Monsters and the Monstrous - Conference Programme Session 1

2nd Global Conference

Monsters and the Monstrous:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Monday 10th May - Wednesday 12th May 2004
Budapest, Hungary

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 1: Monsters Communist and Nazi
Chair: Terrie Waddell

Monstrification of the Monster: How Ceausescu Became the ‘Red Vampire’
Peter Mario Kreuter
University of Bonn, Germany

Without any doubt the Ceausescu regime has been one of the most cruel and most paranoid of all communist regimes after World War II. In Europe it's only comparable to Albania under Enver Hoxha. Especially the time after 1980, when the “Titan of the Titans” decided to pay back the debts of the Romanian state only within a few years, became a very dark one in European history. The three “F” reigned in Romania : foama (hunger), frica (fear) and frig (cold). The cruelty of his reign, that lasted nearly 25 years, has been visible in a drastic way when we look at his end in the only bloody revolution in communist Europe in December 1989.
Therefore it was more than amazing to me to see particularly the Western media reporting about him and his family creating many stories which made a (reel-like) hypermonster out of the (real) monster. Instead of telling the truth about his mediocre character, his youth in communist organizations or his political advancement under the protection of the later party leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, newspapers and political commentaries have been filled with stories about presumed bank robberies in the late 40's, blood infusions with the blood of newborn babies and political rivals in the party killed by him personally.
So what? What was the reason to do this? While the reports on Enver Hoxha have been quite objective containing only few moments of speculation, the whole information about Nicolae Ceausescu has been speculative, ridiculous exaggerating and full of histories by hearsay that have never ever been critically checked and passed on until today. It is the aim of my paper to present the major “monstrifications” to the audience and to discuss them in the wider range of both a psychological and a historical level.

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Nazi Demons and Sicilian Monsters: The “Monsters of Villarbasse”, Piedmontese Anxieties, and the Wounds of World War II
Eleanor Chiari
University College, London, United Kingdom

My paper, based on research at the interface between Italian Cultural Studies, Oral History, and Material Culture, would examine the story of the “monsters of Villarbasse” whose crime took place in 1946 and resulted in the last execution by capital punishment in Italian history (1948).
The story is simple: a group of brigands went to a farm in the middle of the night to commit a robbery. The farmers and their family woke up and the brigands knocked them unconscious with large wooden bars. The victims, including children and old people, were then thrown down a well where they died a slow death by drowning and freezing. The brigands were Sicilian and the evidence they left on the crime scene was a coppola, a stereotypical Sicilian hat.
Newspapers, as well as sensationalist novels following and contributing to the public outcry over the crime, presented the killers as monsters and the crime as the most horrid crime in Italian history. It is true that the age, large number of victims, and manner of death, were quite dramatic; yet there seem to have been other reasons for declaring this crime particularly “monstrous”. The Sicilian (and thus foreign) origins of the killers were an enormous factor.
The region where the crime took place, Piedmont, suffered heavily from Nazi occupation during WWII. The people of entire villages were executed in manners sometimes much crueller than the murders of Villarbasse. The public reaction to the Villarbasse crime, so soon after the war, raises questions about how the spotting and public execution of “monsters” serves the need for restoring a community in crisis. Killing monsters supposedly returns a “community” to an earlier unthreatened imagined coherence, usually just as new and threatening changes loom upon it.

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