Yesterday at Stockholm a new collection of the prestigious Nobel Awards was distributed to various people who did various things for the improvement of the life of the mankind. Or this should be the idea, even if this year was- as we will see later- not exactly true. From all the Nobels this year, two caught my attention for very different reasons: Literature and Peace. Considering the Nobel for Peace was granted to somebody much too well known all over the planet, I will leave it for the end.
The Nobel for Literature was granted to a female writer born in Romania and, of course, this made headlines in the Romanian press. However, the name of Herta Muller was completely unknown to most Romanians prior to October 2009. One of the reasons is Herta Muller left the country in 1987 and the second is she is writing in German, a language not easily accessible to most Romanians. There is also a third reason for which it was necessary a Nobel Prize for this lady to become well known in her birth country: her constant criticism of the politicians and intellectuals who dominated the Romanian public life the last 20 years.
It seems Herta Muller was marked for ever by her experience of growing and living in a totalitarian Romania, by her clashes with the Romanian communist political police, the feared Securitate, and by the way some of these clashes continued after the fall of communism, when she denounced the influence of the only partially reformed secret services as well as of former members of the Securitate in the political, economic and even cultural life of post-communist Romania. This, of course, might be seen as a problem by compromised Romanian intellectuals and trigger a certain negative attitude against this exiled writer- and probably against other exiles which show the same kind of ideas. Nevertheless, Herta Muller was easier to be kept unknown, as a German language writer, then those who, writing in Romanian, didn’t require any translation and could have been published directly.
Romania of the 1990s and the 2000s was and is not the dark place terrorised by the secret services as suggested by some Western action movies. In fact the terror truly ended as a result of the 1989-1990 revolution, but that revolution was unfortunately not complete, due exactly to the efficiency of the Securitate, who managed to prevent the formation of a strong coherent opposition during the 1980s, as it happened in Poland or Czechoslovakia. The revolution came as an explosion of rage and it was quite easy for 2nd and 3rd ranking members of the communist party and the Securitate to pose in revolutionaries and cease the power, especially since the official 1970s and 1980s propaganda was focused exclusively on the dictatorial couple and as a result only they and their closest henchmen were presented as responsible for the crimes of the regime.
Not only that the secret services of the new regime- SRI, SIE, SPP, STS, UM 0215- were formed by members of the Securitate who served the new government just as they served the old one, but former 2nd and 3rd ranking members of the communist party, the Securitate and the “red bourgeoisie” took charge of the State administration, infiltrated more or less all the political parties and much of the civil society, constituting a sort of a conspiracy to preserve and develop their class privileges and to make the restitution of the history stolen by the communist regime- a history not convenient to them- as difficult as possible.
It is symptomatic for Romania that the official condemnation of communism as a totalitarian regime and ideology came a few years ago from the current President, Traian Basescu, who not only was, like many others, a member of the communist party, but also he was in the 1980s the head of the Anvers Office of the Romanian Commercial Marine, a position which anyone who knows a little how the Ceausescu regime was working, knows he could not have without being an affiliated to the Securitate too. In fact, the whole international trade of Romania was controlled by the Securitate, and this says a lot about the very first “nouveau riches” of the 1990s (people like the Paunescu brothers, Dan Voiculescu, Viorel Catarama etc.) who simply turned the activities they were doing for the totalitarian State into their personal businesses. As a result, it is also symptomatic for Romania of the 2000s how this pre-revolution past is used as blackmail tool between politicians and businessmen, but also supposedly people of culture, because never a proper “cleaning” took place, while the secret services, who do not hesitate to listen phones and to set up all sorts of criminal files, referring to real or invented facts as well, are still very influential.

However, Herta Muller’s sudden celebrity in Romania- notably there was no big fuzz in 2008 when she was for the first time nominated to the Nobel for Literature- reminds also of the unfortunate case of the German minority in Romania. German speakers had rough times generally in the Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, which often escalated to ethnic cleansing and genocide; war crimes which some day will have to be just as discussed as the Holocaust is. Romania was unfortunately no exception, but Romania is also a special case because most of the Romanians, unlike the Polish, the Czechs or the Serbs, regret the mass migration of the German minority toward which they keep having a high regard.
The Romanian Germans are divided in 2 major historic communities, the Saxons and the Swabs, to which some smaller ones such as the Landlers can be added. The Saxons do not necessarily relate to the Germanic tribe who conquered Britain, but their name has much more to do with the use of the term of Saxon to designate all the Northern Germans in the Middle Ages. In fact they came in the late 12th Century and early 13th Century in 3 waves, the first from Flanders, the second from the Rhine Valley and the third and the most significant from Saxony, being settled by the Kings of Hungary in the newly conquered territories of Southern and Eastern Transylvania. Artisans and merchants, the Saxons were supposed to boost the economy of the area and so they did. They founded cities and gave Transylvania its German name, Siebenburgen – “the seven cities”.
The colonisation of the Saxons was also stimulated by the brief presence of the Teutonic Knights, between 1211 and 1225, but the King of Hungary felt the danger the King of Poland a little later failed to feel, and drove the Teutonic Knights out of Transylvania. Nevertheless, the Saxons endured and flourished, developing their own dialects here. They were loyal to the Voivodes of the Transylvania and later to the Transylvanian Principality and to the Habsburgs. Also, they never lost their contacts and cultural affiliation to Northern Germany and therefore in the 16th Century they converted to Lutheranism.
However, while loyal to the foreign rulers of Transylvania, the Saxons kept generally a correct relationship with the Romanian majority. This is how the oldest Romanian Orthodox church in Transylvania not converted later to Catholicism or Calvinism- as happened with the older ones- still exist in the former Saxon city of Rosenau (in Romanian Rasnov), the very first known written text in Romanian is a letter addressed by a Wallachian boyar to a Saxon notable, warning about an incoming Turkish raid, one of the very first Romanian printers was in the 16th Century Saxon Brasov (Kronstadt) and one of the main centres of the Romanian national awakening and siege of the recreated Orthodox Archdiocese of Transylvania since the 19th Century was the city of Sibiu, founded also by Saxons under the name of Hermannstadt.
A second enduring German colonisation in Trasylvania, but less important, were the Landlers, brought by Maria Theresa from the province of Landl in Austria to consolidate the Roman Catholicism in the area.
However, the second big wave of Germans were the Swabs- again initially the name of a Germanic tribe, adopted by a duchy in the Holly Roman Empire and extended during the Middle Ages to all the Southern Germans. The Danubian Swabs are the descendants of the settlers originating for Austria and Southern Germany who during the 18th Century were supported by the Habsburgs to migrate in Hungary (completely occupied by the Austrians in 1683-1687), Vojvodina and Banat (annexed by the Habsburgs in 1718), to consolidate the Habsburg rule and the Roman Catholic Church in these areas. In fact, in the historical Romanian territories the Swabs settled in the Banat and in the Northern County of Satu Mare, where again they developed their own dialects, with no exact match in the rest of the German speaking world.
The Swabs too developed a correct relationship with the Romanians and, as a result, after 1878 when Romania needed to develop the economy of the newly acquired province of Northern Dobruja, the Bucharest government of the time organised a settlement of Banatian Swabs in what were becoming the Romanian counties of Tulcea and Constanta, even if the Banat itself was still part of Austro-Ungary.
Another group of Germans were the settlers which came to Bukovina after the occupation of the region, former part of the Voivodship of Moldavia since the 14th Century, by the Habsburgs in 1775. One last German community on Romanian soil were the German settlers encouraged by the Russian authorities to settle in the province of Bessarabia, formerly the Eastern part of the historical Moldavia, taken by St. Petersburg in 1812. Both in Bukovina and in Bessarabia no tension arose between the Romanians and the Germans, even if in Bukovina the Romanian national awakening was directed against a German speaking rule.
Therefore, when in 1918 all these provinces united with Romania, this didn’t create between the Romanian majority and the German minority the kind of tension which persisted with the Hungarian minority; in fact much of the sympathy Romanians had toward Germans came from this loyalty of the German minority which always was compared with the more hostile attitude the Hungarians sometimes showed. Of course, it is an obvious fact the lack of any direct vicinity with Germany or Austria, unlike the cases of Italy, Poland or Czechoslovakia, didn’t create any feeling of separatism between Germans who all the time knew they are a minority in a foreign dominated land.
Even during the 1930s, as there was a certain Nazi wave of sympathy encouraged by Berlin between the Romanian Germans, this didn’t turn against Romania. Also, unlike the Transylvanian Jews, who remained pro-Hungarian until the Horthy regime started massacre them, or the Bessarabian Bulgarians and Gagauz who were placing their loyalty toward Russia, the Germans generally invested their loyalty toward Romania. Interestingly, when Hitler decided to give some satisfaction to the claims of its old time ally, Hungary, and to punish Romania for being much too loyal to France, he dictated a new border which was including the Hungarian majority enclave in the very centre or Romania (nowadays Counties of Harghita and Covasna, and half of the Mures County), and a large bridge comprising Satu Mare, Maramures and the North of Transylvania between this enclave and the main Hungarian territory; but he left most of the German minority under Romanian rule.
The migration of the Germans out of Romania started in fact in the same year 1940, according to a mutual understanding between the Soviets and the third Reich. After the Soviet Union annexed in late June Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (with the City of Cernauti, in German Cernowitz, where most of the Bukovinian Germans were living) commissions were formed out of Soviet and German officials and local collaborationist to identify and relocate the German ethnics. To avoid living under the ruthless communist rule, the majority of those ethnic Germans chose to be relocated and they were initially settled to the occupied Poland, to increase the German ethnicity here, to be at the end of WWII evicted to Germany.
However, the tragedy of the German speakers was only beginning. In September 1944 the self-liberated Romania was occupied by the Red Army, and the Soviets were coming with a vengeance on all Germans. In January 1945, in a move which affected most parts of Eastern Europe, at least 75,000 ethnic Germans from Romania, both women and men, aged between 17 and 45, were deported in forced labour camps in the Russian region of Donbass, where they were put to work mainly in the coal mines, but also in the State agriculture or at the railways reconstruction. The very poor conditions, comparable with those of the Nazi death camps, killed many. The survivors were liberated only in 1949-1950.
If in 1945 the Romanian government, confronted with a lot of pressure from the Soviets who were kin to enforce the local communist party to power, didn’t oppose the deportation, in 1949-1950 it didn’t oppose to the coming back of the ethnic German deportees, as the governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia did. Nevertheless, deported or not, the German ethnics were excluded from the March 1945 property reform which ended in a new distribution of land toward the farmers, and the families of those who volunteered a few years earlier in the German Wehrmacht or in the SS were expropriated of their lands.
However, this was not the end, as the Stalinist government of Bucharest launched in 1951 its own mass deportation. Due to the ongoing conflict between Moscow, and its humble servants at Bucharest, and Tito’s Belgrade, and due to the fact there was a strong and traditional connection between the people of the Romanian Eastern Banat and the people of the Yugoslav Western Banat, thousands and thousands of inhabitants of Banat, Romanians, Serbs, Swabs and others alike, were deported in the poor, arid region of Baragan, from which they were allowed to go back only at the end of 1955. The poor conditions generated a significant death count here too.
During the 1960s West Germany and Austria were recovering from disaster of the war, but they still had a demographic issue, as whole generations had been decimated. Again, Bonn and Vienna turned toward their fellow minorities elsewhere, but this time not to use them to claim new territories, but to repopulate their own lands. Therefore, having ethnic German roots became an easy way to be granted West German or Austrian citizenship. For the Romanian Germans this became an easy way of escaping the communist inferno, even if, in fact, those which were not born in Germany or Austria never fully integrated in these societies and never forgot Romania. Herta Muller herself, a Banatian Swab who escaped to West Germany in 1987, is an excellent example.
The exodus increased during the 1970s and the 1980s, when Ceausescu realised he can do easy money by actually selling the ethnic Germans to West Germany and the Jews to Israel. Unfortunately the anti-communist revolution didn’t put the mass migration to an end, as the difficult period Romania passed through the 1990s increased further instead of reducing the leaving of the ethnic Germans.
Today, the remaining Germans, either they are Saxons, Swabs, Landlers or others, are only a fraction of what they used to be. Nevertheless, Romanians keep posting the German names of the cities and villages, even if their current numbers are under 20% of the overall population in those cities and villages and the law actually says the conditions for multilingual inscriptions are to exist at least 20% of minority population and the members of this population to express their desire for the multilingual inscriptions. Also, in one of the last remaining Saxon strongholds, the major City of Sibiu, today overwhelmed by the Romanians which in the past formed the majority only of the surrounding countryside, the Mayor proposed by the German party, Klaus Jochannis, keeps being re-elected since 1992. Generally speaking, the regrets toward the German exodus are common at the Romanian majority.

Considering the above, her past as anticommunist militant and what the Romanian Germans represented in the European history, the need to preserve them and their traditions, even if I didn’t have the opportunity to read Herta Muller’s writings, I see certain justification and the Nobel Award she received.
I am not so convinced about the Nobel Prize for Peace, granted I would say in haste, if not in a total humbleness which I think unacceptable at such an intellectual level, to Barrack Obama. Yes, he is the first black President of the United States and his election marks a milestone toward the end of the old story of racism and civil rights struggle in North America. However, this is not his achievement, but that of the American voters, and if we look deeper it is only an apparent victory for the racial minorities in the United States.
Barrack Obama is not a genuine, but a fake African American. Yes, he may look black, but his African father left the family when he was only 2, and therefore he was raised by his white relatives, with some Asian contribution from his childhood in Jakarta. The African Americans are an old community, which established its own culture and traditions during almost 400 years of history. They are no longer purely African, as Obama’s father was, and neither are they the same as the White American communities, to which the mother of the American President and the relatives who educated the young Barrack belong.
Nonetheless, this is less important in granting a Nobel for Peace. What matters is what the awarded individual did for the global peace. Which raises the question of what exactly did Obama for the world peace? He changed the tone compared with the Bush jr. Administration, but by doing so he didn’t end the ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. He decided the closure of Guantanamo and the CIA secret detention centres, he talked about ceasing the criminal rendition system to treat alleged terrorists, but he didn’t take the logical step to release the prisoners, many held for years without any trial; instead he pushed toward just passing the problem to other jurisdictions of countries under American influence. He is a Muslim, but he did nothing yet to force Israel to truly negotiate with the Palestinians and end once and for all this conflict which nourishes heavily the international Islamic terrorism.
The exaggerated, even hysterical enthusiasm which surrounded the election of Barrack Obama should not influence a decision like the one to grant such an important award as the Nobel. This is not a popularity award, but one based on actions and facts which, for now, are missing in the case of the newly elected President Obama. This is no less than an insult to the people who were awarded with the Nobel for Peace in the past, after lifetimes spent in promoting peace and fighting oppression, or which, at least, without being saints, took huge steps in view or in attempts to end bloodthirsty conflicts.