Barbarian and noble in late Romanian socialism. Romanian German literature and its aspirations

Some 40 years into the communist regime, the German ethnic minority in Romania went from being the second largest ethnic minority in Romania to a mere shadow of its former self. While communist nationalism started to gain momentum during the ‘70s, the emerging German intelligentsia coalesced around Aktionsgruppe Banat and adopted Marxist-Leninist ideals, going against official party doctrine. Persecuted, the driving forces of the group – forcefully disbanded in 1975 – left for Germany either during the ‘80s or soon after 1989, together with most other German ethnics. Cosmopolitan in nature, their ambitions had nothing to do with the actual political climate they found themselves in but were an aspiration towards western renditions of socialism. I argue that this very discrepancy between official doctrine and potentially subversive idealist socialism created the distinction between a sort of “Romanian” socialism – built on barbarity, surveillance, and arbitrary violence – and a refined “German” socialism – drawing on noble Brechtian sentiments of solidarity and peace. This distinction in turn fuelled the post-1989 anti-communist sentiment whose cosmopolitan roots and vilification of Romanian late socialism contributed to Herta Müller’s success.