CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Wendt, Christopher Timothy |
|---|---|
| Title | Schwaben, Banater, Deutsche: Formulating Germanness in the Greater Romanian Banat, 1918-1935 |
| Summary | In this thesis I examine the nationalization process of an ethnic German minority community, the Banat Swabians, during the earlier interwar period in the state of Greater Romania. I ask how Swabian leaders conceived of and transmitted their sense of “Germanness” to the wider German-speaking community from the last days of the First World War, when the Banat became dislodged from Austria-Hungary, until 1935, when the local German-Swabian political leadership was incorporated into the newly transformed National Socialist umbrella organization of ethnic Germans in Romania. Using a source base primarily composed of local press and contemporary publications, I examine the fluctuation between consensus and disagreement over what “being German” in the Banat meant, and how different components—a connection to a wider German cultural community, Catholic faith, regional rootedness, ethnicity and race—were often emphasized to different degrees, at different times, by different groups. The argument that I ultimately mean to advance regarding the form of “Germanness promoted by Swabian leaders in the Banat rests on a perceived link between “the political” and “the cultural.” Driven by political necessity, Swabian leaders—many of whom had before the war bought into the Hungarian nation-state project—quickly came to espouse a Germanness rooted in ethnicity and represented by volkstümlich or, in some cases, völkisch language. In mediating this cultural image of the German Banat Swabian to the wider community through the 1920s, an exclusivist discourse on Banat Germanness was established that paved the way for more extreme political demands and calls for radical social reorganization. |
| Supervisor | Trencsényi, Balázs; Hennings, Jan |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/wendt_christopher.pdf |
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