Centralization and Uniformization. Sport an Leisure in the Bucharest German Daily „Newer Weg” in the Second Half of the 1960s

Following the onset of the communist regime in Romania and the „denazification” process that the Germans in Romania underwent because of their involvement in the politics of the German Ethnic Group in Romania (Deutsche Volksgruppe in Rumänien) during the Second World War, the German Anti-Fascist Committee of the Romanian People’s Republic (Deutsches Antifaschistisches Komitee der Rumänischen Volksrepublik) was founded and its official newspaper, the centralized daily „Neuer Weg”, was created in 1949 as the sole newspaper in German language in the whole country. The present article analyses the sports coverage and the leisure columns within this newspaper, concentrating on the second half of the 1960s that politically constituted a somewhat positive evolution after the post-war harsh totalitarian era. From a sporting perspective, this period was characterized by an upswing that led to outstanding international performances by Romanian athletes. The sporting coverage in „Neuer Weg” is analysed by means of a series of case studies on the reporting of those international competitions where some of these performances were achieved. The identitarian and discursive shift that the Germans in Romania were bound to undergo in order to become „worthy” citizens of the socialist Romania was visible also in the sporting coverage in German language, where expressions such as „our team” or „our players” no longer referred to German teams and athletes in Romania (as it was the case in the interwar period) but to Romanian ones, since all German clubs and associations in Romania had been dissolved in the post-war years and the German athletes in Romania were bound to integrate in Romanian clubs and in the Romanian sports movement as a whole.