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This paper presents a close reading of two recent novels by the German-Romanian writer Dieter Schlesak: Capesius der Auschmitzapotheker (2006) and Transylwahnien (2011). Born in 1934 among the German community of Transylvania, Schlesak deals in his novels with the tragic epic of the Holocaust, seen from the particular point of view of the transylvanian Saxons and their involvement in the Nazi crimes. More precisely, he depicts the "little homeland" of the Saxons and his dramatic dissolution, while History painfully reveals the existence of the Evil within the reassuring transylvanian Heimat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to reconstruct the traces that romanian folklore left within the works of three prominent italian writers and intellectuals of the second-half of the twentieth-century: Franco Fortini, Ernesto de Martino and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In his first book of poetry, Foglio di via (1946), Fortini translated, from a french version made by Ilarie Voronca, some romanian funeral songs, trying to conceal file folkloric sources, in order to misappropriate them. The same archaic ceremonial songs are used, as historical and ethnographic evidences, by Ernesto de Martino in his great anthropological survey on european funeral laments, Morte e pianto rituale (1958), and then by Pier Paolo Pasolini as a soundtrack for his movie Oedipus Rex (1967). In all of this cases, the fascination for the romanian popular poetry is tangled with reticences and ambiguities, that reveal the complex relationships existing between intellectuals and popular traditions in twentieth-century culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to sketch the historical profile of the Istro-Romanians (Cicci, Wallachians, Ciribiri), a small Romanian-speaking community living in the northwestern part of Istria, discussing their present situation and the (grim) prospects faced by a community on the brink of extinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]