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The present text is dedicated to an anthology of German poetry from Romania, which was collected in 1980 but could not be published during the communist dictatorship and was subsequently published in 2022 to great success on the German book market. The anthology illustrates the fact that a modern movement parallel to the one in Germany emerged within the insular German-language literature in Romania, developing a set of very distinct particularities.
The present contribution provides an analysis of Dirk Oschmann’s volume, Freiheit und Fremdheit. Kafkas Romane [Freedom and Foreignness. Kafka’s novels]. The main idea, already announced in the title, is followed throughout the entire volume. A corpus of texts consisting of Kafka’s three novels and some of his best short stories is analyzed (Die Verwandlung, Bericht für eine Akademie, and In der Strafkolonie). The selected texts are considered stories of internal or external displacement that address and depict freedom and foreignness mostly using spatial displacement. The method used is close reading, the author carefully interprets text passages, goes into details, nuances of meaning, and linguistic features of the Kafkaesque texts. The analysis draws on syntagms and statements made by characters who discuss these themes.
The book Dante und das Gedächtnis [Dante and Memory], published in 2021 by Schwabe Verlag Basel, is a complex interdisciplinary study addressing the issue of memory in the works of the medieval Italian writer and philosopher Dante Alighieri. The study is focused on a “historical approach”, but the investigation of the Commedia and Vita Nova makes use of narratological concepts as well. Monaco sets out to identify and interpret the reflections on memory present in Dante’s work.
The well-documented and systematized study comprises a lot of new information about the poet, politician, and exile Dante Alighieri
The present article is an interpretation of Claudia Spiridon-Șerbu’s study on censorship in Romania during the last 30 years of communist rule. Drawing on unreleased documents from the CNSAS (National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives) Archive dwelling on German ethnic authors from Romania, the author paints a vivid picture of the complex phenomenon of literary censorship. The study follows both the official censorship undertaken by the General Office for Press and Publishing and the unofficial prosecution of writers by Securitate agents and their collaborators.
The present study focuses on imagology. Starting from the theoretical aspects of the concepts self-image and hetero-image, the analysis ponders upon the imagological constructs of two ethnical groups in the novel of the Romanian German-language author Andreas Birkner. In this analysis, the self image identifies with the one of the Transylvanian, and the image of the other is that of the Roma. The analysis of Birkner's novel leads to the conclusion that there have been certain mental images deeply rooted in historical reality and which can be, partly, explained by means of collective memory parameters. Stereotypes and prejudices should be considered in this context.
This article is dedicated to the intercultural aspects of Paul Schuster’s stories (1930-2004), a German writer, born in Sibiu, regarded by German literary historians and criticists as one of the most talented prose writers descending from the small German cultural enclave of Transylvania. His work is thematically focused on events of the past century; The German minority he belongs to plays a decisive role, but also its cohabitation with different ethnic groups in Romania as well as the interethnic relations between them. Interculturality in Paul Schuster's stories is revealed on several levels: cultural exchanges between different ethnic groups, aspects of interethnic collaboration, imagology, linguistic interferences and translations from Romanian authors.
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.
The following study is dedicated to the city of Sibiu as the literary place in the short story “The Blue Sphere” [Die blaue Kugel] by Joachim Wittstock.
Starting from the selection of historical monuments and buildings evoking important personalities of the Transylvanian Saxons, Joachim Wittstock recalls cultural and historical aspects of the Saxons who have left their mark on the present. Using the blue sphere as a metaphor for perfection and balance, the writer from Sibiu describes the city as a literary topos in a time when German culture had reached its peak (18th-19th centuries) suggesting the eventual final decline.
The present review refers to the work of Silvia Zimmermann Das Königsbild im Werk Carmen Sylvas und in Fotografien des Fürstlich Wiedischen Archivs.[The Kingʼs Image in the Work of Carmen Sylva and on Princely Archive Photographs belonging to the Wied House] The year 2014 had a triple meaning for the first Romanian Royal House: 175 years since the birth of King Charles I (20 April 2014), 145 years since his wedding with princess Elisabeth of Wied (15 November 1869) and the death centenary of King Charles I (10 October 1914, at the Peleș Castle). Silvia Zimmermann selects and comments upon texts and images which depict the reign of Charles I over Romania, a very beneficial period for the development of the country
The research objective of the present article is the book Der heilige Teufel [The Holy Devil], written in the field of cultural history by the Romanian German language author Renë Fülöp Miller, published in 1927 and very well received at the time. Important contemporary voices, for instance Th. Mann, ranked it next to fictional works. Taking into consideration postmodern viewpoints, according to which reality and fiction have become impossible to distinguish and interchangeable, it may be concluded that Miller’s work, in spite of its cultural-historical content, is a historical narrative, its style being subordinated to „documentary fiction”. The depiction of reality is a possible one; Russia’s image during Rasputin’s time is a probable one.