ABSTRACT
In 1985 in Germany, tensions which had been simmering for a couple of decades erupted into a full-blown dispute about the Nazi past among the growing Romanian-German émigré community. After 1945, Romanian-Germans were a minority both within Romania and within West Germany. A closer inspection of the internal community disputations resists the simple tag of ‘minority’. Different interest groups occupied a number of seemingly contradictory positions in complex webs of relationships. For instance, the Landsmannschaften – that is, the homeland societies of Transylvanian Saxons and Banat Swabians in West Germany – performed a dual function. The Romanian-German dispute over history occurred on different scales, from the local to the national to the transnational. If the Landsmannschaften had dominated politics since the 1940s, they faced a generational and ideological pushback towards the end of the Cold War. In the 1970s, the Landsmannschaft der Siebenburger Sachsen uncritically fawned over former Nazis without any real opposition.
