2024, Volume 6
Între comunităţile de lectură şi memorie din perioada interbelică şi cea postbelică. O privire asupra bio-bibliografiei pastorului luteran Alfred Csallner
Marian Zăloagă, Scientific Researcher, Ph.D., “Gheorghe Şincai” Institute of Socio-Human Research of the Romanian Academy
Abstract
Between Interwar and Postwar Reading and Memory Communities. A Look at the Bio-Bibliography of the Lutheran Pastor Alfred Csallner
The present paper investigates the reception of the activity and the works of Adolf Csallner (1895-1992). He was one of the most exponential figures of the eugenic movement which gained audience in the interwar period among the Transylvanian Saxons and stimulated the self-Nazification of Lutheran pastors of various ranks. Csallner started as a man of the church and from that position tilted to more radical völkisch ideas, finally, becoming fascinated by the national – socialist racial ideas and choosing to infuse his works with such ideological idiosyncrasies. In the present paper, I recognize four communities of reading, each having their advocates and an anticipated readership. Hence, the authors of different printings sought to guide and influence its anticipated public to a specific understanding of the career of this Transylvanian Saxon clergyman. First and foremost, I am pursuing the feedback received from the side of the (pan-)/German and Transylvanian Saxon readership from the interwar period who read Csallner’s texts at first hand and could be animated by the same essentialist ideas. Secondly, I distinguish between a community of reading which was expected to positively respond to the efforts of rehabilitating Csallner’s work in order to defend an entire nazified generation. In relation to this, I reflect on how a diasporic Saxon readership was invited to recuperate Csallner as a martyrized man of the church, always in the service of his ethnic group with all the argumentative means available. A third community of reading is constituted by the readers who may have considered Csallner’s career and works, by circumstantial bibliographical referencing, hence, portraying him as a eugenicist among others, a veritable exponent for the phenomenon of right-wing radicalization experienced by the ethnic minorities’ elites from the post-imperial states. Finally, I identify a fourth community of reading which has been guided to regard Csallner as a racial driven clerical fascist. In short, this paper aims to demonstrate how the profile of an author entangled with the collective identity projects of an ethnic group during interwar and, especially, in post-war eras.
Keywords: communities of reading; Transylvanian Saxons; clergy; eugenics; Landsmannschaften; deprovincializing historical writing.
Pages: 153-185