My article is written in accordance with the narratives of contemporary Saxon inhabitants of Michelsberg and Heltau in Southern Transylvania, who emphasize their Nachbarschaft institution as a continously-referential folk heritage in post 1989 Romania. As a recurrent discursive theme, Nachbarschaft is particularly significant among Saxons to the extent they use to frame it within broader evocations about their collective identity and tradition. Based on recent ethnographic accounts, I argue that remembering Nachbarschaft could be seen as a persistent performative memory of Transylvanian Saxons, echoing as such their needs of cultural survival as a decreasing ethnicity in the 2000s Romania.

Keywords: Nachbarschaft, Saxons, Southern Transylvania, performative memory.

Full text