Open Access

Anne Türk

• This text is based on the novelette „The Disarmed Bullet – The Frost Pattern On the Thirteenth” by Walther Gottfried Seidner (from the prose volume „On The Cloud Called Transylvania, A Paradise Inmidst Of Hell – Good Night Stories” with a preface by Ph.D. Gerhard Konnerth). Both, research and critical essays on the topic of the deportation of the German minority of Transylvania to the Donetsk valley in Ukraine are marked by the tendency to victimize this ethnis group. The writer Walther Gottfried Seidner publishes his novelette as a reaction against this perspective and as a general humane reflection as well, retelling from the point of view of an six-year-old boy how his mother (a mother of four) is saved by a Russian soldier, who disarms a bullet, lying he would have killed the woman, in order for her to stay with her four small children. The story is captured from the memory of the grown-up child, from a distant perspective, valuable for its subjective but very profound reflections. The present analysis focusses on three dimensions of the post-war novelette: 1. The narrative, 2. The characters, 3. The langauge, especially the elements of the German Saxon variety. The novelette is regarded as being representative for the work of the German Saxon author, as it voices a positive humanism in the face of a warlike Regime, in the period of the Iron Curtain. The work can be seen as a cornerstone of the European idea in the context of the 100th jubilee of the Romanian Unity and of 29 years since the Romanian Revolution.