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The present paper addresses a topic entirely ignored in the studies dedicated to the Roma people during communism times. I am interested to highlight how Roma were accounted for in the German speaking central press published in communist Romania. I am setting my research in the field of representation of otherness but I am setting the resulting rhetoric dedicated to the Roma in the context in which the journalists and the readership were also embodying an ethnic other that had to be surveilled and policed - it is true in a particular fashion and with other means -, by the Communist Romanian state authorities. Remarks concerning the Roma, made in a more or less fugitive fashion in various and scattered press articles, can be regarded as of secondary interests. They appear to be more likely to be a pretext to debate about the challenges encountered by the communist social engineering program. Publication of texts involving interactions between ethnics of different origins, including Germans and Roma, was also a communist journalistic strategy to propagandistically present the advancements made with regard to a provocative social issue which had been wrongly addressed by previous political regimes. In the following pages, I am examining the narratives of the articles published in the "Neuer Weg" and its yearly almanac for a period of fifty years. The objective is to illustrate how Roma were instrumentalized in a propagandistic campaign to reshape modes of thinking of the Germans from communist Romania. Different references to Roma were exploited to nurture a collective feeling of common belongingness to an imagined working - class society that had to transcend preexisting ethnic prejudiced thinking. Hints to sensitive topics like the slavery or the radical wright wing exterminations policies against the Roma were referred to in a cunning attempt to convey to the German readership a sense of guilt, and, thus, to neutralize its eventual reactions in the context of collectivization, systematization, educational, policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political struggles, both inside and between political parties, have not uncommonly been a source of satire for the written press. Therefore, the interwar period does not make a discordant note, the magazines of satire and humour noticing the small personal quarrels between the members of the parties, as well as between the leaders of the most powerful parties. All this took place in a context in which with small steps anti- Semitism is progressively noticeable, and the fascist movements took strong roots in the countries close to Romania. The Transylvanian based (Cluj-Napoca city) magazine, Cucu (Cuckoo), surprises with humour, from a perspective that we can call "making fun of trouble", various political, social or economic situations that marked the period of the ‗30s in Romania. The purpose of the study is to bring to the public's attention how pamphleteers acknowledge the often-comical actions of politicians, the perversion of the political class, political backstage games, while ordinary citizens stared helplessly at the every so often, unfavourable changes around them. Last but not least, in these funny circumstances, real problems of the interwar society and political class come to light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims to exploit the way in which the daily life of Romanians, in the first two years after the Great Union, is reflected in the satire and humor press of the time, Furnica magazine. The magazine, through the ironic, satirical and humorous pamphlets, exposes the situations most commonly encountered in the years immediately following the Great Union, such as rising inflation and speculation, the corruptibility of public officials, the disinterest of the politicians towards the real needs of the population, immorality, and infidelity and so on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]