Literarische Rauminszenierungen in Zentraleuropa

Reviewed by: Literarische Rauminszenierungen in Zentraleuropa: Kronstad/Braşov/Brassó in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts ed. by Enikő Dácz and Réka Jakabházi Agatha Schwartz Enikő Dácz and Réka Jakabházi, eds., Literarische Rauminszenierungen in Zentraleuropa: Kronstad/Braşov/Brassó in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2020. 341 pp. In his preface to Literarische Rauminszenierungen in Zentraleuropa, edited by Enikő Dácz and Réka Jakabházi, Wolfgang Müller-Funk (University [End Page 141] of Vienna) situates the approach taken by the editors and contributors along a triple methodological axis: Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approach, complemented by postimperial studies (developed in the field of Central European studies), and what he calls “die spatiale Gestaltung, die symbolische Architektur einer zentraleuropäischen Provinz” (10). The editors selected Kronstadt/Braşov/Brassó for their inquiry into the ways this multilingual city and its space were imagined and performatively constructed in literary texts since the early twentieth century. They justify their choice of Kronstadt/Braşov/Brassó with the fact that at the turn of the twentieth century, the city was rather atypical for Transylvania given its balanced ethnic and linguistic composition, with roughly one third of the population each speaking German, Hungarian, and Romanian as their native language, respectively. In addition, Kronstadt was an important economic and cultural center that went through a number of significant political shifts concerning its position as either on the periphery or at the center of a state or territory. Most chapters in the volume are authored or co-authored by the two editors, Enikő Dácz and Réka Jakabházi (both of the Institut für deutsche Kultur und Geschichte Südosteuropas, Munich) with one co-authored chapter by Dácz and Ion Lihaciu (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iaşi/Jassy), two contributions by Raluca Cernahoschi (Bates College, Lewiston, Maine), and one each by Noémi Hegyi (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca/Klausenburg/Kolozsvár) and Ana-Maria Pălimariu (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iaşi/Jassy). In the introductory section, methodological and theoretical approaches are discussed by Müller-Funk and the editors, Dácz and Jakabházi. Jakabházi and Dácz describe the literary and cultural space of Kronstadt/Braşov/Brassó as one that elides any essentialist concept of culture and is characterized by pluri-or multiculturality rather than transculturality, something they see as characteristic for Transylvanian society, in particular in the region to which this city belongs, the Burzenland/Ţara Bârsei/Barcaság, situated between East and West. As such, in the words of Dácz, the volume “leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Erforschung postimperialer Narrative im zentraleuropäischen Raum” (31). It does so by exploring newspapers (the Hungarian-language Brassói lapok) and literary magazines (the German-language Die Karpathen, Das Ziel, and Klingsor as well as the Romanian-language Ţara Bârsei) in the first part, while the second part is dedicated to a comparative analysis of literary anthologies and the poetry and prose by [End Page 142] both well-known (i.e., “central”) and lesser-known (i.e., “peripheral”) writers who wrote in one of the three languages (e.g., Adolf Meschendörfer, Heinrich Zillich, Lilla Szépréti, and Mihail Sebastian). Some of the works were written in the interwar years, others are more recent, but they all thematize Kronstadt/Braşov/Brassó during the first half of the twentieth century. How do they create “imaginary geographies” (Edward Said) of the city? Do they construct or rather deconstruct “imagined communities” (Benedict Anderson) defined along exclusionary ethnic identity lines or embrace hybridity? These are the questions that the authors of the individual chapters are posing. After 1918, images of the self and the other become more strictly delineated in the works under scrutiny with the consequence of establishing fictional borders that very much reflected factual political developments. In the 1940s, the literary players of Kronstadt/Braşov/Brassó were particularly influenced, albeit to varying degrees, by the political ideologies of the time. In both German-and Romanian-language anthologies from the first half of the twentieth century (1930 and 1945), Kronstadt/Braşov

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