Authors

David Borchin¹;  ¹ ULBS - ISCI, Romania

Discussion

The rural landscape of the Romanian Banat was a place of marginality, where the values of the Romanian nation-state were implemented with great difficulty as they were largely met with indifference by the multiethnic and multi-denominational populace, broadly made up of Orthodox Romanians and Serbs, and Roman-Catholic Germans and Hungarians. For many of them, it seemed, societal concepts such as the nation-state were vague and far removed from their communal realities. During the interwar period, both Romanian and German political figures of the Banat worked to foster their culture and language among their ethnic kin, with the former being supported by the state and the latter receiving financial support from Germany. After 1933, this state of affairs contributed to the rise of Nazism among the ethnic German communities of Romania and in late 1940 they were granted what amounted to cultural autonomy. This, in turn, lead to an increase in Nazi behavior and rhetoric on the part of Banat German peasantry until 1944 when the Nazi movement was outlawed. This case illustrates how the Nazification of the Banat Germans lead to a majority of them to redefine their national belonging from that of the country whose citizens they were, their fatherland (Vaterland), namely Romania, to that of the country of their language and culture, their motherland (Mutterland), specifically the Third Reich.