Iosef Tellmann, „Meister der Dublizität”. Studiu de caz
Iosef Tellmann, “Meister der Dublizität”. Case Study

Summary/Abstract: Immediately after August 23, 1944, the German ethnic group in our country would feel the repression measures ordered by I. V. Stalin. In January 1945, approximately 62,000 ethnic Germans in Romania were removed from their homes by the police and gendarmerie bodies of the Romanian state. They were handed over and taken over by the N.K.V.D. who transported them under escort and placed them in Soviet labour camps, where they served five years of forced labour (called “reconstruction”). Since January 1945, civilians, women and young men, although they were Romanian citizens and had no other fault than that they were of the same ethnicity as Adolf Hitler, worked hard in the underground coal mines of Donetsk, but also in other regions of the Soviet Union. It was only a first step on the long road of repression, because the return from the Soviet labour camp did not mean their liberation, but only the transfer to another type of camp, much larger, the “communist camp”, which had become the whole of Romania.Ethnic Germans returned to a completely changed Romania. The constitutional monarchy had meanwhile been replaced by a people’s Republic, democratic political parties had been outlawed, property nationalized, church and minority education left without any source of funding, and their right to vote revoked. The properties of the Germans had been nationalized to be distributed to the so-called “entitled”. The proverbial cohesion of the German communities was shattered and the ethnic minority was at the mercy of a totalitarian regime and in the situation of finding, on their own, means of survival. Some of them resisted the pressure, but paid dearly for it. Others chose, like the majority, the easier way and put themselves, in various forms, at the service of the regime. They were those who turned the ethnic minority status into an asset for the communist regime and the secret police, who capitalized on them both politically, trying to project a democratic image both externally and internally, where, as we shall see, used, those willing to collaborate, against fellow countrymen or even members of other ethnic minorities.The biography of Iosif Tellmann, a well-known artist from Hunedoara, is a case study that could also demonstrate how Romania came into the hands of an illegitimate and criminal regime after World War II, as it was defined (and assumed to a certain extent) by the Romanian state. Without proposing a conflict with the past, we want to illustrate an episode of contemporary history, which urges us to value more democratic values, so volatile at times. It is important to talk about these things today, because only in this way will Romanian society develop an immune system and will manage to defend itself from totalitarian attacks that are still a temptation for many of our countrymen. As for Joseph Tellmann, until the artist’s death in 2001, and even to this day, only the official biography is known to the public, which the painter and graphic artist Iosif Tellmann carefully cultivated over the years. We propose a different kind of master and a different mastery, but not in fine arts, rather in duplicity, unknown until now to the public.

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