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The German minority emigrated massively from Romania after the fall of the communist regime in 1989, so the void left by it had to be filled with representatives of Romanian ethnicity. The main actors for the relations between the Saxons and the Romanians in Transylvania are the children who study in schools with German as a mother tongue. They will carry on the cultural heritage left by the Saxons. But how can we reach out for these children? The answer is given to us by the writer Anne Junesch in her book „Das Amenchen. Mäuseleben”, published in 2019. An attempt is being made to sensitize young readers to Transylvanian culture. With the help of a story centered around a fortified church and a main character from Germany, a world full of secrets and of the unknown is revealed to us. With small steps, an incursion is thus made into the almost lost world of the Transylvanian Saxons.
After the First World War and the Danube Monarchy, Transylvania became a part of the Kingdom of Romania on December 1, 1918. The desired minority rights played an important role for the Transylvanian Saxons. The relationships with Hungary and Romania were reflected in the media coverage by the Transylvanian newspaper Siebenbürgisch-Deutsches Tageblatt. The authors created awareness on their concerns by using ideological vocabulary. Such political lexis acts as an appeal to the recipients. There is a clearly identifiable dichotomy: On the one side, negatively connoted lexis arises for the former political conditions in the Dual Monarchy. On the other side, positively connoted lexis appears for the needs and for the behavior of the Transylvanian Saxons and for the concepts of new political conditions that were published in the newspaper. This dichotomy consists of ideological vocabulary and lexis in common language.
Wortbildungen, die im Siebenbürgisch-Sächsischen aufgrund von lateinischen Lexemen entstanden sind
(2018)
As the Reformation took place in the first half of the 16th century in Transylvania and the Germanspeaking mother regions alike, the schooling systems were restructured. Instruction in Latin language was mandatory for attendees of teachers' training institutions. Latin texts were read, Latin grammar was practiced and exercises to that effect were completed. Up to the mid of the 19th century, schools methodically practised high German in writing and reading, but oddly, not in speaking. The spoken language was the vernacular. Consequently student language developed curious constructions based on Latin vocabulary. The vernacular examples chosen are taken from the Transylvanian-Saxon Dictionary, and from vernacular and specialist literature.
Intermarriages in Transylvania are a topic that is still to little scientifically explored. Saxons and Romanians in Transylvania each married in their own circles in accordance with the times they lived.The Second World War, the establishment of communism, deportation and nationalization have changed relations between the Transylvanian Saxons and Romanians. The number of mixed marriages has begun to grow and cultural proximity has become real. Life in Communism has become a collective destiny. At the base of this study are 25 questionnaires filled in by people coming from mixed marriages. The following aspects were analyzed: the name and identity attributed thereto, spoken languages, confession, family life, identity positioning.
Auf Wolke Siebenbürgen … : eine Kindheit voller Gefahren. Die „Deportation“ und Rettung der Mutter
(2017)
Transylvania is a region that frequently appears in the texts of the German speaking writers from Romania. Walther Gottfried Seidner‘s story makes no exception. In the center is the narrator, a kindergarten child, who explores the history of Europe experienced from a subjective point of view. His attention is directed especially to the mother, who is in danger of being deported to the Soviet Union. The red thread of the narrative is interrupted by retrospectives, which complete the image of Transylvania at the beginning of the year 1945. This analysis refers to several aspects within the original text: the Cibin River and its significance to the community of Sibiu, the Christian cross and the swastika, the German National Socialism and the Communism, the deportation of the German minority.
Transylvania was not exempt from the witch hunt of the 17th century; the city of Sibiu itself witnessed a series of trials and death sentences. While the phenomenon itself has been widely studied and written about in Western Europe, it has been scarcely mentioned in Romanian history works. The original documents from the Transylvanian archives, written down in German, have not been translated and presented to the Romanian public. The present paper intends to present aspects of the witch hunt in Sibiu during the 17th century starting from the case of a midwife judged and condemned to death by burning in 1692. This case will be presented through the original documents of the trial, found in the National Archives of Sibiu and containing the depositions of witnesses, of the accused herself, as well as the sentence passed. We hope that this will be the starting point for a selection and translation into Romanian of the German written documents, in order to make them available to the Romanian speaking public.
This article aims to trace different hypostases of alterity as they occur in the novel Vaterlandstage (Days at Home) by contemporary Romanian-born German author Dieter Schlesak. The paper draws on the distinction suggested by Volker Barth between the concepts “das Fremde” (i.e. “the stranger” that remains unknowable and impossible to control) and “das Andere” (i.e. “the other” which is excluded as a result of othering). The analysis of the way in which these two forms of alterity are represented in the novel shows that they go beyond the ethnic and cultural meaning of the terms and are closely linked to Schlesak’s antimimetic poetics, his identity concept based on estrangement and not-belonging as well as to his rejection of a materialist view of the world.
The following essay illustrates the extraordinary love story between Clemens Rescher and Rodica Neagoie. These key characters are representative figures for the nation they belong to. Clemens is a Transylvanian Saxon and Rodica a Romanian. Despite all contradictions, they fall in love, spend time together, travel to the Black Sea and plan their future. Even though they are bound to each other by strong feelings, this love cannot overcome all the preset cultural, ethnic and social obstacles. Clemens and Rodica become the victims of the world they live in.
The importance of Transylvanian records of court proceedings from the end of the 17th century relies, in terms of content, on preserving the day by day life of ordinary people in Transylvania such as craftsmen, tradesmen, and peasants. Regarding linguistics, they are challenging due to the specific tension between feigned orality and literacy, when historical “spoken” language is documented. The research question pertains to describe, from a qualitative point of view, the complex sentences structure. Thereby, we look upon the different ways to construct complex sentences and their specific use according to the communicative functions of text parts: Which is the proportion between hypotaxis and parataxis in combining clauses? How deep is the hierarchy of subordinate clauses? Which subordinate clause functions are most used? Which composition types are relevant for complex sentence structure?
In the present article Bernhard Schwaiger, a Latin language teacher at a school in Thüringen, treats some aspects of the greater or lesser importance of some objects of study, in this case of the foreign languages, importance that is usually determined aleatorily. The article becomes a pleading for the study of the Romanian language as one of the most interesting Romance languages, the Romanian culture being complex and the tourist landscape from Romania very interesting as well. The conclusion of the article is that it is very important for pupils on their way to identity construction to know all the cultural components of Europe, to submit to a critical analysis any object defined „from the outside” as important, because the European continent consists not solely of important countries and languages (such as France, Spain, England, Italy) but also of a multitude of other languages and cultures.