Keywords: Herta Müller, national communism, national minorities, dissidents

The identity of individuals and communities is a construction: nation-building strategies rely on and try to create similarities. The example of minority intellectuals confronting communism (like Herta Müller, Richard Wagner, Éva Cs. Gyimesi and others) shows the borderline that communist nation-building strategies could not pass.

 

Keywords: communist Romania, Hungarians, national image, history schoolbooks, nationalism, politics of memory

The study examines the ways in which historiography and the teaching of history became a legitimizing instrument of state power under the communist regime in Romania, effecting a distortion of the Hungarians’ image as transmitted through schoolbooks. The leading questions of the research revolve around discerning the methods of manipulating the image of Hungarians and the national stereotypes furthered by the schoolbooks, the alterations of the Romanians’ historical self-image and of their representations about their “enemy”, as well as the changes affecting the official politics of memory.

 

Keywords: Hungarian minority, András Sütő, cultural elite, political protest, literature

The Hungarian section of the Nagyvárad (Oradea) Theatre presented with great success in the summer of 1987 the play of Hungarian dramatist András Sütő, Happy Lament for a Wandering Dust Mote. This review of its historical context, dramatic content and political aftermath is concerned with Sütő’s play as a typical example for the indirect mode of dissenting discourse articulated by the cultural elite of the Hungarian national minority in communist Romania. During the Ceauşescu regime, the public performance of such texts, which sometimes passed censorship due to their essential ambiguity, offered the only half-way safe possibility for political protest with their hidden meanings discernible only for the community endangered in its existence by nationalist dictatorship.

 

Keywords: Count Albert Wass, nation-building, literary reception, alternative literature

During the past two decades, the legacy of Hungarian writer Albert Wass (1908–1998) has achieved posthumous cult status. What mechanisms of literary reception does the integration of his works into nation-building discourse disclose? The author proposes four considerations in order to reveal the logic of nation-building through literature, centred upon the functioning of literature perceived as being alternative (by way of opposition, outspokenness and subversion), the eclecticism of interpretive criteria in the reception of such works, the mechanisms of duplicity, and absence as the rhetoric principle for literary reception.

 

Keywords: second modernity, nation-state, national minorities, nation-building, etnoregionalism

As we make our transition into second modernity, earlier ambitions of the nation-state begin to fade away. But does this also mean a surrender of power to the local communities by the state? And what political strategies can minorities adopt for renewed nation-building under these circumstances? According to this analysis, the main chance for national minorities lies now in regionalism. Nonetheless, etnoregionalist strategies directed against the weakened nation-state present us with problems of a different kind. Among the possible pitfalls of minority nation-building, the author mentions multiculturalism of a certain type, based on the fragmented coexistence of miniature nation-states, the persistence of a weakened nation-state with the partial loss of its traditional functions, and the reactionary confirmation of the nation-state against globalization and its crisis.