Motherlands and Father Countries: Transylvanian Saxon Images of Loss and Belonging in Modernity

In 2009, the German-Romanian poet Dieter Schlesak (b. 1934) published the elegies collected under the title Transilvania Mon Amour, a set of poignant images of desertion, loss, and longing. He begins his book referring to the two-volume photograph album by Transylvanian sculptor Peter Jacobi, a highly aestheticized display of elaborately staged and touching still-life compositions of abandoned Transylvanian Saxon sites. These works, among several others, exploit a reflection on existence as loss, as always under threat, as fragile, as spectral. The first word of Schlesak’s first poem, in all bold capitals, is SCHWACH—an echo from nowhere. This echo, however, comes from somewhere. In this contribution I would like to compare these and other post-1945 aesthetic productions of tragic fragility and loss to Transylvanian Saxon self-representations from periods of presumed greater strength and vitality from the period of Habsburg rule. Rather than seeing this as an insulated and integral community that is increasingly threatened in the twentieth century, my interpretation focuses on the relations among Saxon, Hungarian, Szekler, and Romanian cultures as well as the links to Vienna, Prussia, and then the German Empire.