Între „Vaterland” și „Mutterland”: Relația Grupului Etnic German cu statul român reflectată în presa românească

Abstract

The paper focuses on how two Romanian newspapers, Universul (The Universe) and Curentul (The Current), reflected the tensions between the German Ethnic Group and the Romanian state between 1941 and 1944. Consequently, the paper has three parts. The first part will describe the general political context in Romania before August 1944 and how it influenced the liberty of speech and press. Also, I will include relevant information about the chosen newspapers to argue why I chose them for my analysis. This approach will explain why Universul and Curentul refrained from commenting critically on the activity of the GEG and why their published materials had similar, if not identical, content when referring to the German minority. In the second part, I will provide an overview of the GEG's political evolution, why its relations with the Romanian state became tense since the autumn of 1940 and why the conflict amplified in the following months. The third part will employ a qualitative analysis of how Universul and Curentul mapped the growing conflict between GEG and the Romanian state. Thus, official declarations of the Nazi leaders in Romania and Germany and a non-interrupted series of articles about the German minority’s allegiance to the state are analyzed to undercover the hidden reasons that prompted their publication in the press. A last point to consider is the involvement of GEG in the Romanian humanitarian campaign of the Winter Help to prove their commitment to the Antonescu regime and strengthen the military collaboration between Romania and Germany.