* Die zweite Literaturbegegnung Schwalenberg (Rudolf Herbert) * Richard Wagner, Giancarlos Koffer, Rotbuch Verlag 1993 (Rudolf Herbert * Jacques Le Goff, Geschichte und Gedächtnis, Frankfurt 1992 (Gerhard Mahlberg) * Jan Johanides, Bodenfrost, Frankfurt 1994 (Gerhardt Csejka)
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Essay about Romanian litarature.
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„Rumäniendeutsche“ Literatur – ein Begriff, der genauso umstritten ist wie die Frage, ob die aus Rumänien stammenden deutschen Autoren nach ihrer Ausreise in die Bundesrepublik Deutschland noch dieser Literatur zugerechnet werden können. Als Tatsache gilt es festzuhalten, daß die meisten „rumäniendeutschen“ Autoren in den letzten Jahrzehnten des 20. Jahrhunderts dort ihren Wohnsitz nahmen und von der bundesdeutschen Literaturszene rezipiert wurden und werden. Interessant ist in diesem Zusammenhang aber auch die Frage, ob und wie diese Schriftsteller von ihren ebenfalls ausgewanderten Landsleuten zur Kenntnis genommen wurden. Eine mögliche Antwort bietet die Untersuchung der Presse der Landsmannschaften der Siebenbürger Sachsen beziehungsweise der Banater Schwaben in Deutschland, also der „Siebenbürgischen Zeitung“ und der „Banater Post“.
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Spectacolul cărţii la Leipzig
More...Keywords: literature; book; child; adolescent; Romania; german
Report on a research-project on Romanian-german literatur for children and adolescents from the period 1944-1989, based on the examination of the holdings of three romanian libraries: the ASTRA-library in Sibiu (Hermannstadt), the Naitonal Library and the Library of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest as well as five exemplarily selected private libraries. The author discusses the theoretical difficulties to determine what exactly can be understood as "literatur for children and adolescents" as well as "romanian-german" literature. In Romania, literatur for children and adolescents didn't became a subject for research. As an important product of the research-project resulted a list of about 1300 titles with books for children and adolescents that will be published elsewhere.
More...La Târgul de Carte „Gaudeamus” din acest an de la București, Republica Moldova a fost Invitat de Onoare. Despre evenimentele de la Târg cu participarea scriitorilor și editorilor basarabeni, dar și despre felul cum și-a onorat Republica Moldova (Ministerul Culturii de la Chișinău) această invitație, i-am rugat să ne vorbească, în cadrul unui Chestionar cu întrebări „personalizate”, pe câțiva fericiți participanți la această manifestare. Revista Contrafort nu a fost prezentă la Gaudeamus. Invitația din partea Ministerului Culturii (prin telefon, amabilă și încărcată de complimente și aprecieri…) a venit doar cu două zile înainte de deschiderea Târgului. E ușor de ghicit că am refuzat – politicos – să improvizăm o participare. Dincolo de faptul că împrejurări mai puțin favorabile ne-au împiedicat să ajungem la Gaudeamus pe cont propriu, am rămas totuși cu uimirea că Ministerul Culturii moldovean a avut, pentru prima dată în cei 18 ani de când există Contrafortul, ideea să ne contacteze, să ne propună să ne alăturăm unui „demers de reprezentare” ofi cial la București. Să însemne oare că, după 3 ani de la răsturnarea regimului Voronin, statul moldovean încearcă să colaboreze cu intelectualii independenți de la Chișinău?
More...Keywords: social history; regional literature; minorities; influence; reception; exchange process; comparative approach
Romania’s accession to the European Union integrates its German speaking regions into the western value system that they have always felt to be connected to. The new cultural context enables a multiplication of the views on history, freed of resentments and of one dominating interpretation, causing the concepts of periphery and centre to lose their accuracy. The following paper analyses the consequences of these transformations on the Study of German literature. On the one hand German studies expand their literary history onto the new regions, becoming increasingly interested in it and academics in these regions have the same research facilities as the ones in Germany, thus channeling their interest also to the established German literature. Nevertheless the interest in regional literature, in the specific living, production and reception conditions persists creating identity and following the trend of specialization. Analysing the evolution of the study of regional German literature both diachronically and synchronically in the German speaking regions of Southeastern Europe, the paper shows that contemporary studies are less interested in the aspects of influence, reception and imitation and that the focus has shifted towards a comparative approach.
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Keywords: Wirtschaftswissenschaften ; Osteuropa
Bis vor kurzem gingen Vorhersagen über die künftige geistige und methodologische Ausrichtung der Wirtschaftswissenschaften in Osteuropa von zweifelhaften Annahmen hinsichtlich des »westlichen« Theorieangebots und der »östlichen« Nachfrage danach aus. Der Triumph des liberalen Denkens in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften der Region wurde von den meisten Beobachtern als Durchbruch des Neoliberalismus austro-amerikanischer Prägung verstanden. Will der Osten nicht zu seinen kommunistischen oder marktsozialistischen Utopien zurückkehren, so die stillschweigende und ein wenig einfältige Annahme, sollte er sich für Hayek, Friedman und Buchanan entscheiden. Die osteuropäischen Ökonomen könnten, so war zu hören, nach all den Jahren kollektivistischer Indoktrination gar nicht anders, als sich der neoliberalen Strömung anzuschließen:Das imaginäre Pendel müsse einfach in diese Richtung ausschlagen.
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Keywords: student life; Securitate; secret Services;
The Western European impressions of the Romanian communist state are that the secret police, Securitatea, were everywhere and controlled everything. As a foreign - Norwegian - student in Romania in 1978-79, I did not really care. When the archives were opened, it turned out that my roommate at the students' hostel had in fact a file of some 500 pages -- also covering later years. That file contained photos of him -- and myself, and a reference to my own file. In October 2009, I saw my file at the Romanian Securitate, from the period when I was a student in Bucharest in 1978-1979. This turned out to have only 20 pages. However, both my roommate's story, which he used as raw material for a book ('Verdacht.' Mijn Securitatedossier, Uitgeverij Atlas, Amsterdam/Antwerpen 2009, ”Suspect.” Dosarul meu de la Securitate, Editura Trei, Bucureºti 2013), and my own story provide some insight into what the Securitate did - and did not. Horrible as the system was, and of course with fatal consequences for millions of innocent people, my conclusion is that they did not deserve their pay.
More...Keywords: Norway cultural history;Romanian cultural history;Norwegian-Romanian connections
In 1893, the Norwegian composer Johan Halvorsen, who had just been appointed as musical director at the theatre Den Nationale Scene in Bergen, received an offer. An offer to become professor at the Conservatory of Music in Bucharest, and head of a quartet. The pay was three times as high as the one he had just accepted in Bergen. He was intrigued and flattered. He eventually turned down the offer, but not before having found out more about this far, but still European, country. What he found out inspired him to write a march, The Entry of the Boyars, which has become one of the most beloved and popular pieces of Norwegian classical music. This story is used as a point of departure for a survey of Romanian history in the 1800, a time when society and private life underwent thorough changes. To quote the writer Radu Rosetti, “I do not think that there is any other country in which all public and private life changed so rapidly and thoroughly as with us, and even more all traces of a past so relatively recent disappeared some completely and quickly as by us.”
More...Keywords: student life;Securitate;secret services;
The Western European impressions of the Romanian communist state are that the secret police, Securitatea, were everywhere and controlled everything. As a foreign - Norwegian - student in Romania in 1978-79, I did not really care. When the archives were opened, it turned out that my roommate at the students' hostel had in fact a file of some 500 pages -- also covering later years. That file contained photos of him -- and myself, and a reference to my own file. In October 2009, I saw my file at the Romanian Securitate, from the period when I was a student in Bucharest in 1978-1979. This turned out to have only 20 pages. However, both my roommate's story, which he used as raw material for a book ('Verdacht.' Mijn Securitatedossier, Uitgeverij Atlas, Amsterdam/Antwerpen 2009, ”Suspect.” Dosarul meu de la Securitate, Editura Trei, Bucureşti 2013), and my own story provide some insight into what the Securitate did - and did not. Horrible as the system was, and of course with fatal consequences for millions of innocent people, my conclusion is that they did not deserve their pay.
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Keywords: error; clowns; marionettes; prototypical figures; censorship.
The topic of the paper I proposed, Norman Manea’s Clowns versus Herta Müller’s Marionettes, is generous and can be contextualised from an error’s perspective, understood here as a history error in line with the idea that totalitarianism is anexample of 20th century extremism. In this context, two ‘export’ writers of Romanian culture attempt to outwit censorship (Norman Manea) or to express an absurd reality using an expressly chosen typology of characters: clowns and marionettes. The question is predictable: WHY do the aforementioned authors directly or indirectly appeal to these prototypical figures? Incompatible with their forced living environment – communist Romania –, they become messengers of an original world, imposing through their game a set of new rules by ridiculing the given. The clowns and marionettes also represent genericmasks of the narrators, based on which the identity hiding-revealing dichotomy is achieved alongside the reconstruction of a page our country’s history.
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Keywords: food; language; national identity
This article is an overview of the relationship between food and language, first and foremost as symbols and manifestations of a specific culture. In connection to this idea, we also discuss the role of culinary diplomacy as one of the oldest forms of diplomacy, but only recently emerging as a scholarly field. Our dependence on food, which is one of the basic elements in our lives and also one of the oldest forms of exchange, is most of the times the element that brings us together and “softens” the differences between us. Even though it still is a new and understudied field, culinary diplomacy (also known as gastrodiplomacy or diplomatic gastronomy) has been in practice “[…] since the first-time Neanderthal hunters sat around their kill together” (Ruddy, 2014: 29). Food has long been regarded as an important identity marker and researchers have suggested that natural foods together with national languages construct national identities. Similar dishes may indicate cultural contact or common ancestry, which is the same with similar words or grammatical structures. Borrowing of words denoting food items can be seen as proof of cultural contact. Lakoff (2006: 150, apud Gerhardt, 2010: 14) claims that the high number of new terms for food in the US over the last quarter century proves the rising significance assigned to food as a marker of identity. Today it is imperative to have knowledge of culinary terminology from French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi or Thai in order to read a menu. The last part of the article is focused on a brief analysis of the main culinary word formation processes in English.
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Keywords: Rumäniendeutsche; Securitate; Oskar Pastior; Georg Hoprich; Herta Müller;
After the Nobel laureate for literature Herta Müller 2009 publicized their files, which were commissioned by the Romanian security service, in the weekly DIE ZEIT and then in their book Cristina and their dummy or what (in the files of the Securitate), the observation of the Romanian - the Communist Intelligence became a popular subject not only of the media, but also of literary research. According to a brief account of the history of the German minority in Romania, the author describes in a first part how, after the end of the Second World War, the Romanian communist secret service was founded, which officially commissioned the new social order against enemies from outside and protect from the interior. In reality, however, the new rulers were concerned with stifling critical utterances in the germ, silencing other thinkers, and, if necessary, shutting them down or even eliminating them. All this was done with the intention of spreading a general climate of fear and uncertainty to prevent any rebellion against the politically unauthorized authority.
More...Keywords: Immanuel Weißglas; Chernivtsi poetry; Bukovinian poetry; German-language poetry; Holocaust poetry;
The fact that the poet from Chernivtsi, Immanuel Weissglas, reworked, revised and resumed many of his poems in later volumes became an object of study relatively late, also due to his placement in the “shadow” of Paul Celan. His three volumes, Kariera am Bug, the unpublished volume Gottes Mühlen in Berlin and Nobiskrug, however, contain multiple examples of these variations of the original works, the poems being modified, quoted or changed to different degrees. A valuable starting point for studies on this topic is represented by Barbara Wiedemanns list of these equivalents and their type. This article aims to analyze the similarities and overlaps between the first and last volume of Weissglas, while trying to capture the character of these two volumes, possible motivations of Weissglas to maintain his work in a continuous process of transformation, and finding an answer to the question: What has the poem become in its new form?
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Keywords: Immanuel Weißglas; Chernivtsi poetry; Bukovinian poetry; German-language poetry; Holocaust poetry;
The fact that the poet from Chernivtsi, Immanuel Weissglas, reworked, revised and resumed many of his poems in later volumes became an object of study relatively late, also due to his placement in the “shadow” of Paul Celan. His three volumes, Kariera am Bug, the unpublished volume Gottes Mühlen in Berlin and Nobiskrug, however, contain multiple examples of these variations of the original works, the poems being modified, quoted or changed to different degrees. A valuable starting point for studies on this topic is represented by Barbara Wiedemanns list of these equivalents and their type. This article aims to analyze the similarities and overlaps between the first and last volume of Weissglas, while trying to capture the character of these two volumes, possible motivations of Weissglas to maintain his work in a continuous process of transformation, and finding an answer to the question: What has the poem become in its new form?
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