Creating the New Man: Coercion and Torture in Eginald Schlattner's Novel Rote Handschuhe (2001)

Abstract

At the center of this article lies the idea of creating the New Man, a formative idea in any authoritarian regime. I claim that, in their drive to create the New Man by any means necessary, decision‐makers of Communist regimes strove to transform those who did not adhere to their ideal into non‐persons. To illustrate this, I focus on Eginald Schlattner's autobiographical novel, Rote Handschuhe (2001), which depicts the process by which the Securitate (Communist Romania's secret police) re‐educates the first‐person narrator of Transylvanian‐Saxon ethnicity and bourgeois origins and trains him to be a loyal Communist. The nameless narrator succumbs to the violent pressure exerted by the Securitate and becomes a witness for the prosecution in a trial against fellow ethnic German writers in Romania in the late 1950s. Yet he finds that the very system that required his re‐education as a means to ensure its absolute control excludes him from full membership after he has served his purpose. In so doing, however, the regime undermines its own tactics and opens up the possibility of the individual's survival.