Alex Drace-Francis

A Provincial Imperialist and a Curious Account of Wallachia:: Ignaz von Born

This article presents a hitherto little-known description of Wallachian (Romanian) communities in the Banat of Temesvar in the 1770s, which was reproduced, translated and commented upon in a wide variety of publications across Europe in the years to follow. The author is identified, and the accounts genesis and reception placed in its contemporary intellectual and political context, in such a way as to challenge theories of the ‘invention’ of Eastern Europe by Western Europe. Attention is also drawn to the way in which different publishing circumstances and stylistic modifications affected the way in which this proto-ethnography was interpreted, and placed in relation to other colonial encounters, such as those of the British with native populations in India and America.

The Traditions of Invention

Based on hundreds of primary sources in a wide range of languages, this book offers a reevaluation of Romanian images of self and other, as well as of foreign images of the country and people. A nuanced and historically-grounded contribution to the lively debates over Balkanism, Orientalism and identities in Romania and in Europe as a whole.

Review Essay 'All You Need is Love'

The public image of Romania in Western media offers sharp lines and bold, sometimes frightening colours: poverty, cruelty, intrigue, immigration and crime, often interspersed with surreal notes. These themes are refracted in much English-language literary representation, from pulp novels like Joseph Rosenberger’s The Romanian Operation (1983, number 57 in Rosenberger’s ‘Death Merchant’ series); Dan Simmons’s Children of the Night (1999) or more literary works such as Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (2006) or Georgina Harding’s The Painter of Silence (2012). The country’s status as a peripheral fantasy zone is reinforced in tropes such as those surfacing in the Harry Potter fictions, where Romania is a place inhabited by dragons. Admittedly, not all writing published in English fits this paradigm: perhaps the two best-known fictionalisers of Romania, Olivia Manning and Herta Müller, easily transcend such Orientalising interpretations, despite superficial appearances. Some much lesser known but imaginative explorations of ‘Romanian paradoxes’ have come from novelist Philip Ó Ceallaigh, in a set of touching stories depicting suburban Bucharest life, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse (2006) and travel writer Mike Ormsby’s comic but empathetic Never Mind the Balkans (2008), where reaction to unfamiliar mores is recounted not just in a tone of alarm but also with insight into the personal histories underlying apparently bizarre scenarios. The view from within the Romanian literary scene follows quite different rules of composition and subject, but has been harder for outsiders to access. Very little prose fiction in Romanian has been translated into English, and what has appeared has not generally been with established publishing houses. This has improved in recent years as

Beyond the Land of Green Plums: Romanian Culture and Language in Herta Müller's Work

This article attempts to survey and analyse different aspects of Herta Mullers relationship with Romanian culture and language. It begins with a brief historical account of the German communities of the Banat where Muller was born and raised. Then it focuses on three main dimensions of Mullers relationship with Romanian language and culture. First, statements about the qualities of the Romanian language and its influence upon her work are surveyed. Second, an account is given of various possible Romanian literary influences. Without overstating the extent of this influence, attention is given to the Romanian avant-garde tradition, notably the writer Gellu Naum; but also to the popular chanteuse Maria Tănase. Third, the article considers Mullers Romanian-language collages, published in 2005 as Este sau nu este Ion.

'Like a member of a free nation, he spoke without shame': foreign travellers as a trope in Romanian cultural tradition

This chapter enables a more precise focus: Romanian discourses not just about foreigners, but specifically about foreign travellers. In doing so, it seeks to raise questions concerning not just the status of Western travellers as imputed ethical arbiters, but also some of the problems and dilemmas raised by the presence and function of this trope in a variety of forms within an allegedly ‘minor’ culture. The chapter analyses a series of texts, composed between 1702 and 1858, in which Romanian authors either describe British and French travellers, or respond to the latter’s writings about their country or people. It examines some polemics of Ottoman Moldavia and Wallachia, which clearly show the impassioned responses of travelees to travel writing concerning their countries. In Moldavia and Wallachia, more explicit blame was placed on foreigners, and not just any foreigners: travellers and historians in particular were singled out for critique. Keywords:foreign travellers; Moldavia; Romanianculture; Wallachia

[Review of: W. van Meurs, A. Mungiu-Pippidi (2010) Ottomans into Europeans: state and institution-building in southeast Europe,]

to kill every last Ukrainian or even Kulak. (Naimark also suggestively evokes the dimension in which political murder becomes genocidal: it is when group members, like Kulaks, are thought to bear family-like, “ethnic” traits. Children inherited the Kulak identity. Genocide can also be about killing a people summoned into existence by the perpetrator.) But what made the Soviet regime under Stalin genocidal? And how did it cease being so after his death? Naimark is a bit imprecise here. Sometimes he talks of the Soviet “case” of genocide, at other times of the genocides of Stalin and the “Stalinist system.” In one intriguing passage he writes that the “Soviet system frightened itself with its capacity for killing masses of its own citizens.” (130) Indeed, one can think of few cases in history where a regime so rapidly relaxed repressive measures as in the weeks following Stalin’s death in March 1953. But this seems to make the genocidal character of the Soviet Union entirely dependent upon the will of one person. What about the “Soviet system” before Stalin? It also massively targeted and did away with political enemies. Was it genocidal? By contrast, Naimark makes clear, Nazism could not evolve into a post-genocidal regime. Among the many virtues of this tautly argued work is its summoning of deeper insights about the twentieth century’s infamous dictatorships. Though the subject is a dark one, the book confirms the power of scholarship to enhance not only what we know, but what we understand about the past. It also reminds us of the potential for scholars to embrace causes that are moral: Naimark seems to sense that because Stalin’s crimes have not been considered genocidal, they are often simply ignored. I recall a conversation I had at Harvard in 1989 in which a distinguished political scientist all but smirked at the idea that the Soviet regime could be considered guilty of terror and crimes against humanity in Eastern Europe. To think such things was to revert to the Cold War paradigm of totalitarianism. In this scholar’s view, the crimes of Stalin not only paled in significance: they disappeared. Thanks to the pioneering work of Naimark (and also Timothy Snyder), that is no longer the case.

War, politics and culture in Romania and East-Central Europe

These three stimulating and well written new monographs addressing twentiethcentury Romanian (and not only Romanian) history focus on war, politics and culture. While some are more successful and original than others, they all in quite different ways provoke the reader into rethinking aspects of the relatively recent past. Holly Case’s book is a study of the struggle between Hungary and Romania over the province of Transylvania during World War Two. A long first chapter – over a quarter of the main text – surveys the background to the differends between the two states and the terms on which they made claims to control Transylvania. Chapter 2 shows how both Hungary and Romania conceived their commitment to the Axis war aims as a prelude or bargaining ground for their ‘core’ interests in Transylvania. Chapter 3 focuses more specifically on experiences within Transylvania itself, through a series of vignettes or set-pieces from which a number of the strange paradoxes of wartime life are brought into perspective. One such paradox receives special treatment in Chapter 4, which looks at the