DINCOLO PRACTICI ȘI CONVENIENȚE DISCURSIVE PRECEDENTE. REPREZENTĂRI ALE ROMILOR ÎN PRESA CENTRALĂ DE LIMBĂ GERMANĂ DIN ROMÂNIA COMUNISTĂ ȘI MIZELE LOR POLITICE

Abstract

The present paper addresses a topic entirely ignored in the studies dedicated to the Roma people during communism times. I am interested to highlight how Roma were accounted for in the German speaking central press published in communist Romania. I am setting my research in the field of representation of otherness but I am setting the resulting rhetoric dedicated to the Roma in the context in which the journalists and the readership were also embodying an ethnic other that had to be surveilled and policed - it is true in a particular fashion and with other means –, by the Communist Romanian state authorities. Remarks concerning the Roma, made in a more or less fugitive fashion in various and scattered press articles, can be regarded as of secondary interests. They appear to be more likely to be a pretext to debate about the challenges encountered by the communist social engineering program. Publication of texts involving interactions between ethnics of different origins, including Germans and Roma, was also a communist journalistic strategy to propagandistically present the advancements made with regard to a provocative social issue which had been wrongly addressed by previous political regimes. In the following pages, I am examining the narratives of the articles published in the “Neuer Weg” and its yearly almanac for a period of fifty years. The objective is to illustrate how Roma were instrumentalized in a propagandistic campaign to reshape modes of thinking of the Germans from communist Romania. Different references to Roma were exploited to nurture a collective feeling of common belongingness to an imagined working - class society that had to transcend preexisting ethnic prejudiced thinking. Hints to sensitive topics like the slavery or the radical wright wing exterminations policies against the Roma were referred to in a cunning attempt to convey to the German readership a sense of guilt, and, thus, to neutralize its eventual reactions in the context of collectivization, systematization, educational, policies.