All translations from the Romanian are my own, except where mentioned otherwise. 2 Mihail Ionescu & Dennis Deletant, "Romania and the Warschaupact: 1955-1989" in Cold War International History Project (2004), p. 53-54; Peter Siani-Davies, The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 (Ithaca/London, 2005), p. 61. 3 See for example: Siani-Davies, The Romanian Revolution of December 1989. 4 Vasile Oltean, Imnul național "Deșteaptă-te române!" - scurt istoric (Brașov, 2005), 29-37; Valer Rus, Povestea Imnului National (online on the site of the Muzeul Casa Mureșenilor site) http://muzeulmuresenilor.ro/2013/09/03/povestea-imnului-national/ (retrieved: 4 June 2015). 5 publicly. The song bore already clearly revolutionary and patriotic connotations in its original incarnation. When the Communist regime came to power after the Second World War, it initially held a distinctive internationalist stand, and was thus uneasy with anything decidedly nationalist.5 ”Deșteaptă-te, Române!” certainly fell under these definitions, and as such, singing the song in public was forbidden under Communism in Romania. It is generally held that the song was sung for the first time in public again at a workers uprising in the industrial city of Brașov in November 1987. These events are nowadays heralded as a first sign of the regime’s decline, and sometimes named a first, premature spark of revolution as well. During these events it was that ”Deșteaptă-te, Române!” first re-emerged in public.6 As Ion Caramitru, an important opposition figure in the late Communist period, told me about this event: “When we first heard Deșteaptă-te Române was being played [sic] during the protests in Brașov, we were shocked.”7 Despite allusions to the forbidden status of ”Deșteaptă-te, Române!” in the Romanian Communist era, in academic writing on the events no definite answer is given about this. Standard works on the Romanian revolution and the Communist era in Romania often mention the song shortly and without many further references. In Peter Siani-Davies’ detailed work on the Romanian revolution, The Romanian Revolution of 1989, ”Deșteaptă-te, Române!” is mentioned shortly as “the old patriotic anthem”.8 In another important volume, Romania under Communist Rule, the historian Dennis Deletant mentions the song first when he describes the uprising in Brașov, to later re- introduce it when the events in 1989 are narrated. He notes that it was first sung in public during the Brașov uprising in 1987, but other than mentioning that it is a “Romanian national song” and the “anthem of the revolution of
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