Colonists, Rulers, Saviors: Philo-Germanism without Germans

Abstract

Drawing on Cristian Cercel’s 2019 contribution Romania and the Quest for European Identity: Philo-Germanism without Germans, the present article pursues the creation of Romanian philo-Germanism following the 1989 Romanian Revolution in the paradoxical absence of the German minority, which all but disappeared during the early ‘90s; the arguments follow an ethnic group which evolved from being an agent of colonial power in the late Middle Ages to becoming an agent of transnational capital in postcommunist times. Additionally, the article discusses the inflated importance of the German civilizational model as a cure for the perceived shortcomings of a semi-peripheral nation for which self-colonialism, imitative capitalism, brain drain, and labor extractivism were seen as the only conceivable ways of preventing demotion to the status of periphery following the revolution. Lastly, the different manifestations of this cultural stance are represented, as well as how sympathy towards one minority was gradually institutionalized and practiced on a large scale to the detriment of others, chiefly the Hungarians and the Roma, in a case of revived nationalism and ethnocentrism on behalf of the vanishing Germans.