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Hitler's coming to power in Germany had its key consequences upon the fate of the German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. The German community in Romania constituted no exception. After 1933, a process of radicalization can be noticed in the case of the Transylvanian Saxons, one of the several German-speaking groups in Romania. The phenomenon has already been analyzed in its political and economic dimensions, yet not so much in its social ones. This article looks at the latter aspect, its argument being that the Nazification of the Transylvanian Saxon community can be best comprehended by using a conceptual framework developed by political scientist Donald Horowitz in the early 1970s. The analysis uses a series of contemporary sources (diaries, issues of the official periodical of the Lutheran Church in Transylvania, Kirchliche Blätter), but also a wide range of secondary sources, academic and literary. Consequently, the article shows that especially after 1933, the Lutheran affiliation, highly relevant for the production and reproduction of the traditional model of Transylvanian Saxon identity, shifted from the status of a criterion of identity to a mere identification indicium. At the same time, the attraction of a (Pan-) German identity, with its Nazi anchors, became stronger and the center of gravity for Transylvanian Saxon identity radically moved towards German ethnicity, in its National-Socialist understanding.

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This article argues that positive representations of the German minority in post-1989 Romania, discernible in specific memory and identity discourses, are linked to an internalized self-orientalizing view of Romanianness and to a symbolic wish to “belong to Europe,” present in Romanian society and displayed on the Romanian political scene. In other words, it maintains that a phenomenon describable as “philo-Germanism without Germans” in contemporary Romania is tightly connected with the production and reproduction of symbolic geographies whose aim is to insert Romania into the “civilized” Western/European world.

Within the EU-Horizon-2020-funded project Unsettling Remembering and Social Cohesion in Transnational Europe (UNREST), 1 one work package (WP4) analyzed the memorial regimes of museums related to the history of World War I and World War II in Europe. An article by Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen (2016) entitled "Agonistic Memory" provided the theoretical framework for the analysis. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe's work (2005, 2013), the authors distinguish three memorial regimes: antagonistic, cosmopolitan, and agonistic. Antagonistic memory landscapes, revolving around adversarial contrapositions of friends/foes, heroes/villains, and good/evil, dominated the scene in Europe before World War II and well into the second half of the twentieth century, at a time when memory politics underpinned nationalist governments. In the 1980s, however, also under the influence of European integration, memory politics started to move toward cosmopolitanism (Levy and Sznaider 2002). Since the 1990s, this approach has been extended to Eastern Europe. A cosmopolitan memory discourse promotes empathy with and compassion for the "other" by focusing on the suffering and plight of the victims. However, the more recent rise of populist right-wing movements has seen a revival of antagonistic memory against which the dominant cosmopolitan memory regimes seem helpless. Hence, Cento Bull and Hansen suggest that agonism in memory politics might better be able to counter the rise of right-wing populist movements in Europe, as it engages with sociopolitical emotions and passions, and since it revisits the historical processes and struggles that led to people becoming perpetrators, victims, and bystanders.WP4's key objectives were to establish the dominant memory regimes in selected war museums in contemporary Europe, and assess the possible inclusion of agonistic representations and practices. Hence, researchers analyzed the representations of war in five war museums and aimed at evaluating the reception of their exhibitions among visitors. In what follows, we present the key results of the research undertaken within WP4. First, we briefly introduce our case studies and discuss the methodology that we employed. We then present some results from our comparative analysis focusing on the key question of which memory regimes are dominant within war museums in contemporary Europe and of how the public interacts with such regimes.