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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.
The historical events during 1918, which marked the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, along with the violent acts of World War II were for the majority of the “Austrian-Bukovina” Jews the catalyst leading to profound identity disruption and disorientation. The destruction of the old “foundation” and the loss of the existential centre of reference were perceived by a large number of Bukovina Jews as extremely painful. The most of them continued to cultivate the old “Austrian” values. The experience during the war and the Holocaust shattered the survivors in an irremediable way. In this paper, I rely deliberately on the short story „In fartogikn groy” written by the Yiddish writer Alexander Spiegelblatt in order to illustrate the traumatic transition from a multinational to a “national(-istic)” construction, marked by severe and irreconcilable conflict between “old” and “new” values.
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.
This paper discusses and analyses the importance of oral history in offering a true image of reality. Referring to the tragic destiny of the German ethnic group in Romania after the second world war – their deportation in the Soviet Union – it presents an excerpt of the narration of contemporary witnesses.
Die Essayistik Herta Müllers
(2022)
The article follows the two volumes of essays The King Bows and Kills (2003) and Always the same snow and always the same uncle (2011) written by Herta Müller. Politics and aesthetics define the Nobel laureate’s writing, with her essays anchored in Romania’s recent history. They are of a political nature, offer retrospectives on their life in Romania beyond the Iron Curtain, insights into the dictatorial past, persecution by the secret service, the betrayal of closest friends, but also contain reflections on the role of the language, the preference for Romanian, on the use of “The King” in their fictional texts, explain their “alien gaze”. Always the same snow and always the same uncle focuses on the deportation of the Romanian Germans to the Ukraine, with the information serving as a companion work to the novel Hunger angel. The betrayal of closest friends is also discussed, whereby the insight into their files and the past of Oskar Pastior/Otto Stein’s files are used.
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.