The city of Sibiu wears its German heritage on its sleeve. The street signs marking the city limits proudly display the city’s German name, Hermannstadt, and the city’s quaint and expensively restored German architecture draws in hundreds of thousands of western European and American tourists yearly. Many of the shops in the city center are German-themed, from “The German Shop”, which carries heavily marked up German groceries, to the “Cafe Wien”, which attempts to replicate the ambiance of a Viennese coffeehouse at the foot of the city’s iconic German Lutheran Cathedral. The affinity for Germanness is reflected in Sibiu’s politics: the city has been governed by ethnic Germans representing the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania (FDGR/DFDR) since 2000, one of whom, Klaus Johannis, went on to become the President of Romania.
There is only one problem: there are almost no Germans in Sibiu. In 2021, the ethnically German population of Sibiu, which had historically been an absolute majority and peaked at 25,403 in 1977, dipped under 1,000 for the first time in the city’s recorded history. Who can blame them for leaving? It’s been a rough century for Romania’s Germans. The collapse of Habsburg rule in 1918 eliminated their privileged status. Germany’s loss in the Second World War didn’t gain them any good will, and many were “sold” to the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD) in the eighties, until the Romanian Revolution. The restoration of freedom of movement (1989) and incorporation of Romania into the European Union (2007) meant that stragglers nearly all decamped for greener and more western pastures. The “Siebenbuergersachsen” (Transylvanian Saxons) abroad are arguably the most privileged stratum of Romania’s massive diaspora in Europe; many return to their “Heimat” as tourists alongside clueless Americans such as myself.
Considering this near-total absence of Germans in Sibiu, the German-oriented tourism industry finds itself in a strange position. The infrastructure—stucco-clad townhouses, cobblestone streets, Lutheran churches—remains “authentically” German. But the people are gone. “Germanness” is constructed not through actual Germans, but through museumified spaces which seek to convince tourists that, despite the flags, the language, and the people, they aren’t too far outside of western Europe. The reconstruction of the absent Germans of Sibiu reminds me of less historically grounded sites in my home, the United States. America, of course, has its own national minorities, some of them similarly absent from spaces which claim to represent them. But, in my mind, the predicament of Romania’s Germans and its German cities much more closely mirrors the fate of western European settler groups, like the Germans, in the US.
Outside of the very oldest areas of post-Columbian settlement where British cultures took root, European settlement to the US was defined by highly diverse and idiosyncratic waves of migration through the early 20th century. Assimilation was a slow and fraught process, but the descendants of these immigrants largely adhere less to the tangible customs of their ancestors and more to a sort of pan-white American culture, with distinct regional aspects. Many of these euro-descendents bemoan a purported lack of culture in white America, with culture understood as traditional foods, dances, costumes, and beliefs. Personally, I find this “culturelessness” to be a completely bunk proposition—everybody has culture!—but millions of people believe in it. Regardless, the remedy for disgruntled “white ethnics” is clear: the “rediscovery” of their European “roots”, and the vigorous performance of these allegedly lost and suppressed cultures. This “rediscovery” can come in the form of heritage tourism, household knickknacks from the “old country”, language learning, and, most notably for this writeup, place.
The American road tripper will find plenty of examples of what Matthew Frye Jacobson called the “white ethnic revival” on the road: cities and towns which, at some point in the last 70 years, “uncovered” their heritage and made it a selling point which distinguished them from their bland, “cultureless” neighbors. These places, like Frankenmuth, Michigan and Solvang, California are festooned with the flags of the “homeland” (in my two examples, Germany and Denmark), and full of I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Europe buildings, shops, and restaurants. The self-presentation of these places (courtesy of the local planning commission or chamber of commerce) belies the unremarkable nature of these “islands of culture”: their residents, while perhaps of a specific white ethnic descent, are not much different from those of less half-timbered municipalities. The key distinguishing factor is the capital and business savvy to realize that “culture” sells.
Unlike Romania’s Germans, America’s Germans never left. They are still within the borders of the country in which they settled. But, like Romania’s Germans, as contributors of “culture”, they might as well have disappeared. Thus, the museumification of these white ethnic migrant identities in the US increases in tandem with neuroses and anxieties surrounding white identity. Of course, the ends are not identical. But in both countries, association with “lost” heritage carries a certain prestige—for Romania, political and geographic, for the US, cultural and personal—which helps the people living in museumified spaces to wrestle with modernity, and make a few bucks, too.