As a metaphor, the kaleidoscope stands for different modes of being that arise from the same set of particles. It is a frequently used (if not to say: slightly worn) image in journalism and scientific publications. In this volume, it serves as a bracket for the study of Romanian society in its various transdisciplinary facets, from regional, historical, landscape, ethnic, linguistic, and religious perspectives. However, the texts presented here are far more original than the title and will hopefully find a wide readership.The thematic range of the volume extends temporally from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and disciplinarily across the breadth of cultural and literary studies. A thematic focus can be discerned in the majority of the contributions in the aftermath of Socialist politics and economics up to the present and the literary examination of this.The publication was prompted by the thematically broad workshop “Romania in Focus,” which took place in Regensburg in 2019. The binding bracket of the anthology is thus “Romania”—a geopolitical territory, a nation-state, a society, a cultural space—as a research object. It places “people and spaces” at the center of consideration. In doing so, the editors take up a central challenge of transdisciplinary regional studies and especially of those that are always fighting for their existence as “small subjects”: the ideological deconstruction of a unified nation-state and the description of the (re)production of a nation-state with its centrifugal and centripetal forces, without abolishing the subject of the discipline.The tensions between real linguistic, religious, and cultural diversity, as well as the ideal of transnational exchange (as, for example, discussed in Heubaum’s contribution) and multinational statehood (Große’s and Bacali’s texts) and simultaneous nationalist and monocultural aspirations (Dácz, Heubaum), are thus thematized. The discussion of transnational and intra-societal political and economic inequalities (Bopp-Filimonov, Bacali, Biro, Rammelt) contributes to the pertinence of the volume. The authors of the volume succeed in focusing on the overlapping and differently shaped historical, cultural, and linguistic spaces in the area of so-called “modern Romania” and in their confrontation and interdependence with what counts as “Romanian.”The volume is divided into three thematic blocks.“Spaces of Interference and Cultural Overlap” is devoted to the coexistence of ethnic and religious groups. Enikő Dácz analyses how the Transylvanian press dealt with local and regional conflicts in Transylvania at the beginning of the twentieth century. Of great interest for the present is the negotiation of ethical journalistic standards with regard to dealing with false reports and the effect of reports on, for example, fisticuffs. Johann Wellner is on the linguistic trail of the remaining German Bohemians in Bukovina. Martin Jung meticulously traces the history of Catholic journeymen’s associations in Romania from their first founding in 1859 to their banning in 1949 under Communist rule. A clearer political and historical classification would have been desirable here, when an upswing is observed precisely for the 1930s, which is explained with the preservation of “Germanness” outside the “Reich.”The second thematic block, “Ideal Reference Spaces and Imagined Belongings,” deals with geographical spaces. Specifically, it is about the identification or confrontation with Socialist Yugoslavia, Europe, and the (own) nation. Gundel Große analyzes the novel Disco Titanic by the Romanian author Radu Pavel Gheo, who explores the cross-border space of the historical region of Banat and the neighboring Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. The character’s longing for “the multinational ideal of the Yugoslav state” (p. 75) is a highly topical motif at a time when nationalist forces proclaim a monoethnic nation in complete denial of reality and when wars and conflicts in multiethnic states are repeatedly wrongly explained by the failure of multinational states and federations. What is also exciting about this is the external perspective: far beyond the immediate physical, economic, and psychological consequences of the wars for the population, hopes are destroyed and longings are violated for all those who dream of diverse models of state and citizenship and repeatedly seek to defend them against nationalist narratives. A transnational space of reference also emerges through a media space in the form of Yugoslav television and rock music. Miruna Bacali discusses the “geography of inequality” in the novel Adio, Europa! by Ion D. Sîrbu, written during late communism. She uses this dystopia as a comparative foil with restrictions on freedom and a simultaneous appeal for solidarity under the current global pandemic restrictions. Insightful are the demarcations between East and West, as well as the resulting concept of Europe and the Western double standards of defining belonging, which come to light through the protagonist’s simultaneous positioning inside and outside Europe (p. 103).Felix Heubaum examines the nation concepts of three well-known Romanian dissidents of the 1980s—Monica Lovinescu, Doina Cornea, and Vlad Georgescu. Even though these individuals countered the “official” nationalism of the Communist regime, their understanding of nationhood was also primarily ethnic, spiritual-religious, and ruralist. Overall, they thus continued formative discourses from the interwar period and fascism. Even if they saw themselves in clear contradiction to the Communist regime, their understanding of the nation coincided on essential points with that of the regime.The article by Daniel Biro presents partial results of his quantitative linguistic analysis of presidential speeches in the period 1993 to 2004 (Ion Iliescu and Emil Constantinescu). Focusing on the aspects of solidarity and exclusion, he looks at a domestic political discourse that is increasingly characterized by emotions, with trust and foresight playing particularly important roles. These are closely related to the development of accession negotiations for the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The study is based on a corpus of impressive size, but it only marginally places the observed discursive developments in the sociopolitical circumstances from which they spring.The third thematic block, “Lifeworldly and Symbolic Appropriations of Space,” opens with Jana Stöxen’s ethnographic field study of everyday life in a Bucharest apartment block, which describes the city’s recent temporal, architectural, and social history from the perspective of a participant observer of people and space in this microcosm.Valeska Bopp-Filimonov ties in with “post-industrial memories” (p. 185) when she looks at another relic of Socialist architecture: she analyzes the literariness as well as the role and function of industrial ruins in two novels. These become the backdrop for the protagonists who fail in the so-called transformation. The author describes a contrast between the working class and intellectuals that has never been overcome. In this study, literature is seen as a “(life) experience sphere.” The literary examination is consistently linked with the reflection of real multimodal discourses on the basis of the symbolic meaning of industrial ruins in the illustration of newspaper articles.Finally, Henry Rammelt investigates the spatial dimensions of the waves of protest in Bucharest after the end of Communist rule. The demonstrations of the more recent protests took place around public authorities and government buildings, indicating the (new) substantive thrust of the protests, which were increasingly oriented toward day-to-day political issues.