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# The National Awakening of the Saxons

Until the 1840s, the Saxons had played an essentially supportive role in the Transylvanian diet. As late as 1834, they showed sympathy for the Hungarian opposition and even cooperated with the latter in defence of feudal constitutionalism. In 1837, they shifted their support to the government, but they did not oppose the drafting of bills in Hungarian as long as the monarch consented to it, and they considered that it was right and proper for legislation to be formulated in Hungarian and Latin. Thereafter, political calculation and the dynamics of national awakening led the Saxons to confront Hungarians and their policies.

When, shortly before the 1841 diet, the Saxons' political leaders assembled at a meeting of the Lutheran consistory, they took {3-174.} note of the preparations being made by the Hungarian reformist opposition and took a strong position on the issue of language rights. At this time, the highest ranking Saxon in the Transylvanian government was Joseph Bedeus von Scharberg; he had been elected by the 1837 diet to the post of provincial chief commissioner. At the consistory, Bedeus argued that, since Transylvania belonged to the Hungarian Crown, the Saxons should 'endorse the abolition of Latin and agree that Hungarian should become the official language of the central government; for us, there is nothing new in this, since, even under the rule of national princes, Hungarian had been the language of government and legislation.'[175]175. J. Bedeus, 'Erinnerungen,' Archivele Statului, Sibiu, Fond Bedeus, nr. 112, I, pp. 301-2. Ignoring this voice of moderation, the more influential Saxon politicians insisted on full reciprocity and equal rights for all Estates. Their demand that German have the same status as Hungarian reflected a claim to regional autonomy which, in turn, was contingent on the support of the government in Vienna.

Although these initiatives lent impetus to the Saxons' national movement, they threatened to isolate the community from the rest of the country and often gave the impression that Saxon policy consisted of no more than the self-serving manoeuvres of officials who were manipulated by Vienna. Yet Simon Schreiber, the royal magistrate at Nagyszeben, was only voicing the conventional wisdom of the period when he told the diet that 'the nation's mother tongue and intellectual life serve as the closest bonds in all the most precious social and family relations, and bind together the entire civil society, from its lowest to its highest strata.'[176]176. Meeting of 27 January 1842, in Beszédtár II, p. 24.

However, the growing dismay among Hungarian liberals was equally understandable. After cooperating with Hungarians in the diet to draft a series of promise-laden reforms, the Saxons turned around and submitted to the monarch several dissenting petitions, all of which argued that the diet's legislative proposals had no validity in the Saxon lands unless ratified by their own governing body, the Universitas. Many advanced a further justification, that {3-175.} he Hungarian opposition had taken 'huge steps' beyond the desirable limits of reform — notably with respect to the deregulation of industry, the emancipation of Jews, and the proposal to allow anyone to acquire landed property.[177]177. Memorandum of Simon Schreiber Sr, Karl Müller Sr, Joseph Trausch, Michael Kraeges, and Samuel Meister on the guild system, Archivele Statului, Sibiu, Fond Bruckenthal, 0 1-6, p. 181. These reservations inspired the Saxons to dissent even from the legislative proposals for a National Museum and for a building to house the meetings of the diet. (At times, the debates in the diet had an epic quality that filled Saxon delegates — and their constituents — with an exhilarating sense of power; however, with the passage of time, many leading Saxons would come to regret their radically negative posturing.)

In the heat of the battle over language rights, the defence of traditional Saxon privileges became intertwined with the promotion of more modern features of nationhood, giving rise to a broadly-based national movement. A growing number of Saxons wished to move beyond their feudal 'nation' status and obtain constitutional entrenchment of their region's autonomy and right to have German as its official language — in other words, to turn the Királyföld into full-fledged Szászföld, or Land of the Saxons. The latter proved eminently receptive to the cult of nationality popular in the lands that would eventually constitute Germany. Saxons remained stubbornly attached to their ethnic identity; ever since the Middle Ages, only people of 'German origin' could enjoy full rights of membership in the Saxon 'nation,' rights that carried economic, social, and political advantages. The Saxons suffered from a sense of isolation, and when their privileged status came under threat, they acted upon their traditional reflex and turned to the Habsburg government, which, for reasons of its own, was more than ready to exploit their need for support. The Saxons had contributed greatly to the economic development of Transylvania, and now most of them were driven by their sense of German identity to became the allies of bureaucratic absolutism. At the same time, this sense of identity, of belonging to a great German nation, led many to move beyond a provincial, pro-Habsburg imperial orientation and look for guidance {3-176.} to the progressive intellectual and political movements in the German lands to the north.

A group of senior officials, highly qualified in law, served to bind together the upper, feudal-patrician stratum of Saxon society. The Lutheran Church, along with its schools, performed the same function for the society at large and sought to obtain the same degree of autonomy that was enjoyed by the Calvinist Church. Not since the Reformation had pastors and teachers played such a prominent role in Saxon society. However, by virtue of the so-called regulatio, which had been imposed by the Viennese government at the turn of the century and governed administrative practices at all levels of local government in the Szászföld, they remained excluded from the communitas and councils that chose and instructed delegates to the diet.

This exclusion from public life weighed heavily on a Saxon intelligentsia that was growing in numbers and suffered from a shortage of adequate employment opportunities. The educational system encompassed, in addition to the elementary schools, five secondary schools that were staffed by 50–60 teachers and enrolled around 1,000–1,500 students. Some 350–400 high school graduates would go on to higher studies, with half of them choosing to train for the ministry; yet the 250 parishes provided a living for only some 500 clergymen. The aspiring teachers and clergymen were drawn by the powerful currents of German culture and politics to study at Vienna or in German universities. The theoreticians of the national movement, the activists who propagated the ideals of a new nationhood came from their ranks. Josef Andreas Zimmer-mann, a teacher of law at Nagyszeben, played a role similar to that of Károly Szász by showing Saxons that they could exploit Transylvania's legal system to promote their national interests. Johann Karl Schuller, an eminent scholar and history teacher, did much for Saxon dialectology by collecting and publishing local folk songs. He followed the example of German scholars in treating {3-177.} folk poetry as a historical source, and he also engaged in political journalism. These two intellectuals had a great impact on the next, and more productive generation.

Most members of the intelligentsia considered democratization of public life and modernization of the economy to be the essential tasks of national reform; they strove to popularize a version of liberalism adapted to the prevailing social circumstances. They were delighted to discover that the ancient Saxon constitution contained some elements of democratic representation, and turned into a popular slogan the principle of unus sit populus found in the Diploma Andreanum. Some went so far as to advocate that German-speaking serfs in the counties, who accounted for a fifth of Transylvania's Saxons, should be formally linked to the Saxon 'nation.' On the whole, the intellectuals affirmed with some pride that their 'nation' was a community of industrious craftsmen and peasants (while allowing that the Székely lesser nobles and soldiers also embodied the ideal of civic liberty). They also boasted that their community was free of serfdom, since the villages of Romanian and Hungarian serfs that belonged to Saxon towns were not an integral part of the Saxon nation, and since, in any case, these serfs had lighter obligations than those in the counties. In the 1840s, Saxon intellectuals began to propose that free peasants be allowed to commute their feudal obligation to pay tithes to the Church.

The strongest social criticism was found in the pages of the Siebenbürger Wochenblatt and its literary supplements, Blätter für Geist and Der Satellit, which had been launched in the late 1830s and reached a circulation of about a thousand. The publisher, Johann Gött, came from Frankfurt am Main, and his principal assistants, Anton Kurz and Leopold Max Moltke, from Moravia and Prussia; the economic distress and political repression that weighed on intellectuals in the German lands had driven them to seek a better life in multiethnic Transylvania. Armed with liberal notions {3-178.} picked up during their studies in Berlin, the correspondents of the Brassó newspapers at Segesvár proceeded to denounce the unwieldy bureaucracy of 'pigtail-wigged' civil servants; they demanded that reform begin with the institution of greater openness in government and administration, and that the governing councils of towns and villages be constituted on the basis of free elections and not by cooptation. On more than one occasion, political leaders in several Saxon districts were sufficiently alarmed by such critiques that they urged prosecution of the Brassó papers. The editor of a newspaper at Nagyszeben, Joseph Benigni, entertained close contacts with the police ministry in Vienna, and in 1844 he encouraged the town council to institute a lawsuit against Johann Gött; in the event, the respected law teacher Josef Zimmermann managed to convince them that Saxon papers had to be allowed as much freedom to discuss national issues as was enjoyed by the Hungarian press.

Initially, the Brassó newspapers focused their attacks on the Hungarian press and the Hungarian language bill, but they soon shifted their sights to Nagyszeben's Der Siebenbürger Bote, which had risen to the defence of bureaucratic absolutism. To some extent, this press battle reflected the different perspectives that prevailed in the two towns; but there were many liberal-minded teachers in Nagyszeben as well, while Brassó's municipal leadership took a rather dim view of the spread of liberalism. The dominant role played by Nagyszeben aroused great resentment among Brassó's burghers. Although the latter favoured the consolidation of Saxon autonomy, they were ambivalent about a centralized regional administration (provincia cibinienis) focused on the rival town; their preference for a more autonomous pursuit of economic and political reform was symbolized by the slogan Kronstadt voran ('Forward Brassó,' or 'Brassó First').

A proliferation of new associations played an important role in the social mobilization of Saxons. These included industrial and {3-179.} agricultural associations, savings banks, and the Verein für siebenbürgische Landeskunde (Transylvanian Association for Regional Studies). Officially, the latter had a purely cultural mandate, but it would come to play a important political role; the meetings that it organized in small towns had the flavour of nationalistic celebrations.

Stephan Ludwig Roth personified the broad scope of the Saxon national movement. He had studied with Pestalozzi in Switzerland, and published a pamphlet on education that, in the 1820s, aroused very little interest. As a high school teacher at Medgyes, he wanted to emulate the German youth movements that emerged in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars by adding physical education and singing to the curriculum, but his initiative was aborted by small-town conservatism. Roth came into his own in the 1840s, when, while serving as a village pastor, he played a leading role in the nationalist campaign and wrote articles for a popular newspaper that aimed to offer useful advice to farmers.

In fact, Roth was somewhat lacking in political acumen. His major political disquisition, on the language problem, served more to exacerbate the conflict than to clarify the issues; he attributed to the Hungarian opposition extreme assimilative designs that the latter never professed, and claimed that Hungarian was not suited to become the official language. He advanced the politically artful argument that since the majority of Transylvanians spoke Romanian, and since — as was acknowledged by some Hungarians as well — that language was an important means of routine communication between the various nationalities, there was no need to designate an official language (Landessprache). Roth apparently considered it advisable to reserve his comments on the issue of a fourth, Romanian 'nation' for publication in Pest. He recommended that the Romanians not be given territorial autonomy, but receive, like the other feudal 'nations,' a single vote in the diet. In that, he reflected the Saxons' basic view that, on issues of nationwide {3-180.} importance, the diet should adopt the practice of curialis votum, with each 'nation' exercising one vote. In the same article, Roth defended in exemplary fashion the principle of national equality. However, his delineation of the areas in which German, Latin, or Hungarian might be used had a strong feudal colouring. More-over, he invited consideration for the interests of the absolutist central government but left the cause of constitutionalism to his more militant colleagues. Roth also wrote some lengthy articles on the need to modernize industry and agriculture; he offered a rather Romantic, anti-capitalist defence of the guild system and promoted the consolidation of a prosperous class of Saxon farmers.

If Roth became an emblematic figure of the Saxon national movement, it was partly because he avoided unseemly debate with his fellow reformers, and partly because, taking a very narrow view, he affirmed that his only moral obligation was to preserve the Volkstum, or national traditions. He did much to raise the Saxons' social and cultural consciousness. Hungarian publicists tended to oversimplify and to depict the conflict between Hungarians and Saxons as a confrontation between liberalism and a bureaucratic conservatism backed by the Viennese court. For Roth, on the other hand, Transylvania's complexity was best defined in terms of the conflictful relations and mutual dependence of Saxon burghers, Hungarian nobles, and Romanian serfs; he believed that the Saxon burgher was predestined to reconcile these diverse interests and facilitate the ineluctable process of social levelling. This view, too, was somewhat reductionist, for the typical Saxon burgher was as attached to his privileges as the typical Hungarian noble, but it helped the Saxons to overcome their political isolation. Most Saxons were predisposed to react to the diet's promotion of reform by invoking their political independence; by emphasizing their civic vocation, Roth was helping them to break out of their self-imposed isolation and to see merit in collaboration with Hungarian liberals. On the other hand, Roth reinforced a potentially troublesome feature of Transylvanian politics by introducing the notion {3-181.} that if Hungarian liberals were to be the arbiters in Saxon–Romanian relations, then the Saxons could play the same role with regard to Hungarians and Romanians.

For the leaders of the Saxon national movement, liberalism also evoked the possibility that their isolation might become fatal. Given the nature of Saxon society, there were no great conflicts of interests to overcome on the way to national unity; but they had little prospect of winning over the Romanians, who were now a majority and constituted the most discontented stratum in the Szászföld. Romanians were both part of, and, in many respects, excluded from Saxon society. The biggest concentration of prosperous Romanian peasants was found in this region; in the towns, Romanians, notably those who engaged in commerce in Brassó, had a chance to obtain win civic rights. However, as noted, the Josephinist formula of concivilitas was not fully applied. As a general rule, people of Orthodox religion were barred from public office. In the villages, leading posts were reserved — at least in principle — for those who were literate in German; and Church and civil administration were so closely integrated that Romanians had to pay tithes for the support of Saxon clergymen.

In response to a petition, submitted by the Orthodox bishop in 1837, Joseph Trausch, who was at once a police superintendent and a scholarly archivist, drafted a pamphlet arguing that the 'only way' open to the Romanians was to accept the principle of national territoriality: if they wished to exercise full legal rights, they would have to become 'linguistically and culturally assimilated to the Saxons.'[178]178. J. Trausch, Bemerkungen über die von siebenbürgischen Bischof Basiliu Moga in Jahre 1837 den zu Hermannstadt versammelten Landesständen unterlegte Bittschrift (Kronstadt, 1844), p. 24. The petition addressed by the two Romanian bishops to the 1841–43 diet led Johann Karl Schuller to write in a pamphlet that 'the Vlachs could request rights equal to those of the indigenous German population only as naturalized Saxons, and not as Vlachs.'[179]179. J. K. Schuller, Megvilágítása azon vádiratnak, melyet a két Oláh Püspök Urak a Szász nemzet ellen az 1841-43-beli erdélyi országgyűlésen a Rendeknek benyújtottak, trans. by Fr. Hann (Szeben, 1844), p. 14. But even this notion — that all members of the unified political nation have equal rights — aroused indignation among the more conservative Saxons.

{3-182.} In fact, the political struggles in the diet and the debates over the language issue revealed that 'none of the three Estates came even close to accepting the modern notion of equal rights. The nobility and the Székelys wanted the Hungarian language to be made dominant, and the same Saxons who argued that the German language should have equal status would not allow the Hungarians of Szászváros or the people in Romanian villages to use their mother tongue' for official purposes.[180]180. Fr. Teutsch, Geschichte, p. 160. In this fraught atmosphere, the Saxon Universitas even objected to the Gubernium's decision to publish Romanian translations of official acts.

A sense of civic obligation and a growing consciousness of their German identity helped the Saxons to overcome their apprehensions and thus their isolation. The Saxon nation was becoming a community based less on privilege than on shared language. Intellectuals continued to preach that the Saxons were linked to the greater German nation by cultural and ethnic bonds, but now they also argued that the Germans' national movement served the Saxons' own national objectives, and that the Saxons had a vocation to transmit eastward the achievements of the Germans.

This outlook had a direct bearing on politics. Since German and Hungarian liberals professed the same ideology and pursued similar interests, many people anticipated that an alliance between the two groups would serve to limit the Hungarians' efforts to impose their language and facilitate Hungarian–Saxon cooperation. Of the main national movements in Transylvania, that of the Saxons had the smallest ethnic base, and they had the most to fear from the hegemonic ambitions of other ethnic groups. Liberalism, and problems that were specific to Transylvania, notably the language issue, led some Saxons to the logical conclusion that the country should become a modern multinational state, although they offered few concrete proposals to that end.

Brassó's German papers would occasionally evoke the example of the United States and Switzerland in calling for the creation of a cohesive and supranational state that allowed ethnic communities {3-183.} some autonomy at the county and local levels — a model that held some appeal for Hungarian liberals as well. The editor Johann Gött published a couple of articles, by György Apor, calling for cooperation between Hungarian liberals and Saxon burghers, but this promising initiative was promptly squelched by the 'paternalistic authorities.' The idea of Saxon–Hungarian cooperation was endorsed by a number of intellectuals in Brassó and Segesvár as well as by two influential teachers at Nagyszeben, Friedrich Hann (a future delegate to the diet) and Gottfried Müller. The latter, who had earlier won the Kisfaludy prize for a work on Hungarian literary populism published under the name Godofréd Müller, wrote a critical yet sympathetic appraisal of Hungarian liberals in a book entitled Magyaren-Spiegel. Yet another advocate of cooperation was a young man from Szászsebes, Joseph Marlin, who became one of the first Saxon intellectuals to make a living from writing when he joined the staff of a newspaper in Pest, the Pesther Zeitung. In one of his articles, Marlin argued that 'we Saxons must all assume our vocation as Germans [which then signified the propagation of German liberalism], learn to love not only the Szászföld, but Transylvania as well, and work for the country and well as our nation, for that is the only way to put an end to quarrels between Transylvania's national groups and to all the idle chatter about Hungarianization, Germanization, and even Romanianization.'[181]181. J. Marlin, 'Politische Aphorismen aus dem Sachsenland,' Der Satellit, 6 May 1847, no. 36.

However, these intellectuals' advocacy of a liberal solution failed to move the Saxon political elite. The latter followed its deeply-rooted preference for cooperation with the imperial government, for an alliance that brought security and even some hope of Saxon supremacy in Transylvania. There were some, notably Stephan Ludwig Roth, whose sense of pan-German solidarity was reinforced by the hope that Habsburg power would prevail in the German lands, and that, thanks to liberal reforms in Hungary and Transylvania, German emigrants would choose to settle in the Danube Valley and the Carpathian Basin rather than in America.

{3-184.} The national awakening of Saxons coincided with an invigoration of their cultural life. This owed partly to the fact that they had ready access to the musical, scientific, and literary output of the German lands. The musical ensembles (which concentrated on German classics) and the music schools of Brassó and Nagyszeben maintained close contact with their Viennese and German counterparts. Johann Lukas Hedwig, a music teacher in Brassó, composed many popular songs in response to the demand from these ensembles and schools. Carl Filtsch was the greatest musical talent produced by Transylvania since Bálint Bakfark, in the 16th century; a child prodigy, he earned great acclaim with his concert tours around Europe, incidentally sparking some popular interest in his homeland, and his untimely death cut short a brilliant career. Ferenc Liszt's visits to Kolozsvár and Nagyszeben testified to the high standards of musical life in Transylvania.

The Saxon press would report with some envy on the quality of Hungarian theatre in Transylvania. On the other hand, József Kemény, who had done pioneering work in the publication of archival data, had to acknowledge that his former secretary, Anton Kurz, had outdone him in seeking out old documents and publishing these, along with interpretive articles, in the hefty issues of Magazin für Geschichte (Historical Journal), which had a circulation of no more than three hundred. Kurz set a promising precedent by inviting contributions not only from Saxons, but also from Romanian and Hungarian scholars. He was confident that 'it is possible to be a good German and, at the same time, sympathize with the liberal-minded endeavours of Hungarians, particularly in the realm of scholarship, which is not constrained by factors of language or nationality.'[182]182. Anton Kurz's letter to Ferenc Toldy, Brassó, 27 October 1843, MTAK Kézirattár, M. Irod. lev. 4-r, 79.

In the very first issue of Magazin, Kurz invited bids for the drafting of a comprehensive, popular history of the Saxons, modelled on Heinrich Zschokke's accounts of the Swiss. Kurz wanted to sensitise burghers and farmers to their nation's past; indeed, one {3-185.} sign of cultural progress was that more and more peasants and craftsmen took an interest in books and newspapers. A young teacher from Segesvár, Georg Daniel Teutsch, tried to emulate his master, Leopold von Ranke, by writing a work of history that soon became a classic. In the first, shorter version of the work, he recorded as his guiding principle that 'a nation cannot perish as long as it refuses to surrender.'[183]183. G. D. Teutsch, Abriss der Geschichte Siebenbürgen (Kronstadt, 1844), p. 178.

An event of lasting political and cultural significance, comparable to the formation of the Association for Regional Studies, was the addition of a law faculty to the high school at Nagyszeben. Teachers and clergymen played a leading role in the promotion of scholarship, but so did some government officials. Joseph Benigni, an Austrian secretary at the military headquarters, was also the editor of a conservative newspaper and a censor; on the side, he gave lectures on law and published several statistical handbooks. Johann Söllner, a military judge and popular journalist, published a thick tome containing demographic statistics that had been collected by the Gubernium. The provincial chief commissioner, Joseph Bedeus von Scharberg, looked after military supplies and founded industrial enterprises; yet he found time to write a treatise on Transylvanian heraldry as well as a rather conservative analysis of constitutional aspects of the Transylvanian state. Johann Hintz, a young clerk at the Universitas and one of Kossuth's Saxon admirers, earned considerable recognition with his statistical articles on demography and industry. The literary supplements of weekly newspapers contributed to the diffusion of knowledge, notably with respect to the natural sciences, and so did the excellent yearbook put out by Association for Regional Studies.

Literary works, and in particular poetry, played an important part in the shaping of national consciousness. The tensions and links between the two identities, German and Transylvanian, found clearer expression in literature than in politics. In the popular musical anthology published in 1824 by Friedrich Geltch, a teacher at {3-186.} Szászváros, only one or two of the songs made reference to Transylvania as the Saxons' homeland. Saxon poets were inspired by their German counterparts of the 1810s, who extolled the cause of German nationhood and liberty; thus the notion, propounded by Ernst Arndt in his famous poem Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?, that the German fatherland is constituted by all those whose mother tongue is German, was reiterated in countless poems by Saxons. Moved by the prevailing spirit of exaltation, Saxon poets freely evoked battles, yet they would have been hard put to identify the enemy.

Among the dozen or so Saxons who could be counted as poets in this period, it was probably Joseph Marlin who gave clearest voice to the tensions between Saxon and Transylvanian identity and as well as to those marking the shift from feudal 'nation' to more modern, language-based nationhood. However, he was rather inconstant in his ideals. In some verses, he lauded the union of Transylvania's three 'nations.' On the other hand, in a novel, written in 1848 and never published, he idealized Horea as a pioneer in the struggle for social emancipation; moreover, he gave vent to his imagination by having a young Saxon intellectual act as ideologist and spiritual guide for the 'raw power' of the peasants' movement, the implication being that Saxons were particularly qualified to lead the Romanian masses.

The Saxons' past was evoked in only one or two of the better-known ballads, but several prose works brought to life some of their historical figures. The first novels in the Romantic style associated with Sir Walter Scott came from the pen of Daniel Roth, the pastor of Szászhermány. Since the Saxon experience was largely free of serious social conflict, his stories tended to take the form of adventure yarns. Still, Sachs von Harteneck, the hero of Roth's most famous novel, had a certain symbolic quality, and his fate bore some similarity to that suffered by Stephan Ludwig Roth in 1848–49. By thirsting for power and threatening other nations, Harteneck {3-187.} brought about his own downfall; he went to the scaffold with a clear conscience, trusting in God and confident that he had acted in his nation's interest. In any case, one did not have to be a native-born Transylvanian to fathom the more distressing aspects of life in a multi-ethnic society. Leopold Max Moltke, a liberal-minded Prussian who made his home in Transylvania, responded to a request from his new compatriots to write, in 1846, some verses that became the lasting unofficial anthem of Transylvania's Saxons. The song expressed a Transylvanian patriotism that encompassed love of the land and of its diverse ethnic communities:

Transylvania, land of tolerance,
bastion of many faiths!
Preserve over the centuries
your sons' right to liberty,
and be the home of honest words.

Transylvania, our sweet land,
our dearest mother country!
May you be blessed for your everlasting beauty,
and may harmony reign
among the children of your hills and dales!