“Auch bei uns im fernen Transsilvanien”: The Transylvanian Saxons and the Long Shadow of the Third Reich in the Work of Bettina Schuller

Summary

Published in 2012, Bettina Schuller’s (1929–2019) memoir Führerkinder: Eine Jugend in Siebenbürgen (Führer-Children: A Childhood in Transylvania) is a relative latecomer to the public discussion of the relationship between the Third Reich and the Transylvanian Saxons, an ethnic German group settled in the historical region of Transylvania since the twelfth century, who made up a small but powerful economic and cultural elite of the interwar Kingdom of Romania and proved especially receptive to National Socialist ideology. Nevertheless, the memoir was perceived in the Transylvanian Saxon press as having broken a taboo for its unsparing portrayal of the interwar and war years in Kronstadt (Romanian: Braşov), the Saxon economic and cultural center where Schuller was born in 1929 and which shortly after became the seat of the National Socialist movement in Transylvania.

The assessment of the “broken taboo” is a rhetorical gesture often employed by reviewers when describing the engagement of Transylvanianborn authors with this facet of the Saxon past, but it is not an empty one: while this engagement reaches back to the 1980s and has led to a change in the scholarly discourse, acceptance at the popular level has lagged behind. Thus, Schuller’s memoir is an important addition to what Olivia Spiridon has termed the “Berichtigungsdiskurs” (discourse of rectification) in German-language literature from Romania, aimed at “Historisches, besonders Ereignisse des Zweiten Weltkrieges und der Nachkriegsjahre ins richtige Licht zu rücken.”Spiridon applies the term to fictional texts in which self-avowal, childhood and war memories, and the depiction of historical processes and social panoramas flow into each other. Although Spiridon does not discuss memoirs as part of this discourse, Schuller’s Führerkinder easily fits Spiridon’s definition and is aligned with the life writing of other Transylvanian-German writers born in the interwar years, such as Hans Bergel (b. 1925), Eginald Schlattner (b. 1933), and Dieter Schlesak (b. 1934). But Schuller’s work also departs from the perspective of these authors, who recount the identity journeys of male protagonists, and questions gendered assumptions about women’s experiences and historical agency.

The daughter of a respected lawyer and a locally celebrated singer, Bettina Schuller was born into a world of upper-middle-class privilege, which was shattered, however, with the end of the Second World War and the expropriation, deportation, and social demotion of the ethnic German population in postwar Romania.