To the memory of my grand-grand-father, Gheorghe Savu/Szabo, a peasant from Potău/Magasmart (distr. of Satu Mare), dead in the battles of Tirol, in 1917. I also dedicate this article to the memory of my grand-grand-mother, Floare Gheorghiasă Szabo/Croitoru, who never in her long widowhood pardoned the “darling Emperor” for her husband’s death.
Abstract
To date, Romanian scholars have ignored Transylvanian folklore dealing with the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the experience of being a soldier in the imperial army. The gap can be explained by the fact that these cultural artefacts did not fit the Romanian nationalist narrative in politics and social science about the importance of ethnic unity. To address this gap, the paper maps out and discusses the images of the Dual Monarchy and especially of the Emperor in soldierly folklore. The main argument is that these images were shaped by the perception of and attempts to overcome the traumatic and often incomprehensible experiences of military service that peasant soldiers had to go through.
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Notes
On employing and readapting folkloric clichés and the difficulty of historians in using them as objective references, see Trifescu (2015), p. 996.
See the considerations opening these pages on the reluctance of Romanian folklore studies to approach/publish materials on the topic of “soldiering in Transylvania”.
Remark by, quoted in the memoir fragment mentioned above.
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Bot, I. The “darling Emperor”: images of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the Romanian folklore from Transylvania around WWI. Neohelicon 45, 113–121 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-018-0426-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-018-0426-0