6
" Carol I must not be confused with his nephew’s son, Carol II. Whereas the latter was undisciplined and sensual, the former was an anal-retentive Prussian of the family of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who, in the course of a forty-eight-year rule (1866–1914), essentially built modern Romania, complete with nascent institutions, from an assemblage of regions and two weak principalities. Following 1989, he had become the default symbol of legitimacy for the Romanian state. Whereas Carol I signified realism and stability, the liberal National Peasant Party leader Iuliu Maniu, a Greek Catholic by upbringing, stood for universal values. As a mid-twentieth-century local politician in extraordinarily horrifying circumstances, Maniu had agitated against the assault on the Jews and in favor of getting Antonescu to switch sides against the Nazis; soon after, during the earliest days of the Cold War, he agitated against the Soviets and their local puppets. Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop once demanded Maniu’s execution. As it turned out, the Communist Gheorghiu-Dej regime later convicted Maniu in a show trial in 1947. Defying his accusers, he spoke up in court for free elections, political liberties, and fundamental human rights.16 He died in prison in 1953 and his body was dumped in a common grave. Maniu’s emaciated treelike statue with quotations from the Psalms is, by itself, supremely moving. But there is a complete lack of harmony between it and the massive, adjacent spear pointing to the sky, honoring the victims of the 1989 revolution. The memorial slabs beside the spear are already chipped and cracked. Piaţa Revoluţiei in 1981 was dark, empty, and fear-inducing. Now it was cluttered with memorials, oppressed by traffic, and in general looked like an amateurish work in progress. But though it lacked any "
― Robert D. Kaplan , In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond
7
" There were just so many cafés now—bearing conceited names such as Charme, Rembrandt, La Muse—with their chairs and tables made of wicker, zinc, velvet, blond wood, and black metal, each establishment desperately trying to evoke Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, or New York. Even the ashtrays bore edgy designer patterns evocative of Art Deco and the Belle Époque. And yet it has to be said that these new cafés of Bucharest lack the enfolding and layered elegance—and especially the intimacy—of cafés in Central Europe. I was still south of the Carpathians, in the former Byzantine and Turkish world. There was simply "
― Robert D. Kaplan , In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond
8
" As Berlin writes, in his reproach to the historians Edward Gibbon and Arnold Toynbee, “nations” and “civilizations,” while they exist, are not as “concrete” as the individuals who embody them.6 Individuals not only count morally to a greater extent than groups, but the very existence of the former is not inherently problematic like that of the latter. Groups, civilizations, and other mass human assemblages are either artificially constructed to some degree or other (by nationalist ideologues, for example), or in any case are not so clear-cut as they seem, owing to the subtle and not-so-subtle influences upon them of other groups and civilizations over considerable stretches of time. And yet "
― Robert D. Kaplan , In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond
9
" ALL POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES ARE uprooted ones because Communism uprooted traditions, so nothing fits with anything else,” explained the philosopher Patapievici. Fifteen years earlier, when I had last met him, he had cautioned: “The task for Romania is to acquire a public style based on impersonal rules, otherwise business and politics will be full of intrigue, and I am afraid that our Eastern Orthodox tradition is not helpful in this regard. Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Russia, Greece—all the Orthodox nations of Europe—are characterized by weak institutions. That is because Orthodoxy is flexible and contemplative, based more on the oral traditions of peasants than on texts. So there is this pattern of rumor, lack of information, and conspiracy….”11 Thus, in 1998, did Patapievici define Romanian politics as they were still being practiced a decade and a half later. Though in 2013, he added: “No one speaks of guilt over the past. The Church has made no progress despite the enormous chance of being separated from the state for almost a quarter century. The identification of religious faith with an ethnic-national group, I find, is a moral heresy.” Dressed now in generic business casual and wearing fashionable glasses, Patapievici appeared as a figure wholly of the West—more accurately of the global elite—someone you might meet at a fancy "
― Robert D. Kaplan , In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond
11
" World War I memorial at Mărăşeşti in Moldavia. Here in a month-long battle from August to September 1917, the Romanian army fought the German army and some Austrian units to a standstill. The result of this stalemate was 27,000 Romanian dead, and 47,000 German and Austrian fatalities. The memorial itself holds the graves of 5,073 Romanians. The dreary gray walls of the well-socketed and cavernous mausoleum evince a slamming-shut-on-the-tomb finality, which seems to declare the futility of war in the grip of remembrance. Mărăşeşti is a place of august horror, just one particular example of why Romanians require, as they say and wish for, an escape from history. "
― Robert D. Kaplan , In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond
17
" Take the architectural legacy of Bucharest: Byzantine, Brâncoveanu, Ottoman, Renaissance, Venetian Classical, French Baroque, Austrian Secession, Art Deco, and Modernist, all writhing and struggling to break free of a dirty gray sea of pillbox Stalinism, like Michelangelo’s Unfinished Slaves struggling to break free of their marble blocks. "
― Robert D. Kaplan , In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond
