European perspectives

Brits are famed for their “pragmatism” - which basically means their inability to take the world (or ideas) very seriously. Our easy-going flexibility does, however, mean that we are out of our comfort zone when we face unreasonable people and/or cataclysmic events such as the current financial crisis and the political pygmies who pass for world leaders. Two articles in one of this year’s issues of New Left Review have brought home to me our insularity – first is a wonderful interview – Words from Budapest - with a Transylvanian Romanian - GM Tamas – born in 1948 After a stint as an assistant editor of a literary weekly in his native Transylvania, he got into political difficulties with the authorities of the time and emigrated to Hungary in the late 1970s where he taught at the University of Budapest. Sacked for political reasons again, he became known as a dissident intellectual and published only in the underground or abroad. In the late 1980s he supported and was a founding member of the Liberal Party in Hungary, and was elected to parliament as a liberal member of the Hungarian Parliament in 1989.
He quit professional politics in 1994; became an acadenic again; was sacked (?)... and is now...... a revolutionary socialist (!!). What a life! Someone I would very much like to meet......
The interview covers these very different phases of his incredible life - and his honesty in admitting his blindness to what was going on around him after the collapse of communism-

I was born in 1948, in what Hungarians call Kolozsvár and Romanians, Cluj. The principal city of Transylvania, it had been transferred from Hungary to Romania in 1920 by the Treaty of Trianon, awarded back to Horthy’s Hungary by Hitler in 1940, and was under direct Nazi occupation from early 1944 until the arrival of Soviet forces, when it was incorporated into Romania again. Both my parents were Communists. They had come back from the War broken and bitter. My father, a Hungarian writer, was dispatched from prison to the front, where he was seriously wounded—he walked on crutches, later with a sturdy walking-stick, which I still have—by those whom he considered his comrades: the Red Army. My mother, ironically, escaped being deported to Auschwitz because she was in jail as a seditious Bolshevik. But her mother and her favourite elder brother were killed. My father’s family belonged to the petty nobility, or rather yeomanry, in the mountainous Szekler region of East Transylvania; his father was a tailor in a small town. The movement—they never spoke of the Party—meant mostly suffering and persecution: arrest, prison, beatings.
Later, when my father was thoroughly disenchanted with the system, I asked him why he still called himself a Communist. He showed me a little plastic—well, I suppose, bakelite—cube, with six little photos glued on its sides: the portraits of some of the best friends of his youth, tortured to death by the royal Hungarian and Romanian secret services, or by the Gestapo in that awful year, 1944. ‘Because I cannot explain it to them’, he said. It was the perfect Christian idea: bearing witness, martyrdom as the theological guarantee of truth. They were justified by heroic death, and so was the cause. He could not escape it. Keeping faith in the teeth of adverse political experience, the rotting away of the movement, was the only course. Anything else would have been treason. Duplex veritas also: he never denied that ‘state socialism’ was a failure. His identity and his principles were at loggerheads. Some of his comrades, back from the concentration camps, had been rearrested by the Communist authorities, ‘disappeared’ without a sound. This destroyed him as an intellectual.
In the absence of revolution, he suddenly found himself with time on his hands, so he had the leisure to be a wonderful parent. He showed me historical Transylvania, limping on mountain paths, propped on his stick before some redoubt or castle, or another ruined medieval church. There aren’t many intellectuals today who have working-class friends, but we did. Some of our family were peasants, in the poorest regions of Europe. I was taught, without great success, to do things in the fields and the garden. 

Then two harrowing experiences of communist harassment and dissidence; one highly-charged political phase as a liberal member of parliament and then, in past 20 years.... 

......... I decided to throw out my whole so-called oeuvre, break with my entire life so far, and go to school again. This has of course liberated my passionate repudiation of the state of affairs we wrought, my sympathy and compassion for people impoverished and made illiterate again by the market turn. I was obliged to recognize that our naive liberalism had delivered a nascent democracy into the hands of irresponsible and hate-filled right-wing politicos, and contributed to the re-establishment of a provincial, deferential and resentful social world, harking back to before 1945. The break was naturally quite painful, as it excluded me from the circle of people I was associated with for decades—the dissidents—so that my friends at the moment are mostly generations younger than I am; wonderful people, but without the shared memories so necessary for true friendships. At the same time, young Romanian leftists made it possible for me to have a consoling shadow existence in Transylvania, and to get rid finally of the feeling that poisoned my youth—the sense that ethnic conflict was irremediable. After a thirty-year absence, for the first time in my life when I give talks and sometimes write for journals in Romanian, I am made to feel welcome in my own land: a source of great delight and maybe undeserved justification.

The second article (in the same issue of NLR) is a tour de force from one of Francois Mitterand’s eminence gris - Regis Debray – entitled Decline of the West? - of which this is a typical excerpt -

The West guarantees and shapes the formation of international elites through its universities, business schools, financial institutions, officer-training colleges, commercial organizations, philanthropic foundations and major corporations. No empire has ever ruled by force alone. It needs relays among native ruling circles, and this centrifugal incubator produces a global class of managers who incorporate its language, its references and revulsions, its organizational models (rule of law and ‘good governance’) and economic norms (Washington Consensus). It is this moulding of managerial cadres from an already globalized middle class that transforms domination into hegemony, dependence into acceptance. Beyond the internships for young leaders—3,000 per year, organized by American embassies—this digital brain drain engenders a shared collective unconscious. China’s ‘red princes’ send their boys to be educated in the US, whence they return well-equipped for the pursuit of wealth. In Europe, the young find it not just natural but indispensable to obtain a qualification from one of these ‘centres of excellence’.
There is no far-flung land, minority or sect that does not have its suction pump of more or less well-implanted representatives in the US, with their connections in Congress and in the Administration, whose best-placed elements can, if they wish, return to their country of origin, making it their second home. They are the Afghano-ricans, Albano-ricans, Mexico-ricans, Afro-ricans (the Jean Monnet-style Gallo-rican was merely a prototype). This planetary HR department can pull a Karzai out of its pocket in an instant. A Palestinian from the World Bank, an Italian from Goldman Sachs, a re-cast Libyan or Georgian: the ease with which America is able to install a captain at every helm is the reward for its generous embrace of foreigners, an opening of national identity that the British Empire never risked, but which has earned its successor hundreds of thousands of adoptive children, of every nationality—and the possibility of filling its ambassadorships with people originating from their countries of residence.
China, India, Egypt, even little states like Israel or Armenia, benefit from loyal diasporas as channels of influence. The function of the 30 million Chinese expatriates in Southeast Asia is well known. America, which is no more a land of emigration than are the Nordic countries, does better: it has 42 million immigrants at home, the diasporas from every continent—Hispanics, Asians, Africans. Only the Western states—and the US first and foremost—have so many gangways to distant countries. We might periodize as follows: from 1850–1950, the West sweats the natives, inoculates, opens schools. From 1950–2000, the natives who have survived and learned the language come as immigrants to the West. From 2000–2050, the West educates the most talented and sends them back to top jobs in their country of origin, to propagate the West’s ideas and defend its interests. Win–win?

 Whatever we think of French intellectuals, they can always be relied upon to stick it to the Americans! Please read the whole article – it is a real thought-provoker

I’ve always had a soft spot for the New Left Review which first appeared as I was starting University in 1960 and trying to make sense of the world. On its 50^th anniversary, it received the following glowing tribute from an observer -

When so much of even the so-called "serious" media is given over to celebrity-fuelled ephemera and the recycling of press releases and in-house gossip; and when the academic world is struggling to mitigate the worst effects of careerist modishness; and when national and international politics seem to consist of bowing to the imperatives of "the market" while avoiding public relations gaffes; then we need more than ever a "forum" like NLR. It is up to date without being merely journalistic; it is scholarly but unscarred by citation-compulsion; and it is analytical about the long-term forces at work in politics rather than obsessed by the spume of the latest wavelet of manoeuvring and posturing. Despite its self-description in its guidelines for contributors, the journal is not in any obvious sense "lively". It is downright difficult (but none the worse for that), because what it tries to analyse is complex and its preferred intellectual tools are often conceptually sophisticated. It is difficult where being easy would be no virtue, difficult where aiming to be "accessible" would mean patronising its readers, difficult where ideas need to be chewed rather than simply swallowed. That's what I admire above all about NLR: its intellectual seriousness – its magnificently strenuous attempt to understand, to analyse, to theorise.

I am grateful to Wikipedia for its entry which runs as follows -
New Left Review was launched in January 1960 when the editors of The New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review merged their boards. The founders of the new journal hoped that it would provide the motive force for a new round of political organisation in Britain, inspiring the creation of "New Left Clubs" and helping to reinvent socialism as a viable force in British politics.

From 1962, with Perry Anderson as editor, it has had a book-like format with long articles, footnotes, and more than 100 pages per issue.

The NLR — as it came to be known — drew on debates within Western Marxism. It published work by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, El Lissitsky, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser, and interviewed Jean-Paul Sartre, Georg Lukács, and Lucio Colletti.

A distinctive feature of the journal was a series of 'country studies' with Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn supplying an account of the peculiar formation of capitalism and the state in Britain. The journal has also specialized in sweeping global surveys. In 1966 the journal published Juliet Mitchell's essay 'Women, the Longest Revolution', a founding text of second wave feminism. Nearly every issue from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s carried an account by a worker of their experience at work.

Texts of the aesthetic avant-garde were published and a series of articles on film by Peter Wollen. The journal covered third world anti-imperial movements. It reflected the concerns of the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s and documented the crises of the Communist regimes in Russia and eastern Europe. Isaac Deutscher, Raymond Williams, Raphael Samuel, and Ralph Miliband published in the journal and their work gave rise to important exchanges.

In the 1970s and 1980s a debate between Ernest Mandel, Alec Nove and Diane Elson focussed on the respective weight of plan, market and worker or community control in socialist economics.

In the 1990s and after the journal published major studies of the growing evidence of global capitalist disorder by Robert Brenner, Giovanni Arrighi, David Harvey, Peter Gowan and Andrew Glyn. Benedict Anderson, Mike Davis, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Ellen Wood, Tariq Ali and Nancy Fraser published some of their most important texts in the review. Notable studies included Robert Brenner on the origins of capitalism, Erik Olin Wright on class, Göran Therborn on the advent of democracy

The implications of the Soviet collapse were extensively covered. Post-modernism, post-Marxism, the fate of feminism and the real configurations of the "New World Order" were plotted and assessed. In every decade since the mid-1970s the journal has wrestled with the historical meaning of nationalism with essays by Tom Nairn, Eric Hobsbawm, Miroslav Hroch, Benedict Anderson, Stuart Hall, Ernest Gellner,Ronald Suny, Régis Debray, Michael Lowy, and Gopal Balakrishnan.

In its new form, NLR has led with controversial editorials on the direction of world politics and major articles on the United States, Japan, Turkey, Europe, Britain, Cuba, Iraq, Mexico, India and Palestine. It has published work by Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, David Graeber and Michael Hardt and featured analysis of global imbalances, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the credit crunch, the Egyptian Revolution and Arab Spring, prospects for nuclear disarmament, the scope of anti-corporate activism, the prospect of a "planet of slums," and discussions of world literature and cinema, cultural criticism and the continuing exploits of the avant-garde.

Since 2008, the Review has followed the economic crisis as well as its global political repercussions, with in-depth country studies of Iceland, Ireland, Spain and Greece, an ongoing debate on US-China economic imbalances (and their political consequences), as well as on the crisis's toll on California and the US health-care debate. An essay by Wolfgang Streeck in NLR 71 was called "most powerful description of what has gone wrong in western societies" by the Financial Times's columnist Christopher Caldwell. 

The biggest bank heist in history

Slogger has a very worrying post today about the money we thought was safe in our savings accounts. Under this draft proposal – which many expect to be applied to the entire EU – no depositor big or small will in future be able to feel safe with money deposited in a bank.

The German site (German Economic News) reports that all bets are off as far as the ‘guarantee of all funds under €100,000′ pledge is concerned.

• the proposal as drafted – and almost entirely ignored by the Western media – states that small account holders will have to wait up to four weeks to get their money….’depending on how serious the insolvency is’. During that time, there will be a maximum withdrawal of €100-200 per day – again, perhaps less depending on the seriousness of the failure. (Based on the Cyprus experience, the haircut in the end will be at least 60%).

• The EU Parliament – allegedly – is demanding that deposits of €100,000+ euros should be confiscated within five days. (So much for MEPs offering us some kind of protection from the Sprouts).

• In the event of a banking collapse, all previous government commitments are null and void.  The force majeur of “exceptional circumstances” can lead to ways round such pledges. Part of the new plan suggests savers could also be subject to a ‘penalty tax’ if they have less than € 100,000 in the bank. 

The scheme is based on the following insane principles:
1. Putting money in a bank makes every citizen a creditor of that bank, equally prone to confiscation in order to repay….who exactly? The answer is, other banks it owed money. So it’s not really our money after all, it’s the banking sector’s money. After it’s been taxed by the Government, despite the fact that we earned it…it’s really all bankers’ money after all. Unbelievable.
2. If we are prudent enough to keep money in smaller amounts in lots of accounts, we will have to pay a ‘penalty tax’ – well of course we will: I mean, given it’s never our money really – we’re just borrowing it, or something – then quite right too. And because it isn’t really our money, we shall be given strictly limited spending money per day. The brass neck is beyond belief.
3. If you have been seditious enough in your life to actually make quite a lot of money legally, then within five days the money that was never really yours will be taken back by its rightful owners…the bankers….or the Government rescuing the bankers but without doing it in our taxes. Why five days – why not five seconds? I mean, it’s their money: we were just earning it for safe keeping, right? Of course we were.
4. Anything is an exceptional circumstance if they say it is. Even the Nazis in 1933 had to burn down the bloody Reichstag to declare a State of Emergency. In 2013, it requires just one dumb, over-leveraged, f**kwitted bank to collapse under the weight of its CEO’s ego, and we’re all pauperised by Law.
I think the time has finally come when we must give our legislators and ‘leaders’ here in the UK a gigantic kick up the backside.

Romanian literature

I feel quite ashamed that I have had this lovely mountain house in the Carpathians for some 13 years to which I increasingly return and sejour - and yet do not really speak Romanian nor am properly acquainted with Romanian culture. My excuse is that my thoughts and books (from a steadily increasing library here) are in English – with occasional forays into French (the 2010 trip doubled the number of French books) and German (ditto the last 3 month’s trip). The world literature tour which The Guardian bravely attempted in 2011 gave a sense of what these two countries offer – France here and Germany here – let alone China or Poland.

With such treasures beckoning, how can I justify diverting my energies into a forbidding new field? But the past year has given me a new perspective on Romanian classical paintings, for example, which – Andreeescu, Grigorescu and Popescu apart – had until now seemed somewhat sombre. But the file I now have on Romanian realist painting of the first part of the 20th Century is now beginning to rival that of the Bulgarian painters who decorate my various homes. And the new book Romanian Writers on Writing gives me vignettes of almost 100 Romanian writers whom clearly I cannot ignore.

And, although The Guardian has not yet managed a tour of Romanian literature, it did receive these interesting suggestions. Those wishing to get a taste of what’s available can consult the New York's Romanian Cultural Institute or have a look at this list of classic writing 

I am always impressed with the number of new Romanian titles on the groaning shelves of the Humanitas and Carteresti bookshops but all does not seem well with the market according to this writer -

You do not need a PhD to grasp the implications of the simple fact that, in 2011, there were far fewer books sold in Romania (total sales of €60m) than there were in neighbouring Hungary (total sales of €180m), which has a smaller population.
You do not need to be a communist to see that illiteracy — a problem that was largely eradicated in the 1950s — is on the increase in our country, where it now affects 6 per cent of the population, and 40 per cent of teens in the under-15 age group who lack basic reading and writing skills.
You do not have to be affiliated to a political party to notice that in their neglect and denigration of Romanian national culture, Romanian governments of all political hues have been gloriously assisted by the large post-communist publishing houses, whose eagerness to earn money from translations is, in most cases, matched by their disdain for living Romanian culture. And those who are unconvinced of this fact need look no further than the percentage of editorial production in this country which is actually devoted to Romanian books.

In Praise of older women

“Old men should be explorers”, runs a TS Eliot line – and Stanley Spencer has a painting “in praise of older men”. It is time, however, we celebrated older women. Koln’s bookshops were displaying some of their books – a biography of German diarist Luise Rinser; conversations with Loki Schmidt who, apart from her pioneering environmental work, was Gerhard Schmidt’s partner for 68 years; an autobiography by Inge Jens  partner of Germany’s recently-deceased man of letters Walter Jens. An article in Die Zeit brought 90 year-old Anglo-German author of 30 (mainly childrens’) books Judith Kerr to my attention.

Diane Athill is 96 and still going strong – with several volumes of powerful memoirs written over several decades which I’ve totally missed. This says a lot not only about me – but about UK literary circles. I’ve just started her Somewhere Toward the End which is one of the clearest and most honest reflections about living I’ve ever come across. The review article puts it nicely -

Her writing has wit, bite and honesty. Such qualities are rare enough in any memoir and so are especially worthwhile in one that deals with the lives of the elderly – people we often either patronise or ignore.

The opening chapters deal very poignantly with her recollections of love - and her discovery of a neglected female Expressionist painter. Ian Jack - editor of Granta - writes very eloquently of his experiences of editing her work -

As the editor of Granta I also became the editor of her three last books. Very little needs to be said about that. The typescript arrived, a few suggestions for changes were made, she absorbed them with her quick editorial brain, and a slightly amended typescript was soon in the post. Editing her was pure pleasure because I loved reading her; it was like having someone speak into your ear, someone humane and self-amused and wise that you wanted to hear. "Good writing" is difficult to define, and definitions differ according to taste, but you know it when you see it, which is rarer than publishing companies would have you suppose. I remember my excitement when I read the first few pages of the typescript that became Somewhere Towards the End (Athill's choice of title and a good one, as her titles always are). The book arose out of a brief conversation and the exchange of a postcard or two: it seemed to me that while the memoir genre abounded in accounts of youth – the "coming-of-age narrative" is a literary cliché of our times – very few books have let us know about life at the other end of the road. In fact, other than self-help guides (take a cod-liver oil capsule every day) and apart from the late novels of Kingsley Amis and Philip Roth, I could think of none. There are, of course, books about the process of dying by victims of cruel and slow terminal disease, but writers have been shy of the subject of just being old, as if shame and indignity had replaced wisdom and experience as the best-known qualities of great age. Our conversation hardly amounted to an editorial briefing and I had no word of progress for a couple of years. Then a few early pages arrived and with them the first vivid sense of what it is like to become old, like reports from another country that we shall all, if spared earlier elimination, shortly be moving to.
In different hands, the book could have been filled with a sentimental longing for the past, brittle cheer towards the present, or the religious consolation of the future. None of those things could ever have appealed to Athill. Instead, Somewhere Towards the End is a beautifully turned series of episodes, none of them sermonic, in which the author reveals how she has come to terms (or not) with what she calls "falling away" and the unavoidable fact of death. It was, wrote the late Simon Gray – no stranger himself to intimations of mortality – both "exhilarating and comforting" in its good sense, candour and lively spirit. Every passage is rooted in specifics. On the second page, she describes her new tree fern (£18 from the Thompson & Morgan plant catalogue) and her doubts that she will live long enough to see it reach mature height: a small thought, but it immediately takes us inside the mind of someone going on for 90. She has "got it right", and continues to get it right throughout the book, in the sense that we utterly believe that this is how life is and was for her. 

Jack's concluding section is an important comment on current writing -

 we should have more of them....more people who write only when they feel they have something to tell us; more writers driven by the scrupulous need to make us see clearly and exactly what they have witnessed and felt.

An ode to independent Bookshops

A couple of weeks ago I did something I haven’t been able to in 30 years – I ordered a batch of books from a bookshop! Sounds so simple – but my nomadic existence since 1990 has made it so difficult to be in the appropriate place when the books actually arrived. And there were so few bookshops in the countries I was working in which offered such a service. But the Anthony Frost English bookshop is something else– not for nothing called “arguably the best English-language bookshop in Eastern Europe” in this year’s Lonely Planet book on Bulgaria and Romania and voted this year Romania’s best bookshop by the Publishers’ Association of Romania.

The titles on display are, for a man of my taste, mouth-watering and seem to get better on each visit. But that did not prevent me from handing Vlad, the highly knowledgeable and friendly manager, a list of eight books – six of which duly arrived in the flash of an eye within a week! Needless to say, other books also caught my eye – eg Romanian Writers on Writing which has an interesting short video clip here – or were recommended by Vlad, eg the stunning Forbidden Photos and Personal Images which has the following blurb on the great website

It was, indeed, necessary that 18 years pass for people to want to remember what communism meant. When they were ready, it was Andrei Pandele that gave them back their lost and forgotten memories, the one witness who breaks the silence and brings out prints of individual and public history. Maybe the young, tall, slender young man, with green eyes, that paid attention to everything, got an even bigger reward for his courage then he expected. People did want to know. At 63, he is still young and full of energy, currently working on a project on the House of the People.
He now lives in the house where during communism he snuck the films that were to become his testimony, his parents’ house, which he used to leave with a briefcase where he hid the prints that could have gotten him five years of imprisonment each, had he been discovered. The kind of pictures that were not part of family albums.
Pandele’s testimony is a silent, but vibrant one, and this is what he does best, takes pictures of real life, stills time with his camera, and keeps it aside for generations to come. People have a short memory when it comes to hard times and misfortunes. Photographs help them remember and new generations understand their present through their past.

There was also another powerful book with black and white photographs of the Odbor flea market which I found just a bit too lifelike to have in my library

I am therefore thoroughly sustained in my new boycott of the Amazon behemoth. Indeed I feel cleansed! The prices of my purchases in the Anthony Frost bookshop were no higher than the bills I had been getting for the packages delivered to the house. But the human experience was priceless. I googled “in praise of independent bookshops” and am delighted to share these glowing tributes from thepenguinblog; feminspire; booksellers; and - perhaps best of all - independent booksellers

Anthony Frost are also part of the Bookcrossing network with three baskets of free books also available for the taking (providing you leave an equivalent number!) - so another book was duly added ("The Spin Doctor's Diary") about which hopefully I will have something to say soon..... 

Forty Days and Nights in Sofia

One of my Bulgarian friends who has been involved in the protests in Sofia (40 days so far) sent me this morning Ivan Krastev’s brief (and disappointingly uninformative) article on the current situation  - one the few, however, which the British media have deemed worthy to print. Transitions Online has just published this brief note from Boyko Vassilev who is producer of the Panorama programme of Bulgarian Television and writes occasional pieces on Bulgaria such as this one about the self-immolations which were a feature of the earlier phase of the Bulgarian protests (in April)

Hardly surprising that the EC technocrats have been sending broadly supportive messages to the protestors – nor that old leftists have an ambivalent attitude to protests which have the overtones of the wider “Occupy” movement but without the critique of capitalism the leftists expect.

One Bulgarian Professor (in Germany) (who is a self-confessed member of the Mont Pelerin society) offers this perspective on the events in Sofia

The various conflicting attitudes to the protests are evident in the discussion thread to the earlier article by Mariya Ivancheva whose family was apparently part of the old Communist guard.

I'm sorry not to be present at the protests some images of which are here - and wish them well.

Campulung - one of many of Romania's small jewels

We drove yesterday over the spectacular passes from Fundata to Campulung and through the various fascinating settlements which line the road.

Campulung is a town of 40,000 people nestling in the Carpathian foothills and has a long and turbulent history, having been occupied (and frequently set alight) by Turks (in 1738 or so), Austrians, Germans (in The First World War) and even Russians (1828-32). The quieter times after Independence gave the town a chance to exploit its location, culture and climate and superb examples of classic Romanian houses are to be seen there – giving a sense of how the nouveaux riches besported themselves in its baths and streets in the years before the First World and in the 25 years before communism took hold.  

 Campulung was first documented in 1212, in a document by the Hungarian king to the Teutonic Knights. A Saxon community was living there, whose leader was Lawrence of Longocampo. 

Basarab I the Founder (1310-1352) established the capital in Campulung - the first of the Romanian Country. It was also deemed by some to be the cradle of the Romanian language - a letter written in 1521 by one of the stewards of the town to Hans Benkner of Brasov is apparently the first document written in Romanian and the country’s first printing presses started in 1635 here - after the mid-seventeenth century ruler Matei Basarab founded in Campulung the first paper mill in the country. 

One of the oldest schools in the Romanian Country was established in 1552 by Mrs. Chiajna, wife of Prince Mircea Ciobanu. The Roman conquerors have left traces in the area, the camp of Jidava (Jidova) located at the exit of Campulung towards Pitesti is a testimony to this.Heavy fighting took place in the cliffs around Rucăr-Bran in the autumn of 1916. 

You get a sense of the present-day town in this video. Sadly, it being Monday, the town's small private art gallery was closed - it not only has interesting exhibitions but stocks an excellent supply of booklets on the town's history.

Another great post from Tourist in my Country - this time about one of he many derelict palaces one can find tragically scattered around the countryside

Two years ago today, I was blogging about Bulgarian Realist painting

post-industrial dereliction

Detroit (briefly) hit the news recently as the first US city to declare bankruptcy. The statistics are horrific – In half a century, this blogpost tells us Detroit has gone from having the highest per capita income in the US to the lowest.

in 1950 the city had more than 1.8 million inhabitants; this year the population will probably slip below 700,000. Just since 2000, the city has lost 26% of its people. In 1950, Detroit was 82% white – it's now 82% black. 76,000 homes and buildings in once-prosperous neighbourhoods have been abandoned, with many houses on offer for 1,000 dollars
250,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost in Detroit in the past 50 years. 47% of the residents of the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate. Less than half of the residents of Detroit over the age of 16 are working at this point. 60 per cent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty. The violent crime rate in Detroit is five times higher than the national average.

And these images of the decay and dereliction are nothing short of apocalyptic 

For many of us, this is a sign of things to come – a vision of the future. Civilisations come and go – and it is fairly obvious now (apart from the millions of climate deniers) that the Western model has passed its “sell by” date. If it’s not ecological limits, it will be increasing social unrest (from wealth disparities, food prices, immigration).

For another, powerful school of thought, however, this is not just overblown but misses the point about capitalist creativity or, as Schumpeter put it, creative destruction – technology will come to the rescue; more supply will be brought forward to reduce prices. Crises create opportunities.

Two articles exemplify this way of thinking – one in The Guardian and the other, less surprisingly, in the Harvard Business Review.
However my friend The Slogger typically seesit all very differently