Directly involved in the politics of the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania as member of Parliament (1992–1996 and 1997–2004) and also as its president between 1998 and 2002, Wolfgang Wittstock (2004, 34) saw the core areas of his activity as a representative of the German community in the Romanian Parliament as having to do with minority protection, reparations for the arbitrary measures taken during the communist dictatorship and the restitution of nationalized properties. In a similar vein, when asked about the reasons behind the fact that Romanian German migration to the Federal Republic did not stop after the dissolution of the socialist regime but rather continued and actually reached its acme in the early 1990s, literary critic Stefan Sienerth alluded to a counterfactual history scenario while, however, admitting that it was a “thought impossible to verify”: “if the land restitution had taken place at the beginning of the 1990s and if the official apologies of the Romanian state had come earlier, the history of the Germans in Romania might have looked different”. ¹