Pan-German or Pan-Saxon? Framing Transylvanian-Saxon Particularism on Both Sides of the Atlantic

Abstract

From the mid-19th century, Transylvanian Saxons were subject to attempts to frame their particularism within two overarching pan-nationalisms: pan-Germanism and pan-Saxonism. While both lacked support before the First World War, from the interwar period pan-Germanism become important in Transylvania and pan-Saxonism among the large Transylvanian-Saxon diaspora in America. This interwar success, despite the failure of both before the war, highlights pan-nationalisms’ contingency on shifting political landscapes and their utility to their supporters. Transylvanian Saxon expressions of pan-nationalisms were also highly flexible, legitimizing platforms from cultural exchange to something approaching political and territorial unification, to integrating Saxon diasporas into their new American and West German homelands. This flexibility is overlooked in the few studies of “generic” pan-nationalism that, frequently using Germany as a case study, tend to emphasize state unification and empire building. Saxon expressions of pan-nationalism were deeply rooted in Saxon particularist understandings of the communities they posited and shaped to meet their own needs.

Notes

1 John Breuilly, “Nationalism and National Unification in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism, edited by John Breuily (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 149.

2 For example, Breuilly, “Nationalism and National Unification”; John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 96–122; Sarah Danielsson, “Pan-Nationalism Reframed: Nationalism, ‘Diaspora,’ the Role of the ‘Nation-State’ and the Global Age,” in Nationalism and Globalisation: Conflicting or Complementary?, edited by Daphne Halikiopoulou and Sofia Vasilopoulou (London: Routledge, 2011), 42–53.

3 Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981), 94–6; Tanja Bueltmann, “Anglo-Saxonism and the Radicalization of the English Diaspora,” in Locating the English Diaspora, 1500-2010, edited by idem, David T. Gleeson, and Donald M. MacRaild (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 118–34.

4 Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2006), 15–6.

5 Pieter Judson, “When Is a Diaspora Not a Diaspora?,” in The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness, edited by K. Molly O'Donnell, Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Reagin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 219–37; H. Glenn Penny, “German Polycentrism and the Writing of History,” German History 30, no. 2 (2012): 265–82; Stefan Manz, Constructing a German Diaspora: The “Greater German Empire,” 1871-1918 (Oxford: Routledge, 2013), 133–75.

6 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5–6, 109–134.

7 Ephraim Nimni, “National–Cultural Autonomy as an Alternative to Minority Territorial Nationalism,” Ethnopolitics 6, no. 3 (2007): 345–64.

8 Danielsson, “Pan-Nationalism,” 42–56.

9 For population estimates, see Konrad Gündisch, Siebenbürgen und die Siebenbürger Sachsen (München: Langen Müller, 1998), 130.

10 G. D. Teutsch, Geschichte der Siebenbürger Sachsen für das sächsische Volk. Vol I. (Kronstadt: Johann Gött, 1852), 22.

11 Harald Roth, “Autostereotype als Identifikationmuster: zum Selbstbild der Siebenbürger Sachsen,” in Das Bild des Anderen in Siebenbürgen: Stereotype in einer multiethnischen Region, edited by Konrad Gündisch, Wolfgang Höpken, and Michael Markel (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1998), 183–6; Andreas Möckel, “Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewusstsein bei den Siebenbürger Sachsen,” in Studien zur Geschichtsschreibung im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Paul Philippi (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1967), 6–11; Judson, Guardians, 15.

12 Teutsch, Geschichte (1852), 20. All translations are by the author.

13 Gündisch, Siebenbürgen, 28–43. Adolf Armbruster, Auf den Spuren der eigenen Identität: ausgewählte Beiträge zur Geschichte und Kultur Rumäniens (Bukarest: Editura Enciclopedică, 1991), 39.

14 Roth, “Autostereotype,” 180–2.

15 Ibid.

16 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilisation on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).

17 Paul Philippi, “Nation und Nationalgefühl der Siebenbürger Sachsen 1791–1991,” in Die Siebenbürger Sachsen 1791–1991, edited by Hans Rothe (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994), 73–4; Sacha Davis, “East-West Discourses in Transylvania,” in The East-West Discourse, edited by Alexander Maxwell (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 140–6.

18 Teutsch, Geschichte (1852), 51.

19 Andreas Möckel, “Kleinsächsisch oder Alldeutsch? Zum Selbstverständnis der Siebenbürger Sachsen von 1867 bis 1933,” in Siebenbürgen zwischen den Beiden Weltkriegen, edited by Walter König (Köln: Böhlau, 1994), 9; Gündisch, Siebenbürgen, 152.

20 Roth, “Autostereotype,” 183.

21 Karl Kurt Klein, “Flandrenses in Siebenbürgen,” Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 28, no. 1 (1961): 43–70.

22 Teutsch, Geschichte (1852), 19.

23 G. D. Teutsch, Geschichte der Siebenbürger Sachsen für das sächsische Volk, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1874), 21.

24 Teutsch, Geschichte (1852), 22.

25 Philippi, “Nation”; Judson, “Diaspora,” 219–37.

26 Charles Brayne, “Boner, Charles (1815–1870),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/2839; Andy Scott, “headstone for Charles Antonius Boner.” https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95871210.

27 R. M. Kettle, ed., Memoirs and Letters of Charles Boner, with Letters of Mary Russell Mitford to Him during Ten Years (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1871), Vol. I: 5–11; Vol. II: 325–6.

28 Hans Meschendörfer, “Einführung,” in Charles Boner, Siebenbürgen: Land und Leute (Cologne: Böhlau, 1987), xi–xvii.

29 Sacha E. Davis, “Hospitality Networks, British Travel Writers, and the Dissemination of Competing Transylvanian Claims to Civilization, 1830s–1930s,” Nationalities Papers 46, no. 4 (2018), 616–9.

30 Boner, Siebenbürgen, 555.

31 Charles Boner, Transylvania: Its Products and its People (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1865), 119.

32 Ibid., 68–9.

33 Ibid., 103–4.

34 Ibid., 325–6.

35 Ibid., 120–1.

36 Ibid., 120.

37 Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in British History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Montreal: Harvest House 1982), 2–3, 45–63.

38 Ibid., 45–9.

39 Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities Concerning the Most Noble and Renowned English Nation (London: John Bill, 1628), 84

40 MacDougall, Myth, 92–4.

41 Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest, Vol. 1, 6^th ed. (Baudry's European Library, 1840), 92.

42 Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Burleigh, Ostforschung, 6; Horsman, Race, 33–8.

43 Boner, Transylvania, 90.

44 Kettle, Memoirs, Vol. I: 11; Vol. II: 38–9, 64–7, 302–3; Davis, “Hospitality,” 612.

45 Siebenbürgisch-Deutsches Tageblatt (SDT) 11 March 1874: 2; 5 January 1875: 2; 1 June 1885: 1–2; 27 October 1886: 1; 15 December 1892: 1

46 SDT 5 September 1876: 3; 11 August 1881: 2; 13 May 1891: 2; 28 May 1893: 2.

47 SDT 18 November 1896: 1.

48 SDT 25 November 1874: 3; 13 November 1885: 1.

49 SDT 20 October 1880: 2; 21 October 1880: 2.

50 SDT 2 April 1893: 5.

51 R. J. W. Evans, “Hungary in the Habsburg Monarchy in the Nineteenth Century: The British Dimension,” Hungarian Quarterly 44, no. 171 (2003): 115–6.

52 Charles Loring Brace, Hungary in 1851: With an Experience of the Austrian Police (New York: Charles Scribner, 1853), 178.

53 Arthur J. Patterson, The Magyars: Their Country and Institutions, Vol. II (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1869), 260–2, 275–6.

54 SDT 11 March 1874: 2.

55 D. T. Ansted, A Short Trip in Hungary and Transylvania in the Spring of 1862 (London: W. M. H. Allen & Co, 1862), 30; Klein, “Flandrenses,” 46.

56 Boner, Siebenbürgen, 54.

57 “Transylvania: Its Products and Its People. By Charles Boner. London: 1865” Edinburgh Review 123, no. 251 (Jan–Apr 1866): 130–45; “Austria.” The North British Review 44 (Mar–Jun 1866): 51–94; London Quarterly Review 48, no. 95 (April 1877): 67–103; c.f. Robert Bell, "Transylvania: Its Products and Its People. By Charles Boner." The Fortnightly Review, 13 (15 November 1865): 120–3.

58 Michael Kroner, Siebenbürger Sachsen außerhalb Siebenbürgens (Nürnberg, 2001), 15.

59 Vermeiren, “Germany,” Austria, and the Idea of the German Nation, 1871–1914.” History Compass 9, no. 3 (March 2011): 203.

60 Roth, “Autostereotype,” 183–4; Philippi, “Nation,” 73–8.

61 Paul Philippi, “Zum Selbstverständnis der Siebenbürger Sachsen im Zeitalter des Nationalismus und danach,” in Zur Interethnik: Donauschwaben, Siebenbürger Sachsen und ihre Nachbarn, edited by Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann ([Frankfurt am Main]: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), 233–9; Philipi, “Nationalgefühl,” 73; Möckel, “Kleinsächsisch,” 129–33; Möckel, “Geschichtsschreibung,” 12.

62 Jonathon Kwan, “Transylvanian Saxon Politics and Imperial Germany, 1871-1876,” The Historical Journal 61, no. 4 (2018): 991–1015; Jonathan Kwan, “Transylvanian Saxon Politics, Hungarian State Building and the Case of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein (1881–82),” English Historical Review 128, no. 526 (2012): 593–4, 614–9; Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886-1914 (Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1984); Michael Burleigh, Germany turns Eastwards: a study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

63 Kwan, “Politics”; Möckel, “Kleinsächsisch,” 133–40.

64 Philippi, “Nation,” 80.

65 Judson, “Diaspora,” 238.

66 Harald Roth, Politische Strukturen und Strömungen bei den siebenbürger Sachsen 1919-1933 (Köln: Böhlau, 1994), 35–6, 84–9.

67 Sacha E. Davis, “Constructing the Volksgemeinschaft: Saxon Particularism and the Myth of the German East, 1919–1933.” German Studies Review 39, no. 1 (2016): 48–9.

68 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 123–8; Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

69 Davis, “Constructing.”

70 Ostland 1, no. 1 (1926): opposite page 1.

71 “Zur Einführung,” Ostland 1, no. 1 (1926): 1.

72 Davis, “Constructing,” 50–7.

73 H. Pl, “Auslanddeutschtum und Grenzlanddeutschtum,” Siebenbürgisch-Deutsches Tagesblatt (6 June 1926): 2.

74 Gündisch, Siebenbürgen, 185-–196.

75 W. Schunn, Weg und Feinde der NSDR (Sibiu-Hermannstadt: H. Schlosser, 1934), 20–3; Norbert Spannenberger, “The Ethnic Policy of the Third Reich towards the Volksdeutsche in Central and Eastern Europe,” in Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War: Goals, Expectations, Practices, edited by Marina Cattaruzza, Stefan Dyroff, and Dieter Langewiesche (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 60–1.

76 Tudor Georgescu, The Eugenic Fortress: The Transylvanian Saxon Experiment in Interwar Romania (Budapest: CEU Press, 2016).

77 Cornelius R. Zach, “Siebenbürger Sachsen zwischen Tradition und neuen politischen Optionen 1930–1944,” in Minderheit und Nationalstaat: Siebenbürgen seit dem ersten Weltkrieg, edited by Harald Roth (Böhlau: Köln, 1995), 119–20.

78 Barry A. Jackisch, The Pan-German League and Radical Nationalist Politics in Interwar Germany, 1918-1939 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).

79 Davis, “Constructing,” 56–7.

80 Danielsson, “Pan-Nationalism.”

81 Michael Kroner, “Zur politischen Rolle der ‘Deutschen Volksgruppe in Rumanien’ 1940-1944,” in Roth, Minderheit, 141–6.

82 “The Transformation of the Rumanian-German,” in National Socialism: Basic Principles, Their Application by the Nazi Party's Foreign Organization, and the Use of Germans Abroad for Nazi Aims, edited by Raymond E. Murphy, Francis B. Stevens, Howard Trivers, and Joseph M. Roland (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1943), 473.

83 Gündisch, Siebenbürgen, 211.

84 Burleigh, Germany turns Eastwards; Danielsson, “Pan-Nationalism,” 51–3.

85 Fritz Roth, Germanische Kontinuität im Südosten: Vier Jahrtausende südosteuropäischer Geschichte in Karten, Bildern und Worten (Hermannstadt: Krafft & Drotleff A.G, 1942).

86 Ibid., 7.

87 Ibid, 5.

88 Ibid., 60.

89 Sacha E. Davis, “Reflecting on the Diaspora: The Transylvanian Saxon Self-Image and the Saxons Abroad.” Zeitschrift für Siebenbürgische Landeskunde 35, no. 2 (2012): 151–8.

90 Eric Kaufmann, The Rise and fall of Anglo-America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 32–3.

91 Kroner, Sachsen, 22–5; Manz, Constructing, 134–45.

92 Renate Bridenthal, “Germans from Russia: The Political Network of a Double Diaspora,” 187–218.

93 John Foisel, Saxons through Seventeen Centuries: A History of the Transylvanian Saxons (Cleveland: Central Alliance of Transylvanian Saxons of the United States, 1936), 309–23; Siebenbürgische Zeitung (15 April 1980): 3, (30 April 1980): 3 (20 May 1980): 3.

94 Kirchliche Blätter (13 August 1922): 261–2.

95 Davis, “Reflecting,” 154–5.

96 Horsman, Race; Kaufmann, Rise, 26–52.

97 Kaufmann, Rise, 29–36; G. Weinberg, “From Confrontation to Co-Operation: Germany and the United States, 1933-1949,” in America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year Old History, Vol. II, edited by F. Trommler and J. McVeigh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 45–6; L. Rippley, “Ameliorated Americanization: The Effect of World War I on German-Americans in the 1920s,” in Trommler and McVeigh, America, 217–227.

98 Siebenbürgische Zeitung (15 September 1972): 2, (15 July 1977) 1, 4.

99 Siebenbürgische Zeitung (15 September 1972): 5.

100 Michael Cikraji, The History of the Cleveland Nazis: 1933 – 1945. MSL Academic Endeavors eBooks 1 (2016), 21. https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/msl_ae_ebooks/1

101 Cikraji, Nazis, 155.

102 Leon Wiesenfeld, Jewish Life in Cleveland in the 1920s and 1930s: The Memoirs of a Jewish Journalist (Mayfield: The Jewish Voice Pictorial, 1965), 31.

103 Ibid.., ix–x.

104 Foisel, Saxons, viii–ix.

105 Marix Beyen, “A Tribal Trinity: The Rise and Fall of the Franks, the Frisians and the Saxons in the Historical Consciousness of the Netherlands since 1850,” European History Quarterly 30, no. 4 (2000): 494–500.

106 Petrus Johannes Blok, History of the people of the Netherlands. Vol I, translated by Oscar A. Bierstadt and Ruth Putnam (New York: G. P. Putnam's sons, 1898), 42.

107 Blok, History, 53; P. J. Blok, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche volk, 3rd ed. Vol 1 (Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff's Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1923), 64.

108 Blok, History, 203.

109 Foisel, Saxons, 19-34.

110 Ibid., 27–8.

111 Ibid., 1–18.

112 Ibid., 35–259.

113 Horsman, Race, 189–248.

114 Foisel, Saxons through Seventeen Centuries, 297–305.

115 Ibid., 305. Emphasis in original.

116 Ibid., 309.

117 Ibid., 309–23.

118 Hans Foisel, Wacht auf! Ein Laienspiel aus der Urgeschichte unseres Volkes (Cleveland, OH: Saxon Publishing & Printing Co., Inc, 1938).

119 For example, Siebenbürgisch-Amerikanisches Volksblatt (22 October 1942), 6.

120 For example, Siebenbürgisch-Amerikanisches Volksblatt (31 May 1945), 4.

121 Ernst Wagner, Edward R. Schneider, Max Gross and Martin Intscher, The Transylvanian Saxons: Historical Highlights (Cleveland: Alliance of Transylvanian Saxons, 1982), 9–17.

122 Dennis Deletant, “The Transylvanian Saxons: Historical Highlights by Ernst Wagner,” Slavonic and East European Review 62, no. 1 (1984): 123–4.

123 Davis, “Reflecting,” 170.

124 Gündisch, Siebenbürgen, 211–21.

125 Cristian Cercel, “Postwar (West) German–Romanian Relations: Expanding Brubaker's Analytic Triad,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 23, no. 3 (2017): 297–317.

126 Herman Roth and Hermann Fabini, edited by Charles Boner und die Siebenbürger Sachsen [1st ed. 1946], 2nd Ed (Hermannstadt/Sibiu: Monumenta, 2018), 14.

127 Boner, Siebenbürgen.

128 Roth and Fabini, Charles Boner, 8–10.

129 James Koranyi and Ruth Wittlinger, “From Diaspora to Diaspora: The Case of Transylvanian Saxons in Romania and Germany,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 17 (2011): 96–115, 101–106.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sacha E. Davis

Sacha E. Davis completed his PhD in history at the University of New South Wales, and lectures in modern history at the University of Newcastle (Australia). His research interests include German nationalism in Eastern Europe, the treatment of Roma in the (post-)Habsburg lands, and British travel writing in East Europe.