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OCR
EUGEN STANCU in the 1970s could not announce at all his intellectual development. Yet, his further professional openness to various historical themes, his intellectual curiosity, and the interdisciplinary methodological approach he embraced were fostered by some unexpected episodes of his biography, such as the previously mentioned connection with Josef Mactirek. Furthermore, during a second visit to Prague at the end of the 1970s occasioned by the publication of the book Relationships between Romanians, Czechs and Slovaks, he met Helga Abret, a German literary scholar established in France, with whom he started a fruitful intellectual collaboration, whose results were rather unexpected for a historian. In 1984, Boia and Helga Abret published Das Jahrhundert der Marsianer.® Boia refers to this book as an extraordinary historical experiment in which he wrote about scenarios produced on Earth referring to the planet Mars. It was for him the discovery of the imaginary because as he puts it, “on the planet Mars there were projected all sorts of fantasies, dreams, ideologies or utopias.”” It was not only an atypical research topic for a professional historian, but this book also presupposed the investigation of sources which usually were neglected by historians, ranging from popular literature to drawings. At the same time, at the Faculty of history in Bucharest, Boia started to teach the general historiography course which became available after the titular professor was appointed cultural counsellor at the Romanian Embassy in the Federal Republic of Germany."° Boia once more abandoned his research plans, related with the history of the Transylvanian national movement, and specialised himself in historiography.’ Moreover, his interest in the new field, his desire to complete a dictionary of great historians as well as his wish to travel in the West for professional purposes led to him coming up with the initiative to form The International Commission on Historiography, which was established at the 15" International Congress of Historical Sciences, held in Bucharest in 1980. Along with Boia, the groundwork for setting up this commission was done by Charles-Olivier Carbonell and Georg G. Iggers, well-known scholars in the study of historiography and historical theory. Also related to his interest in historiography was Boia’s interest in the 1980s for the French Annales School in which he developed an expertise and published numerous articles in the magazine Contemporanul and in the scholarly journal Analele Universitatii Bucuresti to a point that erroneously he was often considered a historian who followed the methodology of this Lucian Boia — Helga Abret: Das Jahrhundert der Marsianer, München, Heyne Verlag, 1984. Istoriile mele, 89. Ibid, 52. For contexual information related to Boia I used Istoriile mele; Eugen Stancu in dialog cu Lucian Boia. In the second half of the 1970s he published on this new scholarly interest, Lucian Boia: Evolutia istoriografiei romdne, Bucuresti, Editura universitatii, 1976. and Lucian Boia: Mari istorici ai lumii, Bucuresti, Editura universitatii, 1978. * 112 +
