3 - Witness for the Prosecution: Eginald Schlattner in the Files of the Securitate

Summary

IN HIS INTRODUCTION TO DORIN TUDORAN'S published Securitate file, historian Radu Ioanid pertinently observes that “the Securitate file is not a postcommunist title of nobility, but the deformed mirror of the persecution set up by a communist regime through its political police,” and that thus “it reflects first and foremost suffering and tragedies lived by the victims during the time of their persecution.”As such, as Mădălin Hodor shows, “the documentary value of [a Securitate] file must be constantly seen in relation to [the file's] origin. One must not forget that it is the creation of a political police and of a regime that mixed lies in with the truth, and reality in with illusion.” Truth in relation to political regimes, Michel Foucault has theorized, “is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extends it,” and therefore political truth is “to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, destruction, circulation and operation of statements.”

This article documents the statements through which, between 1957 and 1959, the Romanian secret police transformed one aspiring Transylvanian Saxon writer, Eginald Schlattner (b. 1930), into its witness for the prosecution, pitting him against five other Transylvanian Saxon writers— Andreas Birkner, Wolf von Aichelburg, Georg Scherg, Hans Bergel, and Harald Siegmund—in the so-called German Writers’ Trial (1959). Andreas Birkner (1911–98) studied Lutheran theology in Romania and worked first as a priest. In 1934, he began his literary career with a publication in Klingsor, the most important German-language literary magazine in pre–Second World War Romania. On June 23, 1958, he was arrested and received a sentence of twenty-five years of hard labor. Wolf von Aichelburg (1912–94) studied Romance and German studies in Romania and France prior to the Second World War. He was arrested on May 19, 1959, and likewise was sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labor. Georg Scherg (1917–2002) studied philology in Germany and France prior to and after the Second World War. He returned to Romania in 1947, where at first he worked as a high school teacher of German and in 1957 became professor for German studies at the Victor Babeş University in Cluj. He was arrested on September 30, 1958, and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor.