Class Cultures in Postsocialist Eastern Europe

Abstract

tation taken from a newspaper article— Cercel analyzes public discourses on this ‘invasion’ of the deserted German villages by ‘gypsies’. Instead of debating rational public policies and launching media campaigns to cope with the emigration of the Germans, the ethnic Romanian elites resorted to blaming other minorities, such as the most vulnerable one, the Roma, and sometimes even the Hungarians. Thus, in reality, their professed ‘philo-Germanism without Germans’ reveals their rejection of Romania’s other national minorities and thus, of the ‘other Others’. The volume informs the readers about the German–Romanian relationship in the turbulent postsocialist years. The richness of detail and their careful contextualization helps readers to form an accurate image of these relationships. That said, with regard to the theoretical framework, the shortcomings I have noted above diminish the quality of the book and leave scholars specializing in this field with a sense of inconsistency.