Horst Klusch

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Horst Klusch (born May 12, 1927 in Brenndorf , Romania ; † December 16, 2014 ) was a Transylvanian-Saxon folklorist , collector and expert on Transylvanian ceramics. In addition, he caused a sensation with a new theory on the early history of the Transylvanian Saxons, the origin of which he saw not in a planned settlement of colonists by the Hungarian crown , but in a wild land grab by scattered participants in the peasant crusade.

Life

Klusch attended the Brukenthal Lyceum in Sibiu and then the pedagogical school. In 1948, in the year of the communist school reform, he was assigned to Rätsch in the Alba district as a chemistry teacher . He devoted himself to folklore from an early age. This interest began through studies of the collection of painted regional ceramics of the Protestant pastor Ludwig Klaster from the neighboring town of Urwegen . He himself began to collect exhibits of Transylvanian folk art from all local ethnic groups. A first exhibition of this collection took place in 1967 in Sibiu School No. 3, of which he had been the director since 1958. In 1968 he organized the first pottery market in Sibiu. In 1971 he turned his hobby into a profession when he was offered the position of a museum specialist at the Sibiu District Committee for Culture. In the same year he was instrumental in founding the village museum in Michelsberg , followed in 1973 by the textile museum in neighboring Heltau . He was also involved in furnishing the village museum in Cristian, which was founded in 1969 . In the following years he published numerous specialist publications on Transylvanian folklore and developed into an expert in European ceramic research. In 1983 he gave up the organization of the pottery market after 25 years. In 1988 he published a work on the history of the Transylvanian goldsmith's art, which was reissued in 2012 in a revised form.

After the revolution of 1989 Klusch devoted himself to material folk culture as well as other topics of folklore that were politically too sensitive before, such as the history of the immigration of the Transylvanian Saxons, about which he published a new theory in 2001. In 2013 an exhibition was dedicated to Klusch and his collection in the Emil Sigerus Museum in Sibiu.

Pottery market

The pottery market founded by Horst Klusch (Rum .: Târgul Olarilor ), which he organized for 25 years, has since developed into a fixed point in the city's cultural calendar. Pottery from original folk production is presented and offered for sale by potters from all over the country, above all ceramics from the Szekler village of Korund , from Horezu south of the Carpathian Mountains , from the Banat and Bukowina (Rădăuți). Since 1980, a pottery market has been held based on the Sibiu model in Dießen am Ammersee in Bavaria and since 2000 in Klagenfurt in Carinthia.

Crusade theory

In his book On the Settlement of the Transylvanian Saxons , published in 2001, he presented a fundamentally new thesis on the origin of the first wave of Transylvanian Saxons settling in the Middle Ages. The previous research opinion is based on a planned settlement of German settlers by the Hungarian crown under Géza II . However, Klusch believes this is unlikely, since Géza's reign of constant conflicts with the Roman-German King Konrad III. and no major emigration to Hungary is documented in the chronicles of the regions of origin. He advocates analyzing the origin of the Saxons completely independently of an organized German colonization in the east .

Rather, Klusch suspects that the first Saxons, completely unplanned, settled in Transylvania as scattered refugees from the peasants' crusade of 1096, which ended in chaos . In his opinion, this is supported by the fact that the oldest settlements are not to be found in the west, but in the south of Transylvania. He thinks that about 10,000 survivors of this crusade because of their previous looting along the Danube in Zemun and Belgrade were afraid to take the same path back to the home and in front of Byzantine persecutors of today's Bulgaria from up north of the Danube in the Wallachia by beating which was then controlled by the Pechenegs . From there these crusaders moved over the Rotenturm Pass over the Carpathians to the north, where they found largely deserted areas.

The Hungarians tolerated this horde of refugees, who were at least Catholic co-religionists and meanwhile also experienced in combat, and recruited them as border guards for their Gyepű system in southern Transylvania. According to Klusch, this status was only legalized by documents 50 years later under King Géza II, but it existed before that.

According to him, the origin of the first settlers from Wallonia , Flanders and the area around Cologne , which corresponds to the composition of the peasant crusade army, also speaks in favor of the thesis with the peasant crusade . According to Klusch, of all the crusade armies that marched from Germany through Hungary, the unorganized train of the peasant crusade is the most likely, because this alone also included numerous women and children and this was the only way of permanent settlements and ethnogenesis , during later crusade armies consisted mainly of knights and male foot soldiers, excluding women from home.

As a further indication, Klusch sees the fact that these Catholic settlers were not directly subordinate to the Hungarian clergy, but rather had close ties to the Milkow diocese on the other side of the Carpathian Mountains ( Kumanenbistum , today: Milcovul , Vrancea district ) until the Reformation .

Since the official historiography, which was largely written in the 19th century, is also partly based on circumstantial evidence, the new theory of Klusch led to some discussions among historians in Transylvania as well as in the " original home ". So far, however, the theory has not found a hearing in science.

The title of his work refers directly to a work by Thomas Nägler , who in 1976 comprehensively summarized the previous doctrinal opinion on the early history of the Saxons.

Fonts (selection)

  • For the settlement of the Transylvanian Saxons . Kriterion, Bucharest 2001.
  • Magic of old tiles from Romania . Ed. Imago, Sibiu 1999.
  • From the folklore of the Transylvanian Saxons . Honterus-Verl., Hermannstadt 2003.
  • Transylvanian goldsmithing . Kriterion-Verlag, Bucharest 1988.
  • Transylvanian pottery from three centuries . Kriterion-Verlag, Bucharest 1980.
  • The Habaner and their pottery workshop in Winz. Orient and Occident wrote a unique chapter in the arts and crafts . New way, Sibiu 1969.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Horst Weber: The ceramic specialist and collector Horst Klusch turns 70 . Hermannstädter Zeitung , May 9, 1997
  2. ↑ Hannelore Baier: The "inventor" of the pottery market . General German newspaper for Romania (ADZ), April 16, 2013
  3. ↑ Holger Wermke: Corvinius cup and dragon goblet . Transylvanian Newspaper, August 14, 2012
  4. ^ Horst Weber: Exhibition about Horst Klusch . Transylvanian Newspaper, May 1, 2013
  5. ↑ Targul Olarilor . ( Memento from April 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Cultura Sibiu, accessed on December 25, 2014 (Romanian)
  6. ↑ Bodo Bost: New hypotheses about the settlement of the Transylvanian Saxons in Romania , Luxemburger Wort, January 9, 2003
personal data
SURNAME Klusch, Horst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Transylvanian-Saxon folklorist and collector
DATE OF BIRTH May 12, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Brenndorf , Romania
DATE OF DEATH December 16, 2014