Csongor Molnár reviews James Koranyi’s Migrating Memories. Romanian Germans in Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2021, 326 p.
The history of the German minorities in Eastern Europe in the 20th century, especially after the Second World War, has been a central focus of historians in recent decades. Their works have generally covered the political history of German minorities between the two world wars, their relationship with National Socialism during the Second World War, and finally, the disappearance of the communities from the region. Within this context, James Koranyi’s book Migrating Memories. Romanian Germans in Modern Europe goes beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of existing scholarship by presenting the history of the German minority in Romania in the 20th century.
James Koranyi is an Associate Professor of Modern European Cultural History at Durham University. His research interests include minorities in Central and Eastern Europe among other topics. In this book, Koranyi argues that Romanian German identity was not a clear-cut and determined category. Instead, it was defined by events of the 20th century, such as wars, migrations, experiences of minority existence and memory. For Koranyi, the German minority in Romania is an excellent case-study to support this claim, as, unlike many other German communities in Central and Eastern Europe, they did not have to leave Romania after the Second World War. Instead, the emigration to (West) Germany unfolded gradually throughout several decades.
To support the main argument, the book is divided into five thematic chapters. The first chapter, Making Romanian Germans, tells the story of the emergence of the Romanian German minority. Koranyi highlights the post-1918 peace settlement as a turning point, showing in detail that the German minority in Greater Romania had no unified group identity. German identity was determined by historical, religious and geographical factors. It was only under the pressure of the new Romanian nation-state framework that Lutheran Saxons and Catholic Swabians first attempted to form a common political representation, while holding onto their myths, such as the Saxons’ image of themselves as the bulwarks of Christian Europe or the Swabians’ myth of the colonization of Banat. The second chapter, Transnational Germans, discusses the relationship of the German minority in Romania to the countries inhabited by a majority of Germans or German speakers. Throughout the 20th century, the German minority in Romania had increasingly tighter relations with German-majority societies, mainly with (West) Germany and Austria, and to a lesser extent with (East) Germany. The focus here falls on the background, driving forces, and content of these relations, all investigated with a fine sense. The third chapter, Fascist Division in Romanian German Past, examines the relationship of the Saxons and Swabians to National Socialism. The fourth (The Iron Memory Curtain) deals with the relationship of the German minority after the Second World War with the communist regime in Romania. Lastly, the chapter (European Bridge-Builders) explores the new role of the Romanian German minority, which has almost disappeared in the decades following the fall of the Iron Curtain. The role of the German community in Romania shifted after 1990, as they abandoned their role as Europe’s eastern bulwark and saw themselves as a bridge between Western Europe and Romania, playing an indispensable role in the European integration of their former homeland.
In this respect, Koranyi’s book is distinctive as it frames the genesis of the Romanian German minority identity between 1918 and 2014, the year Klaus Iohannis was elected as President of Romania. Between these two years, the book locates 1945 as the breaking point in the history of the German minority. The book’s narrative deconstructs the claim that the German minority in Romania was largely the creator of its history before 1945 and then merely a victim. Unlike previous studies, which focused mainly on minorities, nationalisms, identities, and myths, Koranyi’s book offers a new approach to understanding the Romanian minority. It explores how the constructed and contested German identity in Romania emerged across national borders in the decades of the 20th century, for which the methodology of transnational history is an excellent tool. His analysis draws on a rich variety of sources to highlight– what Rogers Brubaker calls ‘ethnopolitical entrepreneurs’ who played a key role in the building of Romanian German identity in the 20th century. Thanks to the rich and varied primary source base, the reader is presented with a broader narrative of Romanian German identity, which is further nuanced by memory studies. By using these sources, the emphasis falls on the fluidity of the identity narratives of the Romanian Germans. As Koranyi puts it,
the representatives of the German community in Romania have become “agents of their own narrative” (16).
The study’s greatest merit lies in examining what ‘Romanian Germanness’ means. The broad time frame examined allows Koranyi to engage with memoirs, (auto)biograhaphies interviews, the press, literary fiction, visual arts and most importantly memory culture. These provide more intimate sources for examining the self-image and “mission” of the Germans, which Koranyi combines and uses with great flair. He shows how the German identity in Romania was a complex and diverse one by using these varied primary sources which unfold the stories of the key people who negotiated Romanian Germanness.
A good example in this regard is the life of Stefan Jäger. After his initial studies in Budapest, he went from being a Swabian from the Banat to a Romanian German painter. Jäger’s triptych became a reference point for Romanian German identity. A similarly telling example is Adolf Meschendörfer’s book Die Stadt im Osten, which illustrates the changes in the German community through the example of Kronstadt/Brasov/Brassó. The work of literary figures such as Herta Müller or Hans Bergel offers a touchstone for reflecting on post-1945 Romanian German identity-building themes such as the involvement in national socialism and communist Romania. Bergel upholds the narrative of victimhood of Romanian Germanness under both the Second World War and state socialism, while Müller revisits the legacy of National Socialist and Communist rule. These narratives are further nuanced in the book by personal narratives drawn from interviews. Koranyi argues that
“Three significant periods of memory construction and reconstruction – the post-war period, the 1980s, the millennial memory boom – left deep marks on Romanian German memory culture”. (171)
This constitutes the most intriguing part of the argument: Romanian German identity was not primarily shaped through the memories of 20th century events such as the Second World War, deportations, gulag, and post-1989 migrations. Instead, identity-building memories went through migrations themselves: migration shaped the content of memory. The book shows this change in the memory culture of Romanian Germans living in West Germany eloquently through their debates regarding the community’s relation to national socialism and communism. New émigrés challenged the dominating narratives.
Koranyi argues that
“In the end, this story is not just a history of a Romanian German exodus. All too often minorities, especially those in east-central Europe, are treated separately from broader European histories that we tell” (259).
The book, however, discusses the broader European history only partly, and remains primarily focused on the (state) German – (minority) German context. Furthermore, the book substantively only partially addresses the multi-ethnic or fluid German identities within ethnically diverse Transylvania or Banat. The argumentation lacks the often-controversial relationship of the Romanian Germans towards the surrounding nationalities. For instance, the author does refer to the way Saxons distanced themselves from the (Transylvanian) Hungarians in interwar Romania due to the dynamic of self-identification processes under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but does not follow how this dynamic shaped Transylvanian Saxon, or how the national minorities generally shaped each other’s identity in the decades after 1945. For example, the book displays the similarities of different Romanian, Hungarian, and German dissident groups during the state socialist times, but little is said about the influence of these national minorities on each other, or if they had any at all. The book on the other hand points out these entanglements in the post-1990 period as the multi-ethnic character. The shared Romanian, German, and Hungarian past became reference points with almost exclusively positive content. These little details would have provided further value for an already exciting analysis.
In sum, Migrating Memories sheds light on hitherto little-known chapters in the history of the German minority in Romania. The book provides new approaches with its broad primary sources and use of memory studies not only for using historiography and wide variety of sources dealing with the history of the German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe but also for the history of national minorities in Europe. Thanks to its clear and engaging narrative, the book should also be an engaging read for general audience interested in the history of ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe.
Csongor Molnár is a PhD Student at the Eötvös Loránd University, Doctoral School of History and is a Research Assistant at the Research Institute for Hungarian Communities Abroad. His main area of investigation is the history of the Banat.
