Category Archives: Eastern Europe

On 11 February 2004, the Culture section (premium content by subscription only) of Transitions Online carried a feature by Anca Paduraru of Deutsche Welle Radio’s English service about a Transylvanian German writer who has stayed in Romania.

BUCHAREST, Romania–“The commotion of summer 1990 inspired me. Then, ethnic Germans left Romania for Germany in droves, and I was left on the railway station platform helpless and perplexed to witness it.”

Eginald Schlattner, 70, is talking about the experience that prompted him to write two novels in his retirement, bringing him success in the German-speaking world and both recognition and notoriety in his native Romania.

The fall of communism produced at least one unhappy result in Romania: After some 800 years of living together with Romanians and other nationalities in this East European country, ethnic Germans began returning to their ancestral homes.

Statistics tell the story. In the last communist-era census, taken in 1977, 350,000 Germans were recorded in Romania. By 1992, their population had dropped by two-thirds. By 2002, it stood at 60,000–just 0.3 percent of the country’s 22 million people.

“It was indeed an exodus lethalis [deadly exodus], this final exit of Germans from Romania, which produced the last twitches we see in Schlattner’s books,” says George Gutu, a professor of German literature at the University of Bucharest.

Helping Schlattner’s success was the controversy surrounding the subject matter of his novels and his alleged part in sending five of his fellow Romanian-Germans to communist prisons.

Schlattner’s authorial debut, five years ago when he was 65, was Der gekoepfte Hahn (The Beheaded Rooster). His second book, Rote Handschuhe (Red Gloves), came out two years later. They have been reprinted several times and reached the best-seller lists of German-language books. The Beheaded Rooster appeared in Romanian translation in 2001, and Red Gloves is being readied for publication in Romania.

Schlattner says his first book “looks at only one day in our history to describe the situation of the Saxons [Germans] here and their pledge to Hitler.” That day was 23 August 1944, when Romania switched camps to join the Allies.

The second novel, which Schlattner says is autobiographical, “shows the two years of my imprisonment in Stalin City [Brasov]. In this one, I put all my cards on the table and explained what happened during those never-ending police interrogations. I was very tough on myself.” …

LOST LANGUAGE

… Germans in Romania lived in a context that allowed them to preserve their identity, Schlattner says. “As I told [German Interior Minister] Otto Schily, … Romania never forbade us from speaking our language, not even during the last eight months of the war it fought against Germany. So much so that at 12, my only Romanian words were, ‘I don’t know Romanian.’ ”

Schlattner’s praise of Romania for its ongoing publication of ABC books in 12 languages for the minorities within its borders does little to assuage Gutu, who is also head of the association of professors of German literature in Romania. While Gutu acknowledges that the demise of a form of literature is inevitable in the absence of a population to support it, he argues that Romanian and German cultural leaders do little to preserve German-language teaching in Romania.

Once, German-language literature in Romania was placed alongside works from East and West Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Its reputation was boosted by the less-extreme treatment meted out to Germans in Romania compared with those in Czechoslovakia or Poland, millions of whom who were expelled after the Second World War.

But now the community structure has been disrupted in Romania, and German-language teachers are scarce.

“Germany directs its efforts and funding only to the German-language schools for the Germans still living in Transylvania and completely disregards the demand for learning the language coming from Romanian children and their parents outside the Carpathian arch,” Gutu says.

Marina Neacsu, cultural projects coordinator at the Goethe Institute in Bucharest, which is funded by the German state, agrees. She says the government has no specific plans to support the editing of books in the German language.

In 2003, though, Romanian authorities gave 16.6 billion lei ($520,000) to the German community, says Ovidiu Gant, undersecretary of state in the Ministry of Public Information. As part of an across-the-board increase in funding to minority groups, the community’s state support more than doubled over the previous year.

In addition, according to Lucian Pricop, a programs coordinator at the Ministry of Culture, more than 1 billion lei ($31,000) has been spent to edit 14 German-language books, support the cultural supplements to the Carpaten Rundschau (Carpathian Observer) and Banater Zeitung (Banat News) magazines, and help public libraries acquire German literature.

Yet Gutu says Romanian and German authorities are ignoring the demand from Romanian parents who realize that Germany is Europe’s economic powerhouse and see knowledge of the German language as indispensable to their children’s professional success.

As for the future of German literature in Romania, Gutu sees none. “As much as I would wish to be wrong, a literature needs a population base to thrive, and 60,000 people are too few and bound to be less.”

Schlattner shares that skepticism.

The local Lutheran bishop, Schlattner says, “is just here to perform burials. This is what we have come to: a deserted house, emptier than the holy stable of Bethlehem. But that one was soon to be filled up with living beings and gifts as the news of Christ’s birth spread into the world. Our stable is not going to witness that.”

In its compilation of news for the week of 20-26 January 2004, Transitions Online reports that the Szeklers, a minority within the Hungarian minority in Romania (see map), are making another push for autonomy. (Access to TOL archives is by subscription only.)

It may have no chance of success, but the call for a Hungarian autonomous region reveals how deep the rifts now are between Romania’s Hungarians as well as with Romanians….

The document appears not to have the slightest chance of becoming a bill, let alone law, as the majority of even Democratic Alliance of Hungarians from Romania (UDMR) parliamentarians have clearly stated that they do not back the idea. The proposal will be sent to the Romanian parliament in early February….

Territorial autonomy for the Hungarian minority has, in the past year, become one of the most disputed issues in Romanian society. And the demands seem to be becoming more and more radical with each passing day….

Szekler is another name for the East Transylvanian Hungarians. Originally, the Szeklers were a Turkish group, brought in by Hungary’s kings around 1200 to guard Transylvania’s eastern borders.

Over the centuries, they lost their language and almost all their traditions. Even their names are now pure Hungarian. But, to this day, they carry their separate origin as a badge of pride….

According to the 2002 census, there are 1,434,377 ethnic Hungarians in Romania (6.6 percent of the population). This makes them the country’s largest ethnic minority according to official figures. Almost 99% of them live in the western reaches and center of the country, in Transylvania, and the regions of Crisana, Maramures, and Banat.

Other sizeable minorities are the Roma (officially 535,250, although most estimates are at least twice that figure), Ukrainians (61,091), and Germans (60,080).

Hungarians are the majority population in two of Romania’s 41 counties, more than a third of the population in another two, and in another two account for over 20 percent.

A right-wing political leader known for his extremist views has unveiled a statue of assassinated Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin. Are his motives political or peaceful?

BUCHAREST–On 15 January, the people of Brasov, a Transylvanian town 170 kilometers north of Bucharest, witnessed an unusual event: the dedication of a statue of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in a local park. But the most unusual aspect of the event was identity of the man behind the new monument: Corneliu Vadim Tudor, leader of the extremist opposition Greater Romania Party (PRM), founder of the incendiary Greater Romania magazine, well-known anti-Semite and extreme right-winger, had commissioned and paid for it.

Tudor, a senator in the Romanian parliament, is well known for views that glorify former Romanian rulers–including Nicolae Ceausescu–subscribe to a pure race of Romanian people, and promote racist ideology. Phrases like “international Jewish-Masonic complot,” “camps for Gypsies,” and “Hungarian state terrorism” are sprinkled throughout his magazine and speeches. He has denied that the Holocaust took place in Romania, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed during World War II.

At the statue’s unveiling, the man who is often compared to Russia’s Vladimir Zhirinovsky, France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, and Austria’s Joerg Haider insisted that he has had a change of heart. “You cannot be a Christian and hate Jews,” he declared. “They gave us the Bible.”

Tudor’s critics, and there are many, call the statue a stunt aimed at winning support for his next presidential bid. In 2000, Tudor was the runner-up in the presidential elections….

One thing is certain: with general elections 10 long months away–on 28 November–the Romanian political drama is just getting started.

SOURCE: Transitions Online, 13-19 January 2004

According to an article from the Romanian newspaper Evenimentul Zilei translated in the wonderful Czech resource Transitions Online:

Between 10 and 20 percent of Romanian doctors under 35 years of age are leaving their home country every year, according to an estimate by the Romanian Doctors College (CMR), the country’s main professional medical society. They head chiefly to the United States, but in the past several years increasing numbers have chosen France and Germany, countries that are opening their hospitals to foreign workers due to the lack of local specialists….

Paul Doru Mugur, 34, a native of Romania’s second-largest city, Constanta, has been working as a doctor in New York since 1996. He heads the oncology and hematology department in a public hospital. In 1991, during his fourth year of university, he left Romania for France on a Tempus scholarship awarded by the European Community. He finished his studies in Paris.

“I’ve had the opportunity to get to know three medical systems very well: the Romanian one–a tribal system characterized by influence, bribes, and the mentality that the doctor is a small god; the French one–a bureaucratic system characterized by a rigid administration where the doctor is a clerk; and the American one–a business-based system where our patient is our client and the doctor is a businessman,” Mugur said.

In 1983-84, when a single pack of Kent cigarettes could magically change a bureaucratic nu to a da, doctors required a whole carton–or a bottle of imported whiskey, or a kilo of imported coffee, or the like. The only people who actually smoked the Kents received in bribes were said to be doctors or security officials. Everyone else just used them to bribe someone else up the line. Once, an older man who had struck up a conversation with me during a long train ride offered me a cigarette from his open pack of Kents. I didn’t have to ask who he worked for.

Fortunately, those days are long gone. Bribes are now in convertible currency rather than in bartered goods.

In Romania, as a beginner, you’re not allowed to touch the patient because then the patient doesn’t know which doctor he should give the envelope with the cash to.