Suchergebnisse

The Romanians in Transylvania accomplished in the 19th century the transition from the old self-sufficient rural society to a society dominated by bourgeoisie values. The intellectual elite, trained in the educational institutions of the Habsburg Empire, in Vienna, Budapest, Oradea, Cluj, Schemmitz, is the expression of the assumption of these new values. Overall, more than 2041 Romanians studied in the first half of the 19th century in the colleges and
universities of the Empire.

In 1957, The Scientific Research Base of the Romanian Academy in Târgu Mureș was created, an institution that in 1967 was named the Center for History, Philology and Art History. In 1970, it came under the control of the Academy of Social and Political Sciences, receiving the name of the Center for Social Sciences, the research was included in the propaganda themes of the communist regime. Between 1957 and 1971, the Research Base was headed by Fuchs Simion, a left-wing man who was active during the interwar period in the Communist Youth Union, illegally a man with a dramatic biography, deported to Auschwitz, where he lost his mother, wife, and two children. During the time he held the position of director, Romania experienced two distinct periods in the evolution of Romanian communism. The first period was between 1948 and the early 1960s, when historiography was enslaved to the communist regime, recalling Stalin's recommendation of 1930, "that history is not science but politics projected into the past". After the establishment of the communist regime, in historiographical terms, Romania was disconnected both from its cultural tradition and from its ties with the West, triumphing in the historiography of the so-called "Marxist-Leninist" discourse. The second period began in the 1960s and lasted until 1974, when a party program was broadcast at the PCR Congress, in which Nicolae Ceaușescu summarized national history on 18 pages. The 1960s politically coincided with Romania's distancing from Moscow and the encouragement of the national discourse, giving historians the chance to recover a part of the interwar historiography. The history of the Institute reflects an era and a destiny of a left intellectual in the "century of extremes", as Eric Hobsbawm called it.

The present study applies the concept of identity negotiations, used in the field of psychology to describe the processes of self-representations and social interactions, in the sphere of cultural and historical studies, applied in the research of the American war correspondent Leigh White's reports about Romania between 1939–1940, more exactly about the partition of North-West Transylvania. The attention will be focused on the negotiations between the identity representations of this correspondent about Romanians and minorities in this space and how social interactions satisfy or contradict self-representations and the objective goals of these interactions. The historical contexts in which these identity negotiations take place between the self and the other (the others, in the multi-ethnic and multicultural space of Transylvania) will be those with an extreme identity charge, proving how negotiations and communication can be suppressed in conditions of war. The study focuses on the dramatic event represented by the cession of North-West Transylvania in favor of Hungary as a result of the Vienna Award in August 1940, with references to the Bucharest Pogrom of January 21–23, 1941, with the crimes and atrocities committed against the Jews, a subject that will be treated in a separate study. Journalists such as Leigh White and his colleagues Cyrus L. Sulzberger, Robert Parker, Robert St. John, Leland Stowe, Countess Rosa Goldschmidt Waldeck, or Ray Brock will try to understand the identity traits of the others, knowing their historical and cultural context and, at the same time, trying to negotiate with their own baggage of stereotypes, or with the propagandistic directions of the official American or Romanian discourses, or, in extreme cases, with local censorship. American war correspondents proved to be not only over-qualified and over-professional, but also cosmopolitan, tolerant, experienced professionals or young novices, full of energy and enthusiasm, struggling to get at any valuable information, regardless of distance and dangers in war zones. They were sharp observers, checking the news and comparing it with other sources before sending their reports to American publications. In this way, Romanian-American identity and cultural negotiations took place above local human interactions.