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D.Litt. et Phil.

This dissertation explores the transformation of a small town in South East Transylvania, Sighisoara, historically defined through a strong German presence. Despite the small number of Germans remaining in the region after the massive migrations of the last decades, historical German privilege (made visible through and materialized in the long-lasting architecture) is reformulated and re-configured in the present precisely through processes connected to valuing and producing this built landscape as historical heritage. Claims for stakes in the development of the area become entangled with an interest in heritage preservation publicly performed by a diverse set of (mostly foreign) actors. By analyzing a failed development project, the gentrification of the historical citadel, transformations in public spaces, and NGO and historical preservation funding, I argue that Germanness offers a discursive space in which local desires for a developed West are able to articulate, productively, with Western nostalgias for a developmental do-over, as well as with fears for an endangered European heritage at the 'margins' of Western civilization. This dissertation contributes to the anthropology of post-socialist transformations in Eastern Europe by drawing attention to the relationship between ethnicity and participation in a global capitalism. It shows how a continuous, living engagement with the "outside," the "West," with consumer capitalism has been part of local quotidian subjectivities and understandings of the world, all mediated by desire and access to mobility and possibility. Understandings of people's current relationship with development, consumption, the idea and reality of capitalism cannot be disentangled from these continuities, and I argue for locating analysis precisely in these relationships. This dissertation also brings a critical native voice to the body of English language Eastern European anthropology. At the same time, it attempts to both build on and disrupt historical approaches to the region by forging analytical and substantive continuities with discipline-wide approaches to ethnicity, development, and heritage tourism. / text

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This thesis demonstrates the close links between Australian literature and German thought and culture in Catherine Martin's An Australian Girl (1890) and Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest (1908), and thereby provides a fuller understanding of the sophisticated literary and intellectual purposes of these two works. In examining the German elements in each novel, and the contexts from which much of that material is drawn, this study seeks to supplement the scholarly explanations provided in the two Academy Editions of these works. While Maurice Guest has received serious scholarly attention, An Australian Girl has been accorded relatively little. Despite generally favourable reviews on publication, both appear to have been undervalued over time. The study begins with a brief historical survey of German migration to Australia and the contribution German migrants made to the intellectual life and culture of the evolving nation. The examination of Catherine Martin's work includes: biographical details, particularly concerning her contact with German culture; an analysis of the form of the novel and a comparison of An Australian Girl with Goethe's Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister with regard to form, theme and characterisation; an analysis of German philosophical elements in the novel; and Martin's presentation of social conditions in Germany in 1888-90, and their role in the novel as a whole. The examination of Henry Handel Richardson's work encompasses: biographical details; the genesis of Maurice Guest; differences between the reception of the novel in England and Germany; the genre to which the novel belongs and parallels with Künstlerromane; an analysis of Richardson's description of the physical, historical and intellectual milieu of Leipzig, and its role in the novel; and finally her integration of German social customs and the German language into the text. Use has been made of five primary sources which have not been used before in any detail with regard to these aspects of either author: additional material from the Mount Gambier Border Watch; The Hatbox Letters, the family history of the Martin and Clarke families; the German translation of Maurice Guest; German reviews of Maurice Guest; and the correspondence between Richardson and her French translator Paul Solanges. The key argument of this thesis is that the German influence on both form and content, in the case of An Australian Girl, and on style and content, in the case of Maurice Guest, is deep and various, and that these German elements have proved to be an impediment to a full understanding and appreciation of these novels for many Anglo-Saxon readers and reviewers. In the two novels Martin and Richardson provide pointers to Australia's earlier interaction with the wider world and display a level of sophistication which makes these works worthy of greater recognition than they currently enjoy.