Open Access

Olivia Spiridon

• Danubeland scapes have been a recurrent topic in the German-language literature of Southeastern Europe, especially in German literature from Romania, which was the only one to survive the end of the Second World War in the Eastern Bloc. They developed different forms on both-sides of the Iron Curtain. In the West, the Danubeservedas a frame work for the consolidation of a common identity of many disparate groups of former German minorities from Southeastern Europe under the collective name “Danube Swabians”. Additionally, writers from Romania who emi-grated to the West recalled in their works bothwonderful and frightening images of the lower Danube. In Romania, Danube landscapes are to be seen as attempts to negotiate the concept of homeland from a contemporary perspective after its appropriation by the patriotic literature of the court literati. They emergedas a stage for projecting new sensi-tivities: the suffering of isolation, economic misery and environmental pollution. Subversively narrated landscapes also set hidden signs of the memory of the isolated deten-tion camps on the periphery of the country. The transfor-mation of Danube landscapes is analysed by using literary examples after 1945.