Romania
Romania
Etymological derivation
The name ‘Romania’ (Romanian: România) derives from the name of the country’s majority population, the Romanians. In ancient times, much of what is now Romania belonged to Dacia, an early state in the Carpathian Basin, which was conquered by the Roman Empire in 105–106 AD and transformed into the province of ‘Dacia’. Roman rule lasted until the withdrawal ordered by Emperor Aurelian (273). Although the nature of the Romanian people’s ethnogenesis is not without controversy, research largely agrees that the Roman colonisation of Dacia had cultural and linguistic consequences. The ethnonym‘Romanian’ (român) is closely related to the ethnonym‘Roman’ (roman). The historian Adolf Armbruster speaks of an ‘Oriental Romanity’ in the Early Middle Ages, which was later equated with the Romanian people.[1] Another ethnonymic term, which broadly refers to the population inhabiting the territory of present-day Romania, was ‘Vlachs’ (valahi). However, particularly since the 18th century, the local elites have predominantly favoured the term ‘români’, as this alluded to the population’s noble origins and, at the same time, served as an argument in favour of their centuries-long presence in a disputed region such as Transylvania.
Location and topography
Romania is situated in south-eastern Europe. Its current area covers 238,391 km². Romania’s neighbouring countries are Bulgaria to the south, Serbia to the south-west, Hungary to the west, Ukraine to the north and east, and the Republic of Moldova to the north-east. In the south-east, Romania has direct access to the Black Sea.
Historical Geography
On 5 January 1859, Alexandru Ioan Cuza (1820–1873) was elected Prince of Moldavia (Romanian: Moldova) and, shortly afterwards, on 24 January 1859, Prince of Wallachia (Romanian: Valahia, Ungrovlahia,Țara Românească or Muntenia). From the outset, the capital of the state was Bucharest/Bucureşti. The union of the two principalities, which was initially centred on the person of the ruler, was recognised internationally in 1862. The United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (Romanian: Principatele Unite ale Moldovei şi Valahiei) adopted – following the election of Karl (Romanian: Carol) I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen as ruler (Romanian: domnitor) – adopted a constitution on 1 July 1866 which established the name of the state as Romania. Until 1878, Romania was under Ottoman suzerainty and comprised Wallachia and Moldavia (excluding Dobruja and Bukovina, but including Southern Bessarabia). Romania’s neighbours were the Habsburg Monarchy to the west, the Russian Empire to the north and the Ottoman Empire to the south.
In 1878, following the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78 – which is portrayed in Romanian historiography as the ‘Romanian War of Independence’ – Romania gained independence and acquired Northern Dobruja, but lost Southern Bessarabia to Russia. Following the Second Balkan War, Romania also acquired Southern Dobruja (Romanian: Cadrilater) in 1913, which had belonged to the Tsardom of Bulgaria since 1878.
The most significant changes to the country’s borders took place after the First World War, when, under the 1920 Treaty of Paris, Romania was awarded Transylvania, the Banat and Bukovina (which had previously belonged to Austria-Hungary) as well as Bessarabia (which had previously belonged to Russia). This gave rise to what was known as Greater Romania (Romanian: România Mare), with an area of 259,641 km². It bordered Bulgaria to the south, Yugoslavia to the south-west, Hungary to the west, Czechoslovakia to the north-west, Poland to the north and the Soviet Union to the north-east.
The Second World War also brought about a series of border changes. As a result of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939), Romania lost Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union (June 1940). Under the Second Vienna Award (August 1940, known in Romanian as the ‘Vienna Dictate’), Northern Transylvania was annexed by Hungary. In September 1940, Romania and Bulgaria signed the Treaty of Craiova, under which Southern Dobruja was ceded to Bulgaria. During the Second World War, between 1941 and 1944, Romania annexed Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina; it also administered Transnistria, the region between the Dniester and Bug rivers. In 1944–45, it recaptured Northern Transylvania from Hungary. The Treaty of Paris (1947) awarded Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union, and Northern Transylvania back to Romania; these border changes remain in force to this day.
Apart from the administratively autonomous capital, Bucharest, the modern Romanian state is divided into 41 counties (Romanian:județ).
Nation-building
As in many other European countries, the process of the so-called ‘national awakening’ in Romania took place primarily from the end of the 18th century onwards. Although there had been no ‘Romanian’ state in the Middle Ages, the terms ‘rumân/român’ and ‘Romania’ were already in common use at that time. The latter, however, referred to the north-eastern part of the Roman Empire and not just to the territory north of the Danube.
The historian Ioan Aurel Pop speaks of a ‘medieval Romanian nation’ and of ‘medieval Romanian solidarity’[2]. Such bonds of solidarity, however, had hardly any political or national connotations and were rather targeted responses to local issues. An ethnically Romanian ‘imagined community’ (in the sense used by Benedict Anderson)[3] could only emerge much later, partly as a result of the development of modern means of communication. The so-called ‘Romanian principalities’ (Moldavia, Wallachia, Transylvania) were political constructs in which the ethnic Romanian element did not play a state-sustaining role. ‘Romania’ as a nation-state objective did not exist before the 19th century. It was not until around 1800 that the term ‘Romania’ came into use to denote ‘all the lands inhabited by Romanians’ (Alex Drace-Francis).[4]
Since the Middle Ages, Moldavia and Wallachia had been under the more or less intensive suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire, whilst Transylvania belonged to Hungary until 1526, then became an autonomous principality under Ottoman suzerainty and, from 1699 (Treaty of Karlowitz/Karlovci) until 1920 (Treaty of Trianon). A Romanian elite emerged in Transylvania in the 18th century, partly as a result of the union of a section of the Orthodox Church with the Roman Catholic Church. This offered opportunities for social advancement. Representatives of the so-called Transylvanian School (Romanian: Şcoala Ardeleană) promoted the ideas of the Enlightenment and Herder’s pre-Romanticism; they established the first coherent elite discourses on Romanian national identity.
In Wallachia and Moldavia, too, notions of a ‘national identity’ for the Romanians were constructed. During the Revolution of 1848–49, there was an intensive exchange on this complex of issues amongst the elites of the three regions.
The so-called ‘rediscovery’ of Romanian national identity – a term often used to reinterpret its actual construction – also resulted in a linguistic ‘re-Latinisation’ (abandonment of the Cyrillic alphabet, enrichment of the lexicon with words from Latin, Italian and French at the expense of ‘outdated’ Slavic, Greek and Turkish vocabulary); particularly in the second half of the 19th century, there were also attempts to adopt ‘Western’ codes of conduct and fashions.
Romania between 1859 and 1918/19
Between 1859 and 1914, there were three significant moments in the history of the Romanian state: In 1866, Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza was forced to abdicate and Karl (Carol) of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (1839–1914) was elected Prince of Romania (1866–1881; 1881–1914: King of Romania). In 1866, Carol I signed the country’s first largely democratic constitution, which remained in force until 1923 and defined the unified state of Romania as a constitutional monarchy. In 1881, the Kingdom of Romania was proclaimed.
At the start of the First World War, Romania was allied with the Central Powers, but the country declared its neutrality by 1916. Pressure from France and the special interests of Romania, supported by Carol’s nephew and heir to the throne, Ferdinand (1865–1927; King of Romania 1914–1927) and by the Liberal Party led to Romania entering the war on the side of the Entente in 1916. Romania temporarily occupied Southern Transylvania and parts of Eastern Transylvania, but was driven back by the German and Austro-Hungarian armies in the autumn of 1916. Consequently, by the end of 1916, the Central Powers had occupied Bucharest and a large part of the country; the Romanian government and the royal family were forced to relocate to Iași in unoccupied Moldavia. With the help of a French military mission led by General Henri Mathias Berthelot (1861–1931) and Russian troops stationed in Moldavia, the Romanian army, led by General Alexandru Averescu (1859–1938) succeeded in halting the German offensive into Moldavia. The country celebrates the Battle of Mărăşeşti as its greatest victory and the Treaty of Bucharest (May 1918) as its greatest defeat; however, the latter was never implemented in view of the general course of events and the defeat of the Central Powers. The agrarian reform (large-scale land distribution) carried out after the end of the war had its origins in the promises made to the peasants during the war by the king and the Romanian political elites.
Greater Romania during the interwar period and the Second World War
At the end of the First World War, Romania found itself on the side of the Allied Powers and benefited as a result. Transylvania, the Banat, Bukovina and Bessarabia joined the Kingdom following respective Romanian national assemblies held in each region. The union of Transylvania with Romania, decided on 1 December 1918 in Karlsburg/Alba Iulia and sealed by the Treaty of Trianon, was of great symbolic significance.
The integration of the new territories into the unified state proved problematic, partly due to the historically distinct political cultures, and partly due to the transformation of the ‘old’ kingdom (also known as the Altreich or, in Romanian, Regat) into a de facto multi-ethnic and multicultural state. The elites in Bucharest, however, regarded Romania as a ‘Romanian’ nation state and had little sympathy for the concerns of the new minorities. A series of reforms, such as the agrarian reform, the monetary reform and the reform of the education system, were, on the one hand, steps towards the modernisation of the country and, on the other, instruments of a policy of nationalisation.
The interwar period is idealised as a golden age of Romanian history both in much of Romanian historiography and in public discourse. The teleological interpretation of the unification as the ‘fulfilment of a thousand-year-old dream of the Romanian people’ stems from the resulting nationalism and ethnocentrism. However, the democratic character of Romanian political life and the rich cultural life of this period were undermined by attempts at Romanianisation. The rights promised to minorities by the Karlsburg Resolutions of 1 December 1918 were not implemented. Anti-Semitism, the affinity of key figures in cultural and political life – such as Emil Cioran (1911–1995), Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) and Octavian Goga (1881–1938) towards various forms of fascism, the terrorism of the Iron Guard, the corruption of the political elites and much more discredited the political system and had an anti-democratic effect.
The appeal of authoritarian forms of government ultimately led to the royal dictatorship of Carol II (1893–1953; King of Romania 1930–1940). In 1940, after Romania had lost parts of its territory without a fight, the king abdicated. In September 1940, a fascist dictatorship (statnațional legionar) was established in Romania under the rule of General (later Marshal) Ion Antonescu (1882–1946; Leader [conducător] of Romania 1940–1944), who was supported by the fascist Iron Guard (Garda de Fier, also known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael). In January 1941, a bloody clash took place between the Iron Guard and Antonescu (the so-called Legionary Putsch), from which Antonescu emerged victorious.
In 1941, Romania joined the Axis powers and entered the war against the Soviet Union. Its troops occupied Bessarabia, including Transnistria, and Northern Bukovina. In addition to a disastrous military campaign against the Soviet Union, Antonescu’s regime was responsible for implementing a separate Romanian programme for the extermination of Jews and Roma in Transnistria and on the territory of pre-war Romania. On 23 August 1944, Antonescu was deposed by a coup d’état orchestrated by the young King Michael (Mihai) I (born 1921; King of Romania 1927–1930, 1940–1947); Romania subsequently joined the anti-Hitler coalition.
However, as the major powers agreed to leave Romania within the Soviet sphere of influence, the country was de facto occupied by the Red Army. The Soviets forced a pro-Moscow government to take power (6 March 1945) and compelled Michael I to abdicate. On 30 December 1947, he was forced to leave the country, and the Romanian People’s Republic (Republica Populară Română) was proclaimed.
Romania under Communist rule
As leader of the Communist Party (known from 1948 to 1964 as the Romanian Workers’ Party, Rom. Partidul Muncitoresc Român), Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (1901–1965) ruled with an iron fist from 1947 to 1965; This resulted in political purges and the annihilation of the country’s political, economic and cultural elite in the Romanian ‘Gulag’. Following the Soviet model, the nationalisation of private property and the collectivisation of agriculture took place, accompanied by violent unrest, with far-reaching consequences. Administratively, Romania was reorganised into ‘regions’. The 59 counties (județe, administrative units in the interwar period) were abolished and replaced by 26 regions (regiuni), which were subsequently reorganised several times. From 1952 to 1968, the Autonomous Hungarian Region (Regiunea Autonomă Maghiară) also existed, with its seat in Neumarkt am Mieresch/Târgu Mureș, which was intended to demonstrate the minority rights of the Hungarians to the outside world, but which in reality, like the other regions, was subordinate to the central government in Bucharest. In 1968, thejudețe were re-established.
Gheorghiu-Dej succeeded in eliminating his opponents within the communist elite, such as Ștefan Foriș (1892–1946), Ana Pauker (1893–1960), Vasile Luca (1898–1963), Teohari Georgescu (1908–1976), Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu (1900–1954) and Remus Koffler (?–1954). He also advocated a certain degree of independence from Soviet hegemony. The industrialisation of the country that he spearheaded ran counter to Soviet plans for Romania to play a primarily agrarian role within the economic structure of its satellite states. He also succeeded in persuading the Soviet army to leave the country in 1958. This development, coupled with the looming Sino-Soviet conflict, enabled the Romanian Workers’ Party to issue a policy statement on 26 April 1964, articulating the party’s and state’s aspirations for independence from the Soviet Union.
Following the death of Gheorghiu-Dej, Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–1989; 1965–1989) came to power and intensified the policy of distancing the country from Moscow that Gheorghiu-Dej had initiated in 1964. The continuation of relations with Israel following the Six-Day War (1967) and the condemnation of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968) were key moments in this distancing, which also led to Romania’s rapprochement with the West. In this context, not only were diplomatic relations established with Western states such as the Federal Republic of Germany (1967) or deepened – for example, with the United States – but relations with other communist countries (China, North Korea), with the non-aligned states and with international organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were also strengthened.
However, an ultimately disastrous economic policy (overambitious projects), an increasingly dictatorial domestic policy, the ban on abortion, the trend towards national communism and the cult of personality surrounding Ceauşescu, however, weakened the country and ultimately culminated in the bloody December Revolution of 1989, which brought an end to communist rule.
The lasting consequences of the dictatorship include the mass emigration of the Jewish and German minorities, the radical restructuring of the state, the economy and society, and the impoverishment of the population.
Romania after the end of communism
The post-communist political elites in Romania promoted the country’s rapprochement with the European Union and NATO; however, the economic course pursued at the same time, which was committed to neoliberalism, led to significant social disparities.
The country’s first president after the fall of communism was Ion Iliescu (born 1930; 1990–1996, 2000–2004), a former Communist apparatchik. It was not until the first post-communist change of government (1996) that the way was paved for capitalism and a market economy. During Iliescu’s second term as president and Adrian Năstase’s premiership (born 1950; 2000–2004), Romania joined NATO in 2002. Under President Traian Băsescu (born 1951; from 2004) and Prime Minister Călin Popescu Tăriceanu (born 1952; 2004–2008), the country was admitted to the European Union in 2007.
In many respects, the current regime appears to bear similarities to those of the interwar period: widespread corruption in politics and the economy, smouldering inter-ethnic conflicts between Romanians and Hungarians, and a certain dominance of foreign economic interests comparable to neo-colonialism. Particularly worrying is the fact that Romania has become a ‘supplier’ of cheap labour to other European Union countries, such as Italy, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom, thereby intensifying the brain drain from the country.
Population
Between 1859 and 2013, there were 12 censuses in Romania (1859/1960, 1899, 1912, 1930, 1941, 1948, 1956, 1966, 1977, 1992, 2002, 2011). They were conducted using different methods, shaped by the scientific and ideological paradigms of the respective periods.
Before the formation of Greater Romania, Romania was a state with a small number of ethnic minorities. According to the 19th-century censuses, Romania had a population of 3,864,848 (1859) and 5,956,690 (1899).[5] However, these censuses did not record the number of Romanian citizens who identified as German.
The 1930 census, led by Sabin Manuilă, showed that Romania was, in fact, a multicultural country. Only 71 per cent of the population (total: 18,057,028 inhabitants) were Romanians. The country was also home to Hungarians, Germans, Jews, Russians, Roma and others. 4.1 per cent of the total population were Germans (745,421 citizens), including Transylvanian Saxons, Banat Swabians, Sathmar Swabians, Bukovina Germans, Bessarabian Germans and Dobruja Germans.[6]
In the context of the Second World War and the associated territorial loss, Romania had a population of 13,535,757 in 1941. Of these, 542,325 were Germans.[7]
The first post-war census (1948) recorded a population of 15,872,624. The questionnaire did not ask about ethnic affiliation, but it did ask about mother tongue: 343,913 respondents stated German as their mother tongue.[8] The relatively small number of Germans compared with earlier censuses cannot be explained solely by the events of the war
During the communist period, there was steady population growth: in 1956, Romania had 17,489,450 inhabitants, 348,708 of whom were Germans.[9] In 1966, the country had a population of 19,103,163, including 382,595 Germans,[10] in 1977 the population stood at 21,559,910, including 332,205 Germans.[11]
The sharp decline in the population is an alarming indication of the country’s social and political problems in the post-communist era. In 1992, Romania had a population of 22,760,449 (of whom 119,436 were Germans),[12] in 2002 the figure stood at 21,680,974 (of whom 59,764 were Germans).[13] At the time of the last census conducted by the National Institute of Statistics in 2011, only 19,042,936 people were living in Romania, of whom 16,869,816 were Romanians (88.6 per cent). The largest ethnic minorities in 2011 were the Hungarians (1,237,746, 6.5 per cent) and the Roma (619,007, 3.2 per cent); the German population in Romania (Transylvanian Saxons, Banat Swabians, Sătmar Swabians, etc.) numbered 36,884.[14] An unknown number of Romanian citizens live and work in other European Union countries, primarily in Italy and Spain.
4. The Germans of Romania
From a historical, cultural and political perspective, the Transylvanian Saxons and the Banat Swabians are the most significant German-speaking groups in Romania. However, taken as a whole, the German minority in Romania has consisted and continues to consist of several groups: alongside the Transylvanian Saxons and the Banat Swabians, the Sathmar Swabians lived and continue to live here, the Spiš Germans in the Vișau region, the Landlers, the Bukovina Germans, the Dobruja Germans and, during the period when Bessarabia was part of Romania, the Bessarabian Germans.
The discursive amalgamation of the German-speaking groups in Romania into a ‘German minority in Romania’ is a phenomenon dating from the period after 1918. Strictly speaking, one can only speak of ‘Romanians of German descent’ from the period following the First World War, as prior to 1918 only a few ‘Germans’ were Romanian citizens, e.g. the Dobruja Germans and the Germans in the so-called Altreich, particularly in Bucharest. However, the term ‘Romanians of German descent’ only came into common use after the Second World War, reflecting efforts to create a shared identity for all German-speaking groups in the country.[15]
The 1918 Karlsberg Resolutions on the union of Transylvania with Romania also contained provisions regarding the rights to self-determination of the peoples living there, which raised great hopes not only among the Saxons, the Swabians and the other German-speaking groups, but also among other ethnic minorities in the country. The fact that these provisions were never put into practice is one reason for the constant dissatisfaction of the German elites. Nevertheless, they generally endeavoured to cooperate with the Romanian political parties.
All German-speaking groups moved closer to National Socialism, though the impact on them varied considerably. The support given to the so-called ‘ethnic Germans’ by the German National Socialists and the border changes resulting from the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact contributed to the implementation of the ‘Heim ins Reich’ programme. As a result of these measures, Germans from Bukovina, Bessarabia and Dobruja were resettled into the Third Reich, which was forcibly expanding its borders.[16] The Transylvanian Saxons and the Banat Swabians were not affected by such measures. At the height of Nazi Germany’s power and influence in Europe, and as a result of the German–Romanian rapprochement, they were granted, in November 1940, under the leadership of the ‘German Ethnic Group in Romania’—which was brought into line with Berlin— a high degree of autonomy was granted to them within the framework of the Romanian state. From 1943 onwards (Hitler–Antonescu Pact), many young Romanian Germans, enthusiastic supporters of National Socialism, served in the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht.[17] In this context, many of them no longer dared to return to their Romanian homeland after 1944/45.
With the end of the Second World War, the Romanian Germans became a population without legal status: their expropriation (March 1945) and the temporary deportation of those fit for work to the Soviet Union for so-called ‘reconstruction’ (January 1945 to 1949) shaped the lives of the Transylvanian Saxons, the Banat Swabians and the other Germans still living in Romania.[18] Between 10 and 15 per cent of those deported to Russia perished during the deportation; a large proportion of the survivors were ultimately released not into Romania but into what was then the Soviet occupation zone of Germany, which led to the separation of families on either side of the Iron Curtain. The Banat Swabians living on the border with Yugoslavia were, in June 1951, during the Stalin–Tito conflict, were deported to the Bărăgan Steppe along with other population groups deemed unreliable (e.g. Romanian large-scale farmers and factory owners). From 1949 onwards, the Romanian Germans were granted their civil rights once more, and in the years that followed the German Anti-Fascist Committee was founded; German-language newspapers (‘Neuer Weg’, ‘Banater Zeitung’, “Volkszeitung”) were admitted, and mother-tongue education was permitted and state-subsidised. In 1956, the expropriated homes were returned, and state-subsidised theatres were established in Sibiu and Timişoara. The intellectual elite, entrepreneurs and large-scale farmers, on the other hand, were politically persecuted and ‘re-educated’ in penal camps (e.g. through forced labour on the Danube–Black Sea Canal). Following the revolution in Hungary (1956), leading intellectuals were once again imprisoned – for example, in the so-called ‘Writers’ Trial’.
Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rise to power initially led to greater liberalisation, which also appeared to have a positive impact on the lives of minorities in Romania. The establishment of the “Council of Working People of German Nationality” in 1968 is a visible result of these liberalisation measures.
From the 1970s onwards, as Ceaușescu’s economic and social policies became increasingly repressive and began to take on the characteristics of a form of national communism, internal and external pressure on the German minority to emigrate grew ever greater. The so-called ‘ransom’ of ethnic Germans in Romania during the Cold War increased in the final decade of the Ceaușescu regime. Numerous ethnic Germans from Romania emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany from the 1960s onwards, with numbers rising significantly in the 1970s and 1980s. This trend reached its peak with the 1989 revolution and the opening of the border, leading to the so-called mass exodus of Germans from Romania.
As late as December 1989, the ‘Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania’ was founded as a representative political and cultural organisation. Under Romanian legislation, this organisation was, and still is, almost automatically represented by a member in the Romanian Parliament. Today, the results of the censuses show a significant decline in the number of Ethnic Germans in Romania. Nevertheless, since the year 2000, there has been a noticeable revival of German cultural and political life in Romania, particularly in the district of Sibiu.
Bibliography
Nation-building
- Adolf Armbruster: Romanitatea românilor. Istoria unei idei [The Romanity of the Romanians. History of an Idea]. 2nd ed. Bucharest 1993.
- Alex Drace-Francis: The Making of Modern Romanian Culture. Literacy and the Development of National Identity. London, New York 2006 (International Library of Historical Studies 41).
- Keith Hitchins: The Idea of the Nation among the Romanians in Transylvania 1691–1849. Bucharest 1989.
- Claude Karnoouh: The Invention of the People. Chronicles of Romania and Eastern Europe. Paris 2008.
- Sorin Mitu: The Ethnic Identity of the Transylvanian Romanians. A History of Its Origins. Cologne et al. 2003 (Studia Transylvanica 29).
- Ioan-Aurel Pop. Națiunea română medievală: solidarități etnice românești în secolele XIII–XVI [The Medieval Romanian Nation: Romanian Ethnic Solidarities in the 13th–16th Centuries]. Bucharest 1998.
Across the Ages
- Mihai Bărbulescu, Dennis Deletant, Keith Hitchins, Șerban Papacostea, Teodor Pompiliu: Istoria României [The History of Romania]. Bucharest 2002.
- Lucian Boia: History and Myth. On the Presence of the Past in Romanian Society. Cologne et al. 2003 (Studia Transylvanica 30).
- Florin Constantiniu: O istorie sinceră a poporului român [An Honest History of the Romanian People]. Bucharest 1997.
- Catherine Durandin: Histoire des Roumains. Paris 1995.
- Constantin C. Giurescu: Istoria românilor [The History of the Romanians]. Bucharest 1942–1946. (German translation: Bucharest 1980)
- Nicolae Iorga: Istoria românilor pentru poporul românesc [History of the Romanians for the Romanian People]. Vălenii de Munte 1908.
Literature on individual periods from 1859 onwards
- Wolfgang Benz, Brigitte Mihok (eds.): The Holocaust on the Periphery. Policy towards Jews and the Mass Murder of Jews in Romania and Transnistria 1940–1944. Berlin 2009 (Series: Documents, Texts, Materials / Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin 73).
- Adrian Cioroianu: Pe umerii lui Marx. O istorie a comunismului românesc [On the Shoulders of Marx. A History of Romanian Communism]. Bucharest 2007.
- Dennis Deletant: Hitler’s Forgotten Ally. Ion Antonescu and His Regime in Romania 1940–1944. Basingstoke, New York 2006.
- Tom Gallagher: *Modern Romania. The End of Communism, the Failure of Democratic Reform and the Theft of a Nation*. New York 2008.
- Keith Hitchins: Rumania 1866–1947. Oxford 1994 (Oxford History of Modern Europe).
- Irina Livezeanu: Cultural Politics in Greater Romania. Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle. Ithaca, NY, London 1995.
- Hans Christian Maner: Parliamentarism in Romania (1930–1940). Democracy in an Authoritarian Environment. Munich 1997 (Southeast European Studies 101).
- Vladimir Tismăneanu: Stalinism for All Seasons. A Political History of Romanian Communism. Berkeley, CA, et al., 2003 (Societies and Culture in East-Central Europe 11).
- Annemarie Weber: ‘Romanians of German Descent’? Discourses on the Group Identity of a Minority (1944–1971). Cologne et al. 2010 (Studia Transylvanica 40).
Web links and databases
- rolinest.edu.ro/V/C9TC9IGJ46KRL8M9Q6K8A5TGCHV3JA6BUR66IJA5AJ4CNFU2D7-00448?func=quick-
- www.arhivelenationale.ro/index.php?lan=0&page=145 (Database of fonds and collections held by the National Archives in Bucharest)
- archive.is/digitool.dc.bmms.ro:8881 (Database of digitised sources and books on Romania)
- society4romanianstudies.org/ (website of the Society for Romanian Studies)
Notes
[1] See Armbruster: *Romanitatea românilor*, pp. 17–45 and elsewhere.
[2] See Pop: The Medieval Romanian Nation, p. 11 and elsewhere.
[3] Benedict Anderson: The Invention of the Nation: The Life and Times of a Fateful Concept. Frankfurt am Main, New York 1996.
[4] Drace-Francis: The Making of Modern Romanian Culture, p. 9.
[5] Leonida Colescu: The General Census of the Population of Romania. Definitive Results Preceded by an Introduction with Explanations and Comparative Data [The General Census of the Population of Romania. Final Results, with an Introduction containing Explanations and Comparative Data]. Bucharest 1905, p. XIX.
[6] Sabin Manuilă: The General Census of the Population of Romania of 29 December 1930. Volume II: Ethnicity, mother tongue, religion [The General Census of the Population of Romania of 29 December 1930. Vol. 2: Ethnicity, mother tongue, religion]. Bucharest 1938, p. XXIV.
[7] Central Institute of Statistics: The General Census of Romania, 1941. 6 April. Provisional summary data [The General Census of Romania of 6 April 1941. Provisional data]. Bucharest 1944, p. IX.
[8] Dr A. Golopenția, Dr C. Georgescu: The Population of the Romanian People’s Republic on 25 January 1948. Provisional results of the census [The population of the Romanian People’s Republic on 25 January 1948. Provisional results of the census]. Bucharest 1948, p. 37.
[9] Central Statistical Office: The Population Census of 21 February 1956. General Results. Bucharest 1959, p. 556.
[10] Central Directorate of Statistics: Population and Housing Census of 15 March 1966. Vol. I: General Results. Part I: Population [The General Population and Housing Census of 15 March 1966. Vol. 1: General Results. Part 1: Population]. Bucharest 1969, p. 153.
[11] Central Directorate of Statistics: Population and Housing Census of 5 January 1977. Vol. I: Population – Demographic Structure [The Population and Housing Census of 5 January 1977. Vol. 1: Population – Demographic Structure]. Bucharest 1980, p. 614.
[12] National Commission for Statistics: Population and Housing Census of 7 January 1992. Preliminary results [The Population and Housing Census of 7 January 1992. Preliminary results]. Bucharest 1992, p. 38.
[13] www.insse.ro/cms/files/rpl2002rezgen1/14.pdf (accessed 13 May 2012).
[14] See www.recensamantromania.ro/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Comunicat_DATE_PROVIZORII_RPL_2011_.pdf (accessed 13 May 2012).
[15] Annemarie Weber: ‘Romanians of German Descent?’ Discourses on the Group Identity of a Minority (1944–1970). Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 2010.
[16] Dirk Jachomowski: The Resettlement of the Germans from Bessarabia, Bukovina and Dobruja. From an Ethnic Group in Romania to a ‘Settlement Bridge’ on the Reich’s Border. Munich 1984.
[17] Paul Milata: Between Hitler, Stalin and Antonescu. Romanian Germans in the Waffen-SS. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 2007.
[18] Hans Bergel: The Historical Break. Reasons for the Emigration of Germans from Romania. Paper presented at the 11th Sighet summer school organised by the Academia Civică foundation, 2008.
Citation
Cristian Cercel: Romania. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2013. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32633 (accessed 12 February 2021).
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