The German Model in Romanian Culture / Das deutsche Vorbild in der rumänischen Kultur

According to a popular anecdote, when asked by his entourage “What do Romanians need?” (In order, it was implied, to overcome their seemingly never-ending backwardness), Ion Luca Caragiale (1852–1912), the most celebrated Romanian playwright of the nineteenth century, promptly answered: “A Jerry!” (= a German). The apocryphal nature of this mot d’esprit resides not only in its total absence from any of his writings, but also in the fact that it seems to go against his own biography: although Romania was ruled by a German for most of the playwright’s life – Karl I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (1839–1914), as of 1866 Prince and then King of Romania as of 1881 –, Caragiale still chose to move to Berlin in 1905, where he would spend the rest of his life. Nevertheless, the anecdote remains significant for the constant fascination that the “Germans” (a term that did not exclusively refer to the German-speaking people but was a general metonymy designating “Westerners”) exerted on Romanians since the early modern era up until to the present time. Because, even if the number of ethnic Germans in Romania decreased from c. 300,000 to below 23,000 following the 1989 Romanian Revolution (according to the 2022 census data), Germany still represents a model of culture and civilization, chiefly associated with hard work, tenacity, perseverance, seriousness, precision, organization, sophistication and, in general, with traits that Romanians themselves consider they lack or that they possess to an insufficient degree. A recent, indisputable proof of the longevity of this model is the election of the former mayor or Sibiu/Hermannstadt, a Saxon town in Transylvania, as President of Romania in 2014 and 2019, respectively. Klaus Iohannis, an ethnic German, channeled the hopes of a population which had had enough of the “Balkan,” “uncivilized,” “convoluted” ways of conducting politics in Romania – the ridiculousness of which Caragiale had harshly criticized in his plays in the late nineteenth century – and thus embodied the ideal of an “enlightened” leader who would prove able to help the nation “overcome its seemingly never-ending backwardness” and “fix” it.

Ultimately, though, Iohannis’ initial success did nothing but show the entrenchment of myths regarding Western – and especially German – superiority in Romanian public consciousness. For, ever since Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system analysis was introduced to literary studies by Franco Moretti,¹ the core-periphery dichotomy has allowed the latter to finally articulate its own peripherality, and that not only with regard to the contemporary degree of subordination vis-à-vis the Western core, but also while (re)considering the historical evolution of said subordination. For, regardless of how the current world-system is changing in the longue durée, with old hegemonic powers seemingly losing their precedence in a pluri-centric world, the inertia with which this is taking place can only make us question whether or not even older hegemonies have truly lost their grip on the cultural workings of the (semi)peripheries. Two examples are, we think, illustrative of this inertia. The first one involves Immanuel Wallerstein himself, whose 2003 book, The decline of American power: The US in a chaotic world,² written in response to the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York, seems not only dated, but also somehow embarrassing in the crass fallacy of its prediction, given that 20 years later, the USA has not only not declined – or, if it has, it did so to an unnoticeable degree –, but seems to exert an even stronger influence on world events and mindsets. Superseded in some respects by various emerging powers, it still possesses not only an economic and military, but especially a cultural and symbolic ascendency over the world. The second example, which brings us closer to the overarching theme of the present volume, is Germany’s continued importance for the literary world-system: as late as 2016, Germany was the third-largest book market in the world in terms of total revenue from sales and licensing for the retail sector, right after the USA and Japan.³ It might seem insignificant, but the presence of a European player among the top three book markets in the world raises a question regarding the importance of this very player within Europe, i.e., regarding the influence it possibly exerts on contemporary trends in the book markets of emerging European nations.

Cristian Cercel has compellingly shown how the German influence has unfolded in the Romanian periphery following the 1989 Romanian Revolution by way of drawing on the historical role played by the Saxon community in Transylvania.⁴ Starting with the twelfth century, the Romanian and the German cultural space have been intrinsically tied through the colonizing expanse of German settlers in Transylvania, who have come to be chiefly regarded as agents of an “‘export of learning’ (Bildungsexport) through the German language,”⁵ an export of technology, as upholders of Protestantism, “arguably the most globally pervasive intellectual force within German ethnic communities,”⁶ and as defenders against “barbaric” invasions. Their historical presence, as well as their social, cultural, and economic influence over the centuries build the prerequisites of a first major shift in Romanian culture during the nineteenth century, as the French model – designating a fascination for French cultural life, for French literature, for French customs, items of clothing, the importance of French as language of cosmopolitan exchange and administration,⁷ and so on – was replaced or at least contested by the German model, through which Romanian culture “compensated” and “trim[med] the heavy influence of a foreign literature [the French] by reorientation toward another foreign literature [the German].”⁸ This compensation falls in line with Lucian Blaga’s considerations about the role each of these nations played in shaping Romanian culture, which do not by any means glorify the relevance of one element to the detriment of the other, but point to a major difference in the type of influence they exerted. Drawing on a concept borrowed from chemistry, Blaga articulates two types of influence in his Trilogia Culturii [Trilogy of Culture]: the “modelling” influence, dictating universal cultural laws from a position of absolute authority, embodied by the French model; and the “catalytic” influence, tending to foster the individual development of each culture on a path of self-determination and according to the sum of its particularities: