Open Access

Maria Sass

• Erwin Wittstock (1899-1962), the writer of German expression from Romania, has created a monumental body of works (short stories and novels), which stem from German history and culture from Transylvania. The characters he created are projections of his own life. His novel Januar ’45 oder Die höhere Pflicht, reviewed in the present article from an intercultural point of view, is dedicated to the problem of deportation, a topic which was taboo in the communist regime. His work on the topic is shaped into a novel in Balzacian style, the author writing from the perspective of an eye witness. The problematic invites the description of power, of terror and of repression in totalitarian states. As member of the German community in Romania he depicts the Transylvanian multiethnic and multicultural society in his fiction. The elements of interculturality in his novel can be summarized as: social interethnic relations, imagology, respectively the outlining of the image of otherness, also on a linguistic level.