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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become impossible to distinguish and interchangeable, it may be concluded that Miller’s work, in spite of its cultural-historical content, is a historical narrative, its style being subordinated to „documentary fiction”.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.
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.
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 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.
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.