ABSTRACT

Expressionism, a more palatable modernism, was the only modern idiom so deeply assimilated as to become a means of localism and regionalism, instead of the typical avant-garde cosmopolitanism. Expressionism segregated and exacerbated the ethnic, cultural, and social particularities of the national constituencies in Romania. Expressionism constituted a very short-lived, but intensely debated cultural moment for the German ethnic minority in Transylvania during the period after the First World War and up until the mid-1920s. The rejection of expressionism in the Saxon-German conservative milieu is understandable if one takes into account the fears associated with the avant-garde. Looking at expressionism from a Pan-German historical perspective, one would see the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in January 1919 as throwing the Weimar Republic into a revolutionary nightmare. Hungarian expressionism in Transylvania produced less powerful individual figures than did the Saxon-German.