Romania and the Quest for European Identity. Philo-Germanism without Germans

At the end of 2014, Klaus Iohannis, an ethnic German from Romania, was elected president of the Republic. After a tense electoral campaign rife with unfair accusations against him, Iohannis, being placed in second position in the pre-electoral polls, managed to defeat his opponent, the Social Democratic Party candidate, Victor Ponta, in the second ballot. As the author of the volume under review suggests, Iohannis’ ‘Germanness’ vivified this success story. However, it is also important to point out that it was in fact the unforeseen pro-Iohannis participation in the second ballot that played a decisive role. That said, Iohannis’ victory delighted Romania’s civil society, and his election was received with surprise and interest outside the country, too.

Cristian Cercel’s volume starts with this event. In an attempt to contextualize it he argues ‘that post-1989 Romanian philo-Germanism without Germans is strongly connected with Romanian aspiration toward Europeanization’ (5). His intention is to reveal ‘the connections between representations of Germanness in Romania, Romanian identity and memory discourses, and visions of Europe, of the West and the Occident’ (5). The book is a revised version of Cercel’s doctoral dissertation in Government and International Relation Studies, which he defended in 2012 at the University of Durham. The volume’s structure is balanced and carefully organized. After a short introduction and the theoretical chapter, the author addresses ‘Germanness’ in interwar Romania, and then goes on to focus on the post-1990 period, when, despite the massive exodus of the Germans, they acquired an increasingly positive image in Romania and became a metaphor for Europeanization. In seven short pages, Cercel covers the entire communist period without providing a rationale for this approach. He applies Michel Foucault’s ‘discursive apparatus’ to explore the making of collective identities, thus providing the broader methodological backdrop of the book. The empirical basis of the book is largely press releases and other media sources.

After World War I, Romania almost doubled its territory and was transformed from a largely homogenous society in terms of ethnicity and religion to one with a high level of ethnic fragmentation. In 1930, 71.9 % of the population defined themselves as ethnic Romanians, while 7.9 % declared themselves to be Hungarians, followed by Germans and Jews with around 4 % each. Social complexities increased considerably, too, with the most developed provinces, Transylvania and Bucovina, reducing their agricultural workforce from almost 90 %, before the First World War, to 72.3 % by 1930. The same can be said about religious diversification. Before World War I, Lutherans, Evangelical Protestants, and Calvinists who were ethnic Hungarians and/ or Germans, but also Greek Catholics/ Uniates, who were almost all ethnic Romanians, had been virtually unknown. Yet, by 1930, the number of Ethnic Romanian Greek Catholics/Uniates had risen to more than 7 %.

Cercel outlines the difficulties both the state institutions and the German minority had to overcome to accommodate one another. He dedicates an entire chapter (‘The Self and the Other’) to the image of ethnic Romanians in the literary works of leading Transylvanian German figures during the interwar period, including writers such as Adolf Meschendörfer and Heinrich Zillich, and emphasizes their rather sceptical attitudes towards the Romanian majority. In their view, Cercel notes, Romania belonging to Europe was largely dependent on Romania’s Germans. Yet, ethnic Romanian personalities such as the charismatic historian Nicolae Iorga, or less known intellectuals such as the Bessarabian Liviu Marian, ardently supported the Germans’ mission civilisatrice towards the new Romania, enlarged as a consequence of the First World War.

Regarding this author’s bilateral interpretation of Romania’s history, a nuanced criticism seems reasonable. It comes as no surprise that in interwar Romania, a state inflated with national pride and in quest of a new identity, the German model stirred up admiration. As the author notes, this model was rooted in the early modern history of Europe and highlights the contrast between the supposedly disorganized and anarchic Eastern and Balkan societies and the German respect for structure and order as well as its cultural mission (15).

On the other hand, the German influence should not be overstated. Fierce debates took place during the interwar years about how to modernize Romania. Much like Germany, France also acted as a model for Romania, which itself faced violent nationalism, quite in contrast to these Western models. Cercel’s ‘Germanocentric’ research question seems to have led him to neglect other, equally important forces in interwar Romania. It was not about ‘the self and the other’, but rather about ‘the self and the others’, plural. Furthermore, the shift between the ‘external’ westernized ‘other’, as conceptualized in the first chapter with reference to the works of authors such as Larry Wolf, Edward Said, and Maria Todorova, and the ‘internal other’, that is the relationship between the ethnic Romanian majority and the country’s ethnic minorities (including Germans, Jews, Hungarians, and the Roma) comes across as unbalanced. Despite the theoretical framework outlined in the first chapter, which focuses on the models of Germany and France, the author later focuses more on the ‘internal’ others.

In Chapter 5, Cercel analyzes the promising German–Romanian economic relations established in the aftermath of the collapse of communism. In the subsequent chapters, his argument then focuses on the emigration of the Germans from Romania since communist times. The movement of people that had begun as a ‘human trade’ in ethnic Germans (104) under Ceaușescu, continued as a voluntary process on a huge scale in the first years of the 1990s, despite the government’s apologies for what happened under communism, and the efforts of Romanian intellectuals to persuade the ethnic Germans to stay.

Cercel argues that it was the treatment under communist rule that led Germans to acquire an exaggerated sense of victim-hood, which after 1990 became the driving force of their ‘exodus’ from Romania. Deserted Saxon and Swabian villages in Southern Transylvania are proof of this, as is the acute nostalgia expressed in the media by many ethnic Romanian intellectuals. The latter is interpreted by Cercel, throughout the volume, using the theoretical framework of ‘self-orientalization’. With this concept Cercel aims to explain the intellectuals’ deep admiration for the Western model of modernization during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. This idolization then led, he maintains, to their rejecting any model that might have ultimately proven to be better suited to describe Romania’s society.

In the last chapter, entitled ‘The Rich Villages around Sibiu and Braşov Have Been Invaded by the Gypsy Migration’—a quotation taken from a newspaper article—Cercel analyzes public discourses on this ‘invasion’ of the deserted German villages by ‘gypsies’. Instead of debating rational public policies and launching media campaigns to cope with the emigration of the Germans, the ethnic Romanian elites resorted to blaming other minorities, such as the most vulnerable one, the Roma, and sometimes even the Hungarians. Thus, in reality, their professed ‘philo-Germanism without Germans’ reveals their rejection of Romania’s other national minorities and thus, of the ‘other Others’.

The volume informs the readers about the German–Romanian relationship in the turbulent postsocialist years. The richness of detail and their careful contextualization helps readers to form an accurate image of these relationships. That said, with regard to the theoretical framework, the shortcomings I have noted above diminish the quality of the book and leave scholars specializing in this field with a sense of inconsistency.