Draft Four: Stories of reconciliation

I’m writing again from Reșița, where trams traverse this city-as-a-street with “fire and oxygen” painted on them. The slogan blends 250+ years of iron-melting and steel-making, with the promise of wooded mountains and cool lakes surrounding today’s ruins.

Reșița is what’s called a “post-industrial city”. It grew around blast furnaces built in 1771 by the Habsburgs. Its recipes for turning timber, limestone and ore into molten iron and steel were legendary; it wasn’t called The Fortress of Fire (or the City of Steel) for nothing. It birthed gears, bridges, and railway tracks we still travel on.

Architects and heritage stewards say what makes Reșița unique is that industry and town grew symbiotically. In 250 years, the blast furnaces were multiplied, torn down, rebuilt, abandoned. Little Reșița grew into a city, and tens of thousands of people passed through its factories. They came from all over: Germans, Czechs, Croats, Austrians etc. Neighborhoods appeared. Schools, churches, and synagogues were erected. Families connected around pride measured in successful factory-shifts and tamed fire. At its peak, more than 30,000 people worked in the plant and its auxiliaries.

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Over the past few months, a few colleagues and I tried to understand the mythology of furnace work, as part of a larger project run by Make Better (MKBT), a think tank working here for almost a decade. Think of MKBT as lobbyists for the city’s industrial landscape, stewards of rust, visionaries who see collapsed structures as sources of collective meaning. (This digital museum showcases their work).

We interviewed more than a dozen former blast furnace workers. We read history, monographs, even fiction. We learned that for those who worked here, the furnace isn’t just an industrial structure. It’s childhood. It’s pain. It’s camaraderie. It’s where your courage was tested, where you learned the meaning of hard work and solidarity. Many still dream of fiery sparks floating in the air as the molten iron ran at over 1,400 degrees.

They also remember the accidents, the pollution which darkened skin and clothes and made the river oily. It was an identity, a lifestyle, and people felt they mattered.

The collective fabric started to tear in the late 1960s and 1970s – the communist regime inflated production, greedily pushing the factory further into the city, ripping away streets, houses, schools, cinemas, opening up a social wound.

Then came the post-communist 1990s. The furnace fire died out. Of the last two, built in early 1960s, one was melted – fed as scrap metal to the factory housing it. The wound got worse. Transition. Privatizations. Theft. People laid off. People fleeing Romania for work. Workshops shut down, left to rot. A heap of scrap metal, a prime minister said.

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Without historical context, sure – it’s an ugly industrial ruin. A local teen put it well: why should I care? In the past 30 years people built lives outside the factory walls. Barely a 1,000 still work at Artrom Steel, the private company that now operates on the furnace hearth.

Just the one furnace remains. A protected monument, because local do-gooders fought for this. Ada Cruceanu, a guardian of local history, writes: “[It is] a battered, lonely furnace, with no one and nothing heading its way, but that still holds out. It tells its story, to anyone willing to listen.”

This is what MKBT, architects, and civic leaders are doing: reminding local authorities and Reșița at large that this place is not a ruin – it’s a witness. It’s memory.

The mayor was swayed. The mayor swayed the current owner of the factory. So the furnace site is now in process of being turned over to the community. Eventually, if stars and money align, it could be converted into a museum, an experience.

An urban designer put it best at a recent meeting of local stakeholders: this is about memory. Integrating the past into the present to build a better future. For the furnace this means a couple of things. First, facilitating an affective relationship with the object, turning into the symbol former workers say it should be.

Second, and arguably, more important: reconciliation. Not just of Reșița’s past and future. But of its people, too.

For all the nostalgia we found in conversation, there was also bitterness. Anger. Blame. A sense of injustice. A desire for retribution. There are former workers who feel betrayed by their bosses. Others blame corruption far away in Bucharest. Some point fingers at their own comrades for stealing, drinking on the job, betraying the value of hard work long before the end came.

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This is where Reșița serves as a way to understand some of our other discontents.

We tell stories of what happened to us to be seen. But often, we don’t tell them solely for those like us, even if it helps feeling not alone in our pain.

The stories we tell gain the most meaning through the dialogue they spark, and the recognition they receive within a shared social and institutional space.

We tell stories to confront power. And when personal stories of suffering are acknowledged – especially by the powers that once silenced or caused them – they can become acts of collective healing.

I’ve been thinking about this for over a decade, since encountering the work of Michael Jackson, an “existential anthropologist” interested in the politics of storytelling. His insights come from fieldwork with soldiers, refugees, and victims of war, and he says healing begins when institutions recognize and validate personal stories, and when individuals dare to make them public.

In Reșița we brought former workers’ stories to the stage in a live show, printed excerpts, placed them in a street exhibit. But what the stories need is to be heard by mayors, factory owners, prime ministers. And these people than need to say: I hear you. Your experience is meaningful. I’m sorry. I wronged you. I failed you.

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Ideally, the recognition of a personal story of suffering should include justice, reparations.

But at least – even if symbolically – reconciliation requires the listening and recognition of a wound inflicted. Personal stories, Jackson says, need to be acknowledged “from the very social field – often the state – that is held accountable for having stolen or cheated the victim out of her humanity in the first place.”

The state could be any organism that has power over us as individuals: a school, a hospital, local government, the president etc.

Think of our fights in Romania today.

People are hurting from the recent tax hikes and austerity measures – also because the wealthier among us seem spared. Teachers are striking. Unions are pleading. People who lost health coverage are furious. What do those in power do with this avalanche of stories? Largely nothing.

They keep saying, “there is no money. Cuts must be made.” This is cruelty. What they don’t seem to understand – even the education minister, a psychologist of all things – is that they are not opening a new wound. Many could endure that. No, they are further ripping into an old one, that many other power structures, for decades, have kept open.

Then, at SNSPA, yet another professor is exposed as a harasser and a bully. The personal stories of the women are heartbreaking, horrifying. I’ve written about abuse and harassment in universities enough to know that justice – meaning punishment or retribution – may never come. But the anger and the desperation are fueled by the fact that the symbolic justice of acknowledgement is denied as well.

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When our personal stories go unheard, when they are denied legitimacy, they risk becoming isolating, even pathological. If you ever found yourself thinking too many people yell their pain too loudly on social media, ask yourself if it’s not further proof of isolation. Shame breeds monsters, and shame is born when we feel there is an uncrossable line between private and public space.

Storytelling transforms us only when it is met with listening that matters. Here’s Jackson again:

That the state is addressed under these circumstances may, I suggest, have less to do with the hope of material compensation than with the need to be recognized by some ultimate authority.

In an age in which many individuals feel that they are drawn into, diminished, and damaged by global force fields that they cannot completely control or comprehend, recognition of their plight, their experiences, and their needs becomes increasingly desperate. (…)

If the individual is to regain some sense of power, the state or corporation must symbolically forfeit some of its power. Hence the need for a public apology in which the powerful acknowledge the truth of the experience of the powerless.

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It’s that acknowledgement and apology that are hard to come by. To build a future together, our psyche needs this.

As a journalist, I’m still trying to figure out how to help. Most journalism fails to help people tell their stories, their way. And it often breeds more conflict between people and the state, instead of learning to create spaces for reconciliation.

In Reșița, the furnace could become such a space, a conduit for reconciliation. It can store and blend stories of past glory, with acknowledgments of greed, and apologies for the wounds caused.

What furnace master can mix all of it together, remains to be seen. Yet the hope is that while it no longer pours iron, it can still forge connection. Between people. Between generations. Between what was, and what might be. If we light it up again, to see it better, maybe we’ll light up something in ourselves, as well.

SIDE DISHES:

Lavinia Braniște is my favorite Romanian novelist. Her new book, Camping, is the kind of story I mentioned above. Sofia, a Romanian immigrant in Spain, is nearing retirement. She’s been away from 20+ years, driven away by powers that made her feel irrelevant. Will anything be different if she came back? Was exile a source of newfound power or just a diversion from the pain of a wound that will never really close?