| Summary: | This paper examines the memory of the Romanian-German victims of
the Soviet Gulag as recorded in recent collections of testimonies and interviews, a
museum exhibition, an audio-visual documentary project, and Herta Müller’s
2009 novel Atemschaukel. It employs Alexander Etkind’s notions of “soft
memory” and “hard memory” to discuss some of the key historical and political
events that have impeded the establishing of consensual remembrance policies of
the Soviet Gulag in communist Romania. I show how both German and
Romanian communities since 1990 have memorialized the Gulag and discuss
Atemschaukel as a legitimate impulse to document both personal and collective
trauma of the second and subsequent generations. I argue that in the absence of a
crystallized, hard memory, the historical documents and the historical fiction
analyzed serve as viable examples of soft memory that succeed in memorializing
the forced labor camps experience in its collective and individual forms.
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