Unheimlich (the uncanny)

Unheimlich (the uncanny) is the disturbing sensation that a familiar object is, in fact, profoundly alien. In Emmanuel Carrère’s account of post-revolutionary Romania, the concept becomes a way of describing a society that appears to have changed while remaining entangled with the regime it claims to have left behind. The uncanny here is not a supernatural intrusion: it is the unsettling recognition that political reality may be both familiar and estranged, visible and concealed.

Meaning and Use

Freud’s notion, as the book presents it, applies to a feeling experienced in dreams and sometimes in reality: what stands before a person seems known, yet is also deeply foreign. That doubleness organizes the Romanian passage. Its setting is not simply unfamiliar; it is an everyday world in which the ordinary signs of a new order coexist with rumors, suspicion, and unresolved continuities. The concept names the resulting uncertainty without resolving it into a single hidden explanation.

Romania as an Uncanny Landscape

Reporting in Romania that spring, the narrator describes the country as a shadowland suspended between light and darkness. Rumors portray Bucharest as honeycombed with underground passageways dug by the secret police, where people supposedly disappeared; the passage presents these as disturbing rumors, not established fact. The landscape’s uncertainty is also social. Tens of thousands of stray dogs roam the city and compete for scraps with tens of thousands of children, yet the men seem more frightening: the narrator figures them as wolves. Hatred, suspicion, and slander become an atmosphere so pervasive that it feels impossible to breathe.

The uncanny effect comes from this reversal of expectations. The visible strays are not the greatest threat; the more disturbing danger lies in human relations and in what may be concealed behind respectable appearances. The image of a city crossed by rumored tunnels gives physical form to a broader anxiety: that public life has a hidden underside, and that what appears settled may contain unseen routes into the past.

Resistance and Concealed Continuity

A conversation with a celebrated writer sharpens the passage’s political ambiguity. The writer had received prizes and official appointments for twenty years, yet spoke of having inwardly resisted the regime. Asked whether others had resisted more openly, and whether he would name them, he declined, invoking discretion and mercy. His explanation was that the Securitate had recruited some of its most zealous informers from among people regarded as opposition figures. The narrator’s question therefore meets an answer that turns apparent moral clarity into further uncertainty: supposed opponents might have been informers, while a public career under the regime does not by itself settle the question of inward dissent.

The writer’s account is not treated as a revelation that resolves the matter. Instead, the narrator reports that the subtle commentators he consulted agreed that the writer was right, and that everyone knew it as an open secret. The uncanny thus describes more than an individual’s uncertainty about one man’s past. It captures a society in which the categories of collaborator and dissident, public record and private belief, cannot be confidently separated.

Political Significance

The surrounding account reinforces this sense of persistence beneath apparent change: a banned Communist Party had changed its name and leader, while the elections of March 1990 gave it a sizable majority. The new political surface therefore does not erase the familiar structures and actors beneath it. Romania feels uncanny because the old order is neither simply present nor safely past; it returns through renamed institutions, compromised reputations, and the suspicion that resistance itself may have been infiltrated. The concept makes that unstable boundary—not a final answer about who was innocent or guilty—the passage’s central subject.