Period of political thaw in communist Romania

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The period of political thaw in communist Romania denotes a time of relative liberalization in the People's Republic of Romania and the Socialist Republic of Romania between 1964 and the mid-1970s. It went hand in hand with the thaw period in the Soviet Union and the other countries of the Eastern Bloc after Josef Stalin's death in 1953 and was named after the novel " Thaw " by Ilya Ehrenburg (1954). Its main hallmarks were the relaxation of party control, especially in the cultural field, and the rehabilitation of ostracized politicians, intellectuals and artists.

background

The speech of Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 1956 is an important momentum of de-Stalinization . However, it is interpreted differently to what extent Khrushchev was striving for democratization or primarily named the crimes of the Stalin era in order to eliminate his rivals in the power struggle. The Poznan Uprising and the Hungarian People's Uprising of 1956 were attempts to escape Soviet influence and pressure. De-Stalinization came to a standstill there when mass movements demanded the withdrawal of the Soviet army, free elections and freedom of the press, which would have endangered the barely consolidated power of the communists.

The post-war years in Romania were characterized by the stalist policies of the Romanian Communist Party (RKP) up to the 1950s , which among other things led to armed anti-communist resistance , peasant uprisings , the deportation of Romanian Germans to the Soviet Union , and the expropriation in Romania in 1945 with the associated collectivization of agriculture and the deportation of Serbs and Germans to the Bărăgan steppe .

Late start

In Romania, the de-Stalinization under the then RKP leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was kept within narrow limits and was characterized by power struggles at the top of the party. Far-reaching liberalization was avoided in the 1950s in order not to endanger the party's position of power.

After the opening of the Soviet gulag , the Eastern European satellite states now also released political prisoners. In Romania, the return of the deportees from the Bărăgan steppe in 1956 was seen as a special sign of liberalization.

From 1952 to 1960 there was the "Hungarian Autonomous Region" ( Romanian Regiunea Autonomă Maghiară ) in Romania , which essentially comprised the present-day Covasna and Harghita counties and the eastern part of the Mureş county . The Hungarian minority in Romania had its own educational institutions, especially there. In the fall of 1956, the rumor grew that the Hungarian Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj would have to move to Târgu Mureș , which caused unrest among the Hungarian students who demanded autonomous structures. At the beginning of November, the authorities took repressive measures on the occasion of a solidarity rally in the Cluj cemetery. There was also a student uprising in Timișoara in 1956 , and there were protests against the Soviet intervention in Hungary in Bihor County , Moldova and the capital Bucharest , but a network of informants from the Securitate secret service succeeded in nipping many actions in the bud . Some resistance groups were not discovered until 1957; several people received the death penalty for merely planned actions.

In the 1959 Kronstadt writers' trial , five Transylvanian-Saxon writers were charged with forming an anti-system association and disseminating anti-regime literature and sentenced to 10 to 25 years of forced labor.

liberalization

After repressive methods had not led to the desired political success, the RKP wanted to gain more popularity and authority by means of a more attractive ideological and cultural policy. The liberalization that began with the party congress was an action directed “from above” with a “firm hand”. The new liberal phase began on June 16, 1964 with a general amnesty for political prisoners (including those convicted in show trials), which resulted in a relative relaxation in the relationship between the state and minorities.

In 1965 Nicolae Ceaușescu was appointed the new party leader of the RKP. The change of power revived the people's hope for an improvement in the general situation, because after the death of Gheorghiu-Dej, Ceaușescu maintained the liberal change of course that had begun in order to improve the image of his country. He propagated the policy of alleged political neutrality and in 1966 called for the abolition of the military blocs. In terms of foreign policy, the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Federal Republic of Germany was particularly welcomed in Western Europe .

At a party congress of the RKP, Ceaușescu admitted abuses such as abduction and expropriation in minority politics after the end of the war, which appeared to be significant for the country's ethnic minorities, as they were granted “correct treatment” and “more rights”. A new constitution should guarantee minorities the free use of their mother tongues in schools and in public. The minorities were now officially referred to as "naţionalităţi conlocuitoare" ( German  nationalities living with them ). In 1968 "Councils of the Working People of Hungarian, German and Serbian Nationality" (see Council of Working People of German Nationality ) were constituted and incorporated into the "Front of Socialist Unity". This raised hopes, but actually only feigned democratic say.

Numerous Romanian cultural journals were founded in the province, and in 1970 the publishing industry was decentralized and, as a result, there were more favorable publication options for all writers. The publishing house of the co-resident nationalities " Kriterion " took over most of the German-language book production, other publishing houses such as "Ion Creangă" (children's literature) and "Albatros" in Bucharest, "Dacia" in Cluj-Napoca and "Facla" in Timișoara began immediately after their establishment also to publish works in German. The newspaper “ Neue Literatur ” appeared monthly from 1968; in Sibiu the “ Hermannstädter Zeitung ” appeared on February 25, 1968 (from 1971: “Die Woche”); in Timișoara from February 21, 1968 - as the successor to “Truth” - the Neue Banater Zeitung ; instead of the “people's newspaper”, the “ Karpatenrundschau ” appeared in Braşov . The phase of liberalization reached its climax in 1968, when the head of state and the Communist Party of Germany, Ceaușescu, together with the other Warsaw Pact states, refused to suppress the Prague Spring .

Transition to dictatorship

From the mid-1970s, state-controlled liberalization finally came to an end, when Ceaușescu gradually turned to an increasingly dictatorial course, in the course of which minority politics hardened again with Romania's increasing national communist orientation.

The historian Günther H. Tontsch explained : “In addition to direct repression, a ' pinprick policy ' dominated, which drew its ideological legitimation from the 'nation theory' anchored in the party program and implied the assimilation of minorities in the desired homogeneous nation state. The minorities were humiliated by officially decreed or covert historical falsifications, their press organs were prohibited from using place names in their language, immigration regulations massively influenced the ethnic composition of Hungarian settlement areas in particular, traditional minority schools were merged with Romanian ones, books and press products were imported from the mother countries massively restricted etc. "

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cornelia Harlacher: Nikolaus Berwanger - life and work of a Romanian German. Vienna, May 2008, p. 21.
  2. ↑ a b Freie Universität Berlin , Mariana Hausleitner : From thaw to frost. Germans and other minorities in Southeastern Europe 1953-1963. , Conference report: November 2, 2007 - November 3, 2007, Klausenburg / Cluj, Romania, in: H-Soz-u-Kult , December 17, 2007
  3. ^ Anneli Ute Gabanyi : Party and literature in Romania since 1945. R. Oldenbourg, Munich 1975, p. 49.
  4. ↑ William Totok : The compulsions of memory. Records from Romania. Junius, Hamburg 1988, pp. 45, 48.
  5. ↑ Jürgen Henkel: Introduction to the history and ecclesiastical life of the Romanian Orthodox Church. LIT Verlag, Münster 2007, ISBN 3-8258-9453-3 , p. 98
  6. ↑ Lönhárt Tamás In: Free University of Berlin , Mariana Hausleitner : From thaw to frost. Germans and other minorities in Southeastern Europe 1953-1963. , Conference report: November 2, 2007 - November 3, 2007, Klausenburg / Cluj, Romania, in: H-Soz-u-Kult , December 17, 2007
  7. ↑ Anneli Ute Gabanyi: The unfinished revolution. Romania between dictatorship and democracy. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1990, p. 79.
  8. ↑ William Totok: The compulsions of memory. Records from Romania. Junius, Hamburg 1988, p. 49.
  9. ↑ a b Günther H. Tontsch: protection of minorities in Eastern Europe. Romania. University of Cologne
  10. ^ Diana Schuster: The Banat Authors' Group. Self-presentation and reception in Romania and Germany. Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz 2004, p. 32.
  11. ↑ a b Thomas Krause: The stranger races through the brain, nothing .... Images of Germany in the texts of the Banat Authors' Group (1969-1991). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1998, p. 47.
  12. ↑ William Totok: The compulsions of memory. Records from Romania. Junius, Hamburg 1988, p. 52.
  13. ↑ René Kegelmann: "At the limits of nothingness, this language ...". On the situation of Romanian-German literature in the 1980s in the Federal Republic of Germany. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 1995, p. 21.
  14. ↑ Peter Motzan: The Romanian German literature in the years 1918-1944. Kriterion, Bucharest 1992, p. 110
  15. ^ Romania begins to come to terms with the atrocities in the Ceaușescu era. In: Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of September 4, 2013
  16. ↑ Romania wants to punish murders from the time of communism. In: The time of September 3, 2013
  17. ^ Romania is working through the dictatorship. Investigations into the murders of political prisoners. In: Der Tagesspiegel from September 5, 2013