In the conflict over a DPA news report on the 1918 Union Day, the Germans rushed to replace the incriminated word “Anschluss”. Intact remains the problem of those who accuse him.

A Dambovitean interlop who headed to the west, along with the prince of a nomenclature, before making the delight of the Romanian viewers during the transition period, had been caught lying by the German police and presented to the judges.

“Leave me,” he had told the accomplice, to calm him. “I have a coat of theirs.” In front of the magistrates, the man stumbled across the nerves. “So, you say, you arrest me because you see me harsher, judge me like you did to the Gypsies in the Second World War,” he began to scream to the representatives of authority. Of course, they were horrified that they could be considered racist. So they have suddenly shown their clemency. They forgot about bars and fines, and were pleased to admonish the thieves, asking them to refrain from theft in the future.

I do not know if there is a country and authorities in the world that are more careful not to be reproached by historical revisionism than by the Germans. Officially, they pledged Nazi crimes plenary and exemplary, regretting them not only with words, but also with the deed.

More vulnerable to history than any other European state and more sensitive to its own past than its fascist allies who supported the Holocaust, Germany is also very cautious when it comes to the names of the barracks, streets, schools. Nor would it pass through a German mayor to give to the streets of his city the name of a former war criminal or any member of the Nazi Cabinet. And the change in the accusations of racism and anti-Semitism is generally at a rapid pace.

But how easy it is to take advantage of such a civilization of “conscience of guilt”, to use Karl Jaspers’ concept of a culture of guilt, as was told to those marked by western protestantism, including the German one!

The word “Anschluss” has 25 different meanings in German. It is not just the Hitlerite annexation of Austria, as Antena 3 made this mistake, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Romanian ambassador to Berlin, Emil Hurezeanu, in an angry and partly manipulative indictment against the German press agency DPA. The frightened, just like the German embassy in Bucharest, of the stridency of the accusations, hastened to change the term incriminated by Anschluss of Transylvania, used to describe the unification in one state of the Romanians on 1^st of December 1918.

To get along. It’s really a sensitive matter. And it is good to repeat that the creation of the great Romania by the unification of the kingdom with Transylvania and the Banat, supported by the Romanian majority and by some minorities, including the German ones in Transylvania, was a legitimate act, not only historically and demographically, but and in terms of international law.

But the DPA did not challenge this legitimacy in its news. Were they wrong, using the word “Anschluss” on the act of 1^st of December 1918?

It would be good to use other phrases from the same family of words. It might have been useful to avoid a polysemantic term sparking negative associations. But it seems that, where Eastern Europe has a lively political, historical and linguistic ignorance, they require the omniscience of western journalists.

How can some German editors know that they have to be cautious philologically as well in a matter in Eastern Europe that has long been done? How can they understand that, despite the accession of Romania to the EU and NATO, democracy, which regresses not step by step but with huge steps between the Carpathians and the Danube, being liquidated, and relaxation that has covered an ancient historical litigation? How to know that the atmosphere of nationalist hysteria maintained in the country by the Dragnea regime will wreak havoc, in the range of those promoted by other regimes and dictatorships, from the royal, the Antonescu-Legionary to the national-communist to Ceausescu?

Indeed, there are included “unification” and “attachment” between the 25 meanings and synonyms of the term Anschluss. The last term is also the official term used in the Romanian language for the passage of Transylvania under the jurisdiction of the Romanian state in the royal document entitled “Decree-Law No. 3631/1918 regarding the annexation of Transylvania to the Kingdom of Romania”.

It can be a stupidity, denoting ignorance, or, in the case of the MFA, a mischief of the voluntary ignorance of the German language, to translate the reductionist and unilateral a word and to restrict its meaning, to the criminalization of those who use it, to the annexation of Austria by Hitler.

Sadly, Romania’s ambassador to Berlin has joined with weapons and luggage at the campaign attached to these complaints in Bucharest. Did Emil Hurezeanu kneel in front of the ultranationalist agenda of the powerful Dâmboviţeni? I have no idea.

But the exaggerated scandal of the MFA and the ambassador to Berlin is fueling the suspicion that Bucharest has tried, not without a spectacular success, to speculate to blood the well-known German sensibilities and vulnerabilities. And, at the same time, they should distract the attention of the Romanians, through a diversion, from the truly outrageous, unrepentant, of the Dragnea-like kleptocracy.

In the securityist-post-communist oligarchy, between the Antena propagandists and the illiterate authorities of the Dragnea regime, it would be absurd to seek the immaculate. But some Romanian diplomats, like Hurezeanu, seemed different than the PSD oligarchy, which has recycled the Ceausescu-like national communiscm in recent years. Differentiated, tactfully, skillfully and honestly both the history and the Romanian language. So he could have worded more appropriately than Anschluss. It would have been expected to know that the definition of “annexation” may be, but is not, necessarily and always, pejorative.

But he is probably called to prove his usefulness by a regime that, having no assets at all, has the interest to compensate for its mischief by displaying nationalism all the way, Hurezeanu seems to have metamorphosed. He became a hero of Antena 3. And, alas, of Codrin Ştefănescu.

In response to the scandal campaign orchestrated in Bucharest, the Germans at DPA and ZDF, knowing historically, feeling guilty, rushed to appear sensitized. They also complied with the demands of the German embassy in Bucharest and gave up, replacing the word “Anschluss” with “Beitritt”, adhering, as well as “Zugehörigkeit”, membership, both doubtful in the historical context of 1918.

It’s a sad day for press freedom and for fighting the conspiracy theories, so dear to the dictators. But it is clearly a great triumph of the Dragnea regime. It is unclear, on the other hand, to what extent this diplomatic-linguistic victory will increase the number of kilometers of built highway in Romania, or the number of schools and hospitals, or the restoration of the independence of the judiciary and of the demolished Romanian state of law.

Source: DW (Translation TFP)