By 1935, the officials of the League of Nations were well accustomed to receiving petitions submitted on behalf of Hungarians in Romania. Although not very successful in resolving minority grievances, these petitions still raised international attention to minority problems.Footnote 1 Thus, probably no one was surprised to receive another set in 1935 and 1936, this time concerning the allegedly unlawful and discriminatory layoff of thousands of minority public officials and employees following a compulsory Romanian language exam.Footnote 2
Already in the fall of 1934, the Transylvanian-Hungarian press reported mass firings of Hungarians.Footnote 3 The reports, collected in Budapest, found their way into semi-scholarly publications analyzing the history and current situation of the Hungarian minority in Romania.Footnote 4 They considered the grievances the result of deliberate and consistent persecution of Hungarians by the Romanian state. Hungarians were very familiar with the hardships of former Hungarian public employees, many originally forced out of civil service in 1919–20, at the time of the territory's transfer from Hungary to Romania. Some were living on subsistence wages or had emigrated to Hungary. The National Office of Refugees issued the staggering figure of 197,000 Hungarians who had left Romania between 1918 and 1924. More than 20,000 were registered as former state, county, or municipal officials or employees of public utility companies, such as the state railways.Footnote 5 In 1934 and 1935, after fifteen years of Romanian rule, thousands of Hungarian public employees who had managed to keep their jobs amidst the 1919–20 layoffs were suddenly required to prove their knowledge of the Romanian language and threatened with dismissal if they failed to demonstrate an unspecified level of fluency.
The language exam episode betrays much more than the duplicity of propaganda. The exams, against the backdrop of the intensification of nationalist politics, brought to the fore issues of loyalty and ethnicity (or nationality). These concepts are interrelated but not identical, and often hard to distinguish. The language exams provide insights into individual perceptions and strategies of identification; they help to refine the simplistic portrayal of the Romanian state as a unitary actor driven by a single nationalizing agenda and of the Hungarians as a unified bloc suffering from these policies.Footnote 6
Scholarly literature focused on ethnicity (or nationality) and loyalty came to the fore only recently.Footnote 7 Identity, as a catch-all concept, quickly overshadowed loyalty in scholarly usage, in part because of its greater applicability to political discourse.Footnote 8 But in the case of the language exams, the latter concept offers the most fruitful avenue for analysis. The language exam process assumed non-Romanian ethnicity from the outset, since its premise was that a specific group of public servants whose defining trait was their (perceived) non-Romanian national identity and its ethnic marker, their mother tongue should be tested. Regardless of their previous conduct, they were selected for the exam and thus inescapably marked with one unalterable ethnicity. Therefore, identity had lost its flexibility and was considered an assigned characteristic instead of a changing and adjustable phenomenon. Thus, it is predominantly loyalty, as a practice and an attitude that is crucial for understanding the Romanian language exams and their meaning for individuals.
Although the concept of loyalty appears often in the scholarly literature devoted to the Habsburg Monarchy, it remains only vaguely defined. Instead of a rigorous analytical approach, it is usually understood indirectly, through the juxtaposition of dynastic or imperial loyalty with national identity.Footnote 9 This type of loyalty seems less applicable to successor states, where dynasties either did not exist or represented specific national groups. Loyalty in these states was not simply about fulfilling the duties of a citizen and abiding by laws, it was rather—as Rebekah Klein-Pejšová formulated—a form of rootedness.Footnote 10
A closer look at how loyalty is theorized as an analytical concept for history reveals its use for interpreting the language exams. Martin Schulze-Wessel pointed out that loyalty is an emotional corollary of practice, action, and interaction resulting from power and obedience. His approach follows the Weberian notion of legitimate rule, but goes beyond simple acceptance of it (it does not even count as loyalty) and presumes an emotional background (motivation) for action if loyalty is present in social relations: working with devotion for someone else's aims. It is never, however, a momentary occurrence; it is preceded by a period when loyalty was established and it is also present subsequently, capable of triggering future actions.Footnote 11
Loyalty can also have different variations. Peter Haslinger and Joachim von Puttkamer differentiated three aspects of loyalty. Emotional-ethical loyalty presupposes a mutual relationship; loyalty is not a one-sided devotion and cannot exist unless both sides undertake mutual obligations. Loyalty as an attitude (Verhaltensbezug) generates different social actions that serve as an expression of acceptance in social practice: visibility, predictability, and the existence of norms facilitate acceptance. The third aspect of loyalty is discursive and most often associated with politics; it provides flexibility and enables a redefinition of loyalty without visibly abandoning discourses of identity.Footnote 12 Haslinger also points out the importance of inward and outward aspects of loyalty, that is, what is delivered by and what is expected from the individual. Expectations and their fulfillment are of a crucial importance in evaluating and judging the loyalty of individuals, but also create a space for negotiation.Footnote 13
Loyalty is often difficult to distinguish from other types of emotionally-motivated relationships of crucial importance in feudal or early modern societies, like faith, allegiance, fealty, or liege. Faith lacks loyalty's transactional nature, but the other three have a transactional aspect and are often present in an altered form, like informal patronage, in modern institutions. In modern bureaucracies like interwar Romania, however, loyalty is often disentangled from personal relationships. Although patronage is not entirely precluded in the system, the general bureaucratic mechanisms of promotion, rotation, and differentiated jobs reduce the systemic relevance of personal loyalty and redirect it to the broader and more abstract idea of the state and its institutions. Action and interaction still need concrete people to happen, but in a defined bureaucracy it does not depend on who they are as individuals. Whoever holds a position is expected to act according to its rules and norms if loyalty exists.
These ideals of modern bureaucratic loyalty are clearly distinguishable from feudal or early modern societies, as seen in the case of minority language exams in interwar Romania. The exams’ content and process made them inevitably a test of loyalty; proof that a minority public official fulfilled his or her duty by honing their Romanian language skills to near perfection. Beyond demonstrating passable, average, or even literary Romanian, the exam prompt to compose texts on a given topic posed further expectations for employees’ answers.Footnote 14 Thus, these texts are to be understood not only as testing linguistic skills. Some essay topics reflected the third, discursive aspect of loyalty by asking public employees to express one's attitude toward the state and their understanding of identity.
On a conceptual level, loyalty and ethnic identity differ significantly. The latter presupposes an unconditional, seemingly natural identification with the goals of one's ethnic community, while loyalty, even in its most emotional forms, suggests a mutual relationship that implies conditionality of action. But since one of the aims of nationalism is to sever existing ties and replace existing foci of loyalty with the ethnic group, more often than not loyalty in nation-states is understood as devotion to the nation, not to the state. As a result, ethnicity and loyalty were increasingly bound together, or taken as different facets of the very same phenomenon.Footnote 15 Nationalist discourses and discursive representation of identity offered elements transferable to preforming loyalty and could influence how people composed their language exam texts. Therefore, practices of loyalty and practices of identity could overlap and reinforce the idea that identity and loyalty were the same.Footnote 16
From this perspective, the situation of the Romanian language exams was somewhat unique: the candidates had to perform their individual ethnicity (already known to be non-Romanian) and loyalty (a criterion being tested through the proxy of language knowledge) and to signal their general understanding of those phenomena. It was fertile ground for demonstrating individual actions and reactions defining one's loyalty and ethnicity, or, paraphrasing Rogers Brubaker, loyalty happening.Footnote 17 The concept of identification is crucial for revealing how loyalty and ethnicity “happened” in the context of the language exams. Identification denotes not a stable and permanent national idea or sentiment, but an act, an interaction that expresses it at the level of the individual in a specific context. In performing ethnicity, people make it visible or hide it in different situations. Identification does not require that individuals attach the same meaning to ethnic identity in every case; meaning and action often varies according to the given circumstances.Footnote 18 Identification can be an act of consumption, a speech, a decision to attend a venue or an institution, or other such acts. Loyalty is not identical to ethnicity, but the way it becomes visible is analogous to ethnic identification—an act that reveals an attitude or a sentiment in a situation.
Minority employees were not uncommon in Romanian state service despite the 1918–19 layoffs, and many of them had a relatively long history of employment, establishing the long term relationship important for loyalty. Nevertheless, the exams were a sudden disruption to the status quo and triggered articulations of loyalty and ethnic identification. During this encounter, people represented abstract entities—the state and the minority—in a very concrete relationship. People on all sides were able to gain agency and act as representatives of these entities, but as soon as they did not act uniformly it also made palpable the fragmented nature of both Romanian state actors and the public employees from the Hungarian minority. This fragmentation made the administration of the language exams an occasion for negotiation.
It is important to stress that neither the existence of minority public servants, nor their possible loyalty, nor the fragmentation of the state and the uneven quality of nationalization should necessarily alter the understanding of interwar Romania as a nationalizing state, or the nature of the exams as representing nationalist politics. First, the language exams reveal individual attitudes towards a complex state with many facets, and these individual attitudes were the result of individual circumstances. Second, while states usually have their normative aspect, often reflected in their self-understanding (for Greater Romania it was the idea of the nation-state) that determines ideas concerning how the state and the polity should be arranged, states also have a functioning aspect. The realities of day-to-day activity and the relationship between these two aspects of statehood is not as straightforward as one might assume reading the bold claims of politicians. This article analyzes a moment when nationalist politics interfered with state functions, revealing fractures in the state and its nationalizing ideology, even if the results of the state's policies were largely unchanged.
In the Service of Greater Romania
In a broad sense, the present study answers the question, who were the minority public officials in Greater Romania? What was their social background? What was expected of them and how did they adapt to the challenges of working for a nationalizing state? How did they define and redefine themselves? Historical research so far has not tackled many of these questions directly and in depth. Previous scholarship disclosed some important details on the persistence of minority officials, but either presented a general narrative of minority grievances or focused on nationalizing efforts with little nuance.Footnote 19 Other important studies have described and analyzed the changing legal framework of public service.Footnote 20 Some of them have also explored minority public officials in a more general manner, highlighting the legal obligations and status of this group, but further analysis is warranted.Footnote 21
During the interwar years, the fate of minority public officials was a subject of permanent complaint from Hungary and Hungarian organizations in Transylvania. A mass outflow of Hungarians between 1918 and 1924 suggested a deliberate policy of dismissal. Because of their significant influence on Hungarian politics, these émigrés could keep their case in the eye of the public.Footnote 22 Dismissed employees and their political allies expounded on discrimination and the refugee problem publicly, usually portraying a dire situation.Footnote 23 Minority officials disposed of through successive Romanian governmental actions, particularly language exams, offered the most potent examples.Footnote 24 Some accounts claimed that by 1930 only around 1,500 Hungarian public officials were left in Romania.Footnote 25
Greater Romania had come into being with the unification of four component regions, each with different past political-administrative cultures that left an imprint on administrative structures and practice.Footnote 26 Transylvania represented the Hungarian tradition of municipal autonomy, by which county and local governments were entitled to select most officials, including those who executed the orders of the central government. Public employees and political elites of Romanian nationality in Transylvania likewise shared this legacy of municipal autonomy and represented it in the new state.Footnote 27
Taking over Transylvania's administration was a laborious task for the enlarged Romanian state. The first years, 1919 and 1920, brought rapid changes and many officials with Hungarian political sentiments left for Hungary. It was not only their uncompromising stance towards Romania that made them unwilling to accept new circumstances: part of the emigration resulted from the revolutionary events in 1918, not from Romanian occupation.Footnote 28 The new rulers of the province sought to make room for more Romanian officials, but the change was less abrupt and less marked than usually portrayed. Two factors benefitted remaining Hungarian officials: the lack of experienced Romanians and local social networks. The new administration sometimes explicitly admitted that it lacked the necessary Romanian specialists, and delegates of the central government defended minority employees who were attacked by local Romanians as being disloyal or even subversive to Romania.Footnote 29
As a result, even refusal to take the oath of fidelity to Romania did not necessarily mean immediate dismissal—a grievance frequently mentioned in the Hungarian press and political circles. For example, in Caraș-Severin County, a region with a relatively strong Romanian and German middle class grown out of the local border regiment, the county administration employed 165 people between 1920 and 1925 (fifty-eight more than in 1910).Footnote 30 Seventy-five were non-Romanians (three more than in 1910), out of which thirty-three had started their career in the Hungarian administration; most of them, especially those of Hungarian nationality, had not sworn allegiance to the new rulers immediately.Footnote 31
Rather than universal dismissal, the general rule for the creation of the new administration was that where the new rulers had sufficient human resources, they pushed more eagerly for Romanianization, but where they did not, they retained minority officials.Footnote 32 The Germans in the region fared even better: after they had supported Romania's claim on Transylvania in a declaration in Mediaș in January 1919, they preserved their positions. In Brașov County, where Hungarians, Romanians, and Germans were equally numerous and similarly educated, Saxon politicians dominated during the Dualist era and continued to be well represented in the 1920s. The number of minority officials in 1923 exceeded that of ethnic Romanians at every level.Footnote 33 However, in the early 1930s, Saxons were gradually pushed out of the most important positions, and in 1934 the last German mayors of important cities were replaced with ethnic Romanians.
Although the aim of Romanian politics was to develop a group of educated Romanians to replace minority officials and employees, they needed time.Footnote 34 Time could also serve the interests of minorities, however, especially if they had previously accumulated social capital and could use it to their own advantage now. The decade after the mid-1920s brought relative stability. A law that unified the administration was passed in 1925, while a statute on public officials defined the prerequisites of employment and key rights, such as exemption from arbitrary transfer. The first wave of basic Romanian language exams also ended in 1924–25.Footnote 35 Candidates were treated very benevolently and few of them were dismissed.Footnote 36
Stability also made for a relatively constant number of minority public employees after the initial flight. Not many of them were active in the central and regional ministerial organs, and they were slightly underrepresented in the higher echelons of county administration, where mainly indispensable experts and Saxon officials remained in their posts. But minority public servants abounded in mid-level positions, especially in the postal system and the railways. For example, 319 out of 1,188 railway station masters were registered as minority officials in January 1934.Footnote 37 Their numbers were also relatively high among village notaries in most countries, apart from the Szekler region, where the state pursued a pronounced nationalizing campaign and where the proportion of the Hungarian population was so high (over 80%) that installation of only a few ethnic Romanians resulted in disproportionate representation.Footnote 38 Another important sphere of employment for minority public servants was administrative work at the community level and the lower rungs of state services, such as public road departments and public traffic companies.
Due to the lack of state-wide statistics, one has to rely on illustrative localized examples to understand the representation of minority pubic employees. In (Caraș-) Severin County, 36% of village notaries were of minority origin in January 1934, much higher than their proportion in the county population. Their presence in community administration was also over-proportional, at around 30%, while minorities made up less than 20% of the rural population of the county.Footnote 39 In Bihor, 350 individuals were assigned to take the language exam in 1934, excluding the county seat of Oradea.Footnote 40 In Timiș-Torontal, 496 people were reexamined in 1935.Footnote 41 Additional counties (Târnava Mare in 1937, Bihor in 1937, Cluj and Turda in 1935, Sălaj in 1935 and 1937) show similar patterns.Footnote 42 These numbers suggest that in the mid-1930s, minority public officials were more than proportionally employed in public administration, post offices, and railways in Transylvania. The lowest possible estimate for minority public employees (excluding post and railways) in the region was about 4,000 (extrapolating the lowest known ratio of minority officials to all of the counties where such data is not available), or 47% of the number of non-ethnic-Romanian public servants in 1910. It is probable, however, that 8,000–10,000 minority officials were employed in state service, the same as in 1910. Given the total number of employees in these strictly administrative services and organs (one calculation gives 110,000 for Greater Romania in 1929, another 65,000 for 1937), it seems plausible that minorities were, at least in Transylvania, more than proportionally employed in the public sector until the mid-1930s, although their local size always depended on the specific circumstances.Footnote 43 This high number did not always mean continuity, however; emigration and natural workforce fluctuation affected minorities, too. The total number of public servants exceeded dualist Hungary's, and the new positions were filled mostly with ethnic Romanians, reducing the ratio of minority officials.Footnote 44
Analyzing lists of minority employees from Bihor, Caraș-Severin, Timiș-Torontal, and Cluj reveals details about employees’ social profile in the mid-1930s. The most important differences between minority and Romanian officials were their length of service and educational level. The proportion of those who finished only lower secondary school (one to four years) was about 30% among both ethnic Romanian and minority officials. At the middle educational level, 29% of ethnic Romanians finished five to eight years of secondary school, while only 14% of minority public servants fell into this category, but mostly because they often had even higher degrees. The proportion of those with a secondary school degree or a specialized degree (such as notary, teacher training, or commercial professional school) was almost double (46%) among minority officials compared to ethnic Romanians (26%). The share of public employees with an advanced university degree was again equal at 9%.Footnote 45
The baccalaureate, a separate exam closing secondary school and—if successful—providing entry to universities was introduced in 1925. Minority students always had a lower success ratio at the exams, therefore the overrepresentation of minorities in the group with completed secondary education was due to divergent lengths of employment.Footnote 46 Non-ethnic-Romanian officials with higher degrees earned before the introduction of the baccalaureate often had history of service, starting in the Hungarian era. However, local circumstances led to significant variation. In 1934 in Caraș-Severin, 78% of minority officials in rural administration had been in public service for more than eleven years, and 61.5% of this group had started their career in dualist Hungary. But here ethnic Romanian public officials also had unusually long periods of service under their belts: 59% had worked more than ten years and 37% of this group had begun working before 1919.Footnote 47 On the other end of the spectrum, in Bihor, only 43% of minority officials in rural administration had served longer than ten years (36% served less than five years), and only five people had begun their careers before 1919.Footnote 48 Among ethnic Romanian officials in Bihor, 60% had only six to ten years of service, serving as witness to the high rate of administrative turnover there. Minority and ethnic Romanian public employees were similarly affected by the general circumstances in their respective counties.
All this evidence suggests that positions—at least up to mid-level jobs—were relatively open to minority candidates. Public service remained a viable choice for minorities, even if ethnic Romanians had a better chance to land open jobs. Where local social networks transgressed ethnic boundaries before 1919, like in Caraș-Severin, they could remain sufficiently strong to preserve the positions of minority members, despite nationalizing efforts from above. The proportion of ethnic Romanian employees with less than five years of service in the mid-1930s suggests that any strong wave of forced Romanianization did not start in the 1920s.
The older generation of minority officials was usually better educated than new ethnic-Romanian personnel, pointing to only limited success in raising a new Romanian educated elite. Still there was not much difference among new hires, with ethnic Romanians holding a slight edge in education over minorities, especially Hungarians. Minority public servants with specific expertise could be found in higher-level county positions too, and they were numerous at the higher mid-level posts of the city administrations.Footnote 49 However, their proportional presence or slight over-representation did not necessarily mean that they held positions in areas populated by minorities; many minority officials were stationed in Romanian villages.
Language, Loyalty, Identification
The process of executing language exams, which began in September of 1934, was relatively simple: the local prefect invited the minority employees and convened a three-member commission, with himself as its chair, together with the director of a Romanian secondary school and a secondary school teacher of Romanian language and literature.Footnote 50 The all-Romanian commission administered a written and an oral exam, usually tailored to the position and educational level of the candidates. Minority officials were treated equally: neither Saxons nor Hungarians were given preference.
The essay topics were decided on examination day. Three major types were preferred: a general topic, a professional topic, and a personal topic. The first dealt with history, geography, or culture, inviting the candidates to talk about national issues. They were free to decide whether to give a boiler-plate answer or to deviate from it, and could also choose how much to stray from the standard answers. These types of questions would not be surprising for candidates who entered public service after 1919 because as applicants for public employment they had had to pass a similar competency exam.Footnote 51 A language exam was slightly different, however, in that it was not the content but their linguistic expression that was being evaluated.Footnote 52
The second type of question was either strictly professional (a description of one's working day or an outline of the rights and duties of the community administration) or involved asking the applicant to discuss the social role of public servants, especially in rural areas, where the state was perceived to be the main driver of modernization and progress. This reflected the perception of the state in the eyes of its leaders and the notion that the imaginary enactment of these duties could prove loyalty to the state project. Essay topics in this sub-category ranged from the role of village notaries in the fight against alcoholism to their role in the peaceful co-existence of minorities and ethnic Romanians.Footnote 53
The questions concerning private experiences were often posed in a general manner to rural officials and more specifically to urban ones, implicitly differentiating their roles in these contexts. While rural officials should excel as missionaries of modernization, urban ones were expected to exemplify the norms of urban middle-class life. Examinees in urban areas were sometimes asked to describe how they spent their last holiday, or to summarize a novel they recently read, while village employees had to give a general description of their life or describe significant events from it.Footnote 54
How did these various types of questions trigger performances conveying loyalty and identification? The topics themselves were certainly indicators of the examiners’ expectations. The candidates could decide how to frame their answers and how to position themselves in relation to it: whether to portray themselves as mere professionals or use tropes of national discourse indicating loyalty and identification beyond the obvious sense of duty. Even though the exam essays were meant to test linguistic mastery rather than be judged for their content, the expectations of the examiners and the nationalist purpose of the exams undoubtedly influenced the answers. Still, it would be misleading to interpret these texts as simply disguising “true” identities through “fake” identifications. Most exam topics did not require any expression of national identification or overt acceptance of the tenets of Romanian nationalism. Because of the absence of an explicit requirement to identify with Romanian nationalism, test takers could use various strategies to adjust their text to the perceived expectations of the exams.
As their “official” ethnicity was not subject to change, most candidates tried to portray themselves as professionals and members of a specialized state body, rather than paragons of Romanian culture. Within this general framework, however, there was significant room to express how exceptionally attached and loyal one was. It was customary to emphasize long and dutiful public service and/or expound upon their credentials as competent, indispensable administrators.Footnote 55 A striking variety of professional identification strategies can be found in David Eugen's language exam essay.Footnote 56 He had served in Sălaj County as a notary since 1926. At his reexamination in early 1935, he had to write about significant events from his life. His most important childhood experience was his mother's disappearance, leaving him to be raised by relatives. This is followed by the story of his greatest achievement: graduating from notary school. He presented it as the fulfillment of his deepest desires and the result of extreme struggle. When Eugen had traveled to Curtea de Argeș, in Wallachia, he was barely admitted to the school and lived there in poverty. But through hard work, he achieved his goal and earned a position in the state's employ.
Beyond the clear message of being a loyal servant of Romania, the essay suggests a deep emotional attachment: an orphan from a minority community finds a new home and family among the public servants of Greater Romania. Even if Eugen's exaggerated devotion was the exception and not the rule (and perhaps also the result of the stress of being reexamined after a seemingly successful test), his essay emphasized the same themes as many others: loyalty through professional conduct, industriousness, impartiality, and willing acceptance of the social role of public servants outside their office, either as models of proper civic life or as educators of the rural population.
It is hard to analyze the ethnic aspects of identification in essays dominated by professional knowledge, but nevertheless some topics offered opportunities to express nationality without directly requiring it. As fascinating as essays on Romanian history from notaries might be, they would tell us little about how they differed from other professional and social groups. One batch of exams, however, offers a sizable sample of examined officials from a range of social classes: the reexamination of employees in Târnava Mare.Footnote 57 Here, officials with varying educational levels from urban and rural environment alike were tested in significant numbers. Forty-five essays were submitted with the title “The Seat of our County,” written in the historic city of Sighișoara. This Saxon city with a multi-ethnic population offered the opportunity to invoke history, culture, and religion—all important for national self-perception—although the prompt was not explicitly national.
In order to ascertain standard conceptualization and deviations for this essay, I categorized sixteen subjects and their most typical elements.Footnote 58 With the help of these units, I tried to identify the most common topics of the essays and how these elements were combined to portray the city. The typical essay started with Sighișoara's name (thirty-nine times) and its general evaluation as beautiful (twenty-six), mainly due to the river and the nearby hills (twenty-three and twenty-five times, respectively). Examinees made reference to the three nationalities living there (thirty-two), followed by a vague description of the economy, often mentioning commerce (twenty-six), and specifically the textile industry (seventeen). Among architectural landmarks, the essays mentioned the fine and important palace of the prefecture (twenty), the orthodox cathedral (twenty-one), and the Prince Nicolae secondary school (twenty). Many listed important institutions, like the prefecture (fourteen), county court (thirteen), and tax office (twelve).
These aggregate responses show how much the candidates accepted the civic and professional identification that the question suggested. The city is presented as stereotypical; only its development in the present and the presence of the state is considered noteworthy. The dominance of state institutions and buildings as landmarks (the orthodox cathedral was a state institution, because this church was constitutionally the national church and part of the public sector and its priests public servants) points to professional identification again. Examinees consistently described the city from a perspective of a public servant. The responses eschewed sensitive topics (only seven even mentioned history) and took a neutral approach to reporting facts (twenty-six essays listed ethnic Romanians first, and generally did not specify precise numbers among the nationalities), revealing how officials tried to avoid issues that could be interpreted as signs of anti-Romanian sentiment or disloyalty.Footnote 59 The typical essay portrays a community that is united in its development efforts and one where ethnic diversity is accepted, but mainly in schooling (Saxon schools were mentioned twenty times) and in religious life. Other aspects revealing ethnic difference (such as cultural life or associations) were rarely highlighted; perhaps examinees perceived them as unwelcome. This professional, description of the city sufficed and reflected in Romanian leaders’ perception of the state.
There were three notable deviations from the typical essay. The first emphasized one's devotion to his superiors, usually by mentioning the prefect, the mayor, or the city council (seven essays) in a positive light. For example, essays attributed economic and cultural development to their wise leadership, sometimes also noting the leaders’ Romanian ethnicity. There was no significant difference among examinees in nationality, age, education, or position in mentioning their devotion to superiors.
The second type of deviation expressed national sentiment, either by omitting Romanian institutions (like the Orthodox cathedral, although this usually meant neglecting every church and the Prince Nicolae secondary school, too) and mentioning Saxon ones (like the Teutsch Gymnasium) or through telling a “heretic” history of the city.Footnote 60 For example, a passage that correctly attributed the founding of the city to the Saxons or to a Hungarian king was marked with red pencil as problematic. The most defiant non-Romanian historical references usually came from Hungarian public servants with relatively high educational levels and moderate lengths of service.Footnote 61 But texts written by Hungarians with shorter employment records also sometimes echoed Romanian nationalistic views, showing a lack of homogeneity among minority employees.Footnote 62
The third type of deviation reveals the importance of social differences: a low-ranking official fascinated with the modernity of city life. While in cases of the better educated mid- or upper-level officials one could assume that the expression of professional loyalty was a conscious effort to play by the rules, in some essays a naive honesty is detectable. A petty officer from Mediaș submitted an unusual text, not a general description of the city but an account of his trip(s) to Sighișoara. He essentially wrote a travelogue of his examination day, coming from the railway station, admiring the new buildings along his route, like the Orthodox cathedral, which he found larger and finer than the church in Mediaș. He was enchanted by the buses of the public transport company.Footnote 63
In general, the exams mostly evidence an easy and comfortable strategy of identification as a professional public servant, expressing strong loyalty but not necessarily accepting Romanian nationalist discourse. The whole process steered the candidates towards this kind of professional and civic identification, and it seems that even if other possibilities were open most of them opted for this one. There was also a clear difference between urban and rural personnel. The former had to act as role models of middle-class life while the latter as pioneers of state efforts to elevate the rural world. The city was indicative of state-driven progress—a place where nationalities coexisted peacefully and enjoyed equal civic rights—again a reproduction of leaders’ perception of the state.
Unholy Alliances? The Aftermath of the Language Exams
In early 1935, the county administrations prepared for the dismissal of failed examinees. Failure was nominally an average grade lower than five on a one-to-ten scale (in some rare cases a grade of five was also insufficient).Footnote 64 Many prefects sought to dismiss employees humanely, offering pension or severance pay. But the bomb dropped in January 1935, when a telegraphed order from Bucharest, signed by Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Interior Dumitru Iuca, communicated an instruction from the Council of Ministers that everyone with a grade of five or lower should be fired immediately and brought before disciplinary commissions, losing their claim to benefits or a pension.Footnote 65 Those with a grade higher than five and lower or equal to six should be reexamined, and only those with a retake result better than six would pass.Footnote 66 The news was received with consternation and unleashed unexpected reactions, most of them aimed at modifying the decision or subverting it. Many prefects sided with their minority subordinates and started a surprisingly persistent struggle with Iuca.
Before outlining the tactics employed and strategies followed, it is worth elaborating on the political environment. Those who were called to be examined were officially registered as non-ethnic-Romanians, thus liable to prove their language proficiency. In the early 1930s, the growth of the Legion of the Archangel Michael and the general shift of politics posed greater challenges for minority public servants.Footnote 67 Former Prime Minister Alexandru Vaida Voevod had started a campaign for the numerus valahicus, the limitation of minority presence in every sector of public and economic life, in 1934.Footnote 68 The language exams were a result of this growing nationalist passion, and affected the younger generation of the National Liberal Party, too.Footnote 69 Thus, when the prefects defied Bucharest, they could find little support among political entities in Romania.
Prefects employed a wide variety of strategies to fend off pressure from above to fire minority employees. First was refusing to abide by the order, like in the county of Făgăraș.Footnote 70 It started as tacit sabotage, but when Iuca's office inquired about the situation on May 28th, the prefect had to change course. He prepared a protracted answer, which he sent weeks later on July 12th, admitting that he had not yet started the layoffs because without proper replacements it would have disrupted smooth administration. Somewhat pointedly, he promised to proceed with the removals as soon as Bucharest approved the hiring of new officials. Others used a less defiant tone, like the prefect of Sălăj, but still attributed not dismissing minority employees to the lack of replacements.Footnote 71
Few of the prefects were bold enough to make such a stand against their superior, but nevertheless negotiated the issue in general terms and lobbied on behalf of some specific functionaries. All of these efforts deliberately delayed (or sabotaged) the removal process. The prefect of Bihor gained significant concessions with this method. He relied, in particular, on the contradiction between successive orders. As he pointed out, Iuca initially ordered the forwarding of failed candidates to the disciplinary commission.Footnote 72 However, another order from March 18th instructed the prefects not to involve the disciplinary commissions, because they reexamined officials and kept them at their posts. In order to create legal ground for this change, the Ministry invoked a ruling of Section III of the Supreme Court of Cassation. The prefect not only pointed out the contradictions among successive orders and clarified how local disciplinary commissions proceeded (thirty-four officials had already received their verdicts), he also lodged legal arguments that aimed to undermine Iuca's authority. In this vein, he argued that a sentence pronounced only by one section of the court did not have the scope the Ministry claimed it possessed. Additionally, he argued that Article 5 of the statute on public functionaries made it mandatory to involve disciplinary commissions in cases of dismissal. The Ministry relented and sent delegates to Oradea to discuss the issue with the prefect, who in early April offered a compromise solution, which was readily accepted after a legal counsel admitted the validity of the prefect's arguments.Footnote 73 Everyone whose dismissal was yet to be deliberated by disciplinary commissions (fifty-three cases were pending) would abide by its decision regardless of the second ministerial order, and those reinstated would remain public officials.
Deliberate delay played a role, as well. With his refusal to comply with the second order immediately, the prefect secured the necessary leeway to put all his subordinates through the standard disciplinary procedure. In this way, he saved twenty-four people from being fired.Footnote 74 To delay the dismissal of employees, some prefects even played dumb. Throughout the protracted exchanges of letters with Bucharest during 1935, the prefects of Turda and Sălaj pretended not to have copies of the ruling of the Supreme Court of Cassation (even though it had been published in the official gazette, the Monitorul Official), or of the statutes on public servants. When the Ministry, after long delays, sent the documents, the prefects admitted that they already had the ruling, but they had “misunderstood” something, or had presumed that the Court had issued a new sentence on the matter.Footnote 75
It was also common to refer cases to authorities other than the office of the prefect, which were often very slow in reaching a conclusion. The head of Timiș-Torontal County reported on June 7 the fate of 104 failed public servants in the city of Timișoara and in the county administration, out of which he claimed only twenty-three fell under his jurisdiction. In seventy-one cases, the mayor of Timișoara was responsible for the unsatisfactory employees, while the ten veterinary surgeons fell under the purview of the Ministry of Agriculture, which had not taken steps to resolve their status since February.Footnote 76 When the prefect submitted another report in September, he still blamed the mayor for not carrying out the ministerial order.Footnote 77
Some prefects hoped that in the mountains of documents sent to and from Bucharest, no one would notice a small irregularity, especially when the county administration seemed to follow the instructions in most regards. The prefect of Târnava Mică issued a decision in June to remove all of his subordinates with a grade lower than (but not equal to) five and duly notified the Ministry. The report was registered without noticing how it contravened the ministerial order, enabling the reexamination of examinees who had scored a five on the first exam.Footnote 78 Even those prefects who executed the orders without much resistance usually tried to lobby on behalf of specific employees, gaining individual dispensations from the Ministry either for reexamination or for pensions.Footnote 79
Alongside these individualized efforts there were more organized ones. One strategy was to appeal and overturn the decisions made on the basis of the exams and the ministerial order. When the Ministry blocked the way to disciplinary commissions, the Local and National Commissions of Revision (Comitetul de Revizuire) entered the fray.Footnote 80 They accepted appeals en masse, usually overturning the ministerial order, justifying reinstatement through their own reexamination.Footnote 81
Pensioning off failed public employees was another method to moderate the effects of the exams, and it often required the prefects to serve as accomplices. This could be accomplished in multiple ways. In most cases, the grounds for claiming a pension was officially not failure of the exam, but some illness (sometimes of dubious medical validity). Alternatively, prefects could informally influence the authorities ruling on pension claims or cheat the system. One of the most flagrant violations was the case of Dominic Römer, a notary in Timiș-Torontal, who failed his language reexamination. He applied for a pension a few days later, on June 13, and the prefect authorized it the very next day! Bucharest intervened and, after much back and forth, forced the prefect to revoke his decision on December 18th. But the pair did not give up: the prefect pensioned Römer again on the grounds of physical incapacity on January 13, 1936, invoking his decision from June 14, 1935 while never mentioning its revocation. When state authorities initiated an inquiry into the prefect's actions, he confirmed the existence of his second decision based on the first, legally-annulled one, again omitting his first pension authorization's revocation.Footnote 82
Trouble arose not only for those who failed the first language exam, but even for those who thought they had passed. Their treatment generally confirms the impression of benevolence from their superiors. Apart from lenient reexaminations (discussed in further detail below), prefects also made some efforts to circumvent the rules on failing and retesting. A fascinating case occurred in Trei Scaune, where the county prefect initially tried to convince Undersecretary Iuca how unjust it would be to dismiss people who thought they had succeeded at the examination with a grade of five, especially since their examination was very thorough.Footnote 83 Bucharest administrators remained firm on this issue, but did allow for the reexamination of some failed Trei Scaune candidates.Footnote 84 Here the events took a strange twist. The original examination commission reconvened, consulted their notes from the original exam, and “discovered” that all of them wished to give a grade of seven rather than five to three previously examined notaries. Thus, they did not waste their time with an actual reexamination, instead they simply wrote up a new proceedings account and submitted it to the Ministry with a carefully-formulated letter that was confusing enough to suggest that the candidates had been tested again. The Ministry was either fooled or satisfied.Footnote 85 Iuca himself wrote to the central disciplinary commission that the three notaries were reexamined and had succeeded!Footnote 86
In many cases where minority public employees were indeed reexamined, the second round of language exams were very lenient. Examinees were rarely exposed to rigorous testing and tricky questions, and the examiners evaluated their work very generously. Reexamination was less challenging than the original exams.Footnote 87 In Cluj County, the commission personalized the written exercises for each test taker to enable him/her to utilize the vocabulary most relevant to their own line of work. Eugen (Jenő) Gonda, an engineer for the forestry department in the city of Cluj, was asked to write about the importance of replanting forests in Transylvania; engineer Ștefan (István) Lakatos was asked about recent and future construction projects in Cluj; and Dr. Grigore (Gergely) Ioja, district secretary at Borșa, simply had to describe his administrative district.Footnote 88
The evaluation of the exams was similarly benevolent. In Someș County, nineteen out of twenty candidates succeeded at the second exam.Footnote 89 The next prefect of Satu Mare later accused his predecessor of being too lenient.Footnote 90 The prefect of Cluj told the Ministry that not one of the village notaries failed when Bucharest inquired about the number of vacant posts.Footnote 91 Telling proof of the general sentiment towards the officials who were forced to take a second exam is provided by the material from Timiș-Torontal. Here, the evaluated exams are full of examples of how the examiners clearly tried to award at least the minimal passing grade. They awarded very high grades for the oral exams of candidates who otherwise wrote miserable texts. In most cases even a grade as low as three for the written essay was counterbalanced with the necessary oral grade of ten! Among 256 city employees examined in May 1935, fifty-six achieved a surprisingly high oral grade after a bad written exam, together just averaging the necessary final grade of six and one-half. Thirty-one of the examinees received a score of eight on the oral after scoring a five for the written exercise; seventeen of them received a nine after a four; and five received a ten after a three. Three of them scored a nine after a five and there were two failed candidates who nevertheless received a nine after a three.Footnote 92 Among rural public servants (excluding notaries and sub-notaries), twenty-one out of seventy-nine reexamined showed the same general pattern. Sixteen of them received an eight on oral exam after a five for the written; five of them scored a nine after a five.Footnote 93 The lower expectations for higher marks are clear from the overall picture. These city employees had earlier achieved a grade of five and one-half or six, but upon reexamination only 29% failed (seventy-four people), 35% (ninety-one people) received a score of six and one-half, and the remaining 36% scored a significantly higher grade than in September 1934. Among village employees in the county, only 15% (twelve people) failed, 38% (thirty people) earned a six and one-half, and the remaining 47% received a significantly higher grade than in September 1934. Assuming that both examinations were conducted consistently and the same evaluation criteria were applied, one would expect an average grade much closer to the original five and one-half or six.Footnote 94
In addition to lenient reexaminations, authorities’ final recommendations show a generally benevolent attitude toward minority examinees also. Out of forty-six failed German public servants, twenty-four were nevertheless recommended for further service, eight for being pensioned off, and only fourteen were recommended for removal.Footnote 95
Nevertheless, the outcome of the language exams was a mixed bag. Iuca's decision was not revoked and the official policy remained a cleansing of minorities from public services. Some of those who were spared at first in September 1934 were eventually laid off (officially around 30% of them were reexamined). However, not all of them were fired, and data on minority officials shows that a portion of those who had failed their language exams already in 1934 were still in service years later. In Bihor, for example, forty-five out of eighty-one rural officials who failed their exams in 1934, often with very weak grades, still held administrative positions in 1937.Footnote 96 A significant proportion of those who could not succeed upon reexamination were still retained through some bureaucratic trick. Thus, it is plausible to estimate a maximum loss of around 15–20% of all minority public employees in 1934–35, much lower than the figures of the petition submitted to the League of Nations. Many prefects successfully subverted the system or wriggled out concessions from Iuca. In the end, on the very last day of 1935, Iuca gave in and officially lowered the threshold for a passing grade to a six.Footnote 97 The supreme irony of this struggle was that it enabled Romania to refute the minority petitions to the League of Nations as exaggerated or even unfounded.Footnote 98
This likely could not have happened if there were not higher officials in the Ministry who were sympathetic to the prefects’ efforts. Alexandru Pretorian, a general inspector, toured the country in 1936 to finish still pending reexaminations. In Timișoara, he was just as lenient as the county officials, readily awarding high enough oral grades to counterbalance less successful written exams. But Pretorian consciously afforded this leniency more to those in lower positions, considering their educational and social level and the fact that only oral communication was necessary in their work. Meanwhile, he decried the bad Romanian of higher officials as an affront to their social position and status, resembling the urban-rural differentiation of the exams.Footnote 99
The aftermath of the exams revealed nationalizing and discriminatory intentions at the center, but also proved the strength of professional solidarity among the members of the body of public servants, irrespective of nationality. The topics and texts point to the primacy of professional identification and loyalty, too. Although regionalist tendencies may have played a role in some cases, non-Transylvanian prefects just as actively defended their minority subordinates as Transylvanians, pointing to a more general professional solidarity at play.Footnote 100 The prefects’ successful action highlights how inaccurate it is to treat the Romanian state as a monolithic entity. Despite being a nation-state, public service offered opportunities to Romania's minority citizens, too, to such extent that they were accepted into non-national communities of solidarity. Therefore, contrary to the assumption of a monolithic and aggressively nationalizing nation-state, nationalizing policies were deflected, sometimes even sabotaged, by the mechanisms devoted to the functioning of the state, across various local contexts and different institutions.
Minority public servants in Romania were peripheral in discursive constructs of the nation. They were an anomaly from the perspective of the nationalizing state and contradicted the dominant—primarily Hungarian—minority narrative of victimhood. It was hard to account for the existence of a sizeable group that earned its living from the very state minority leaders and politicians identified with their oppression. Although they lived and worked in Romania and were counted as non-ethnic-Romanians, when people spoke of Hungarians, the minority community was associated with and limited to institutions like churches, denominational schools, and social groups, including peasants, workers, and representatives of the liberal professions. If public servants were mentioned at all, it was the ones who were laid off at the end of World War I without pensions and benefits. Minority public servants appeared in this construct usually only after they “joined” this latter group.
The language exams were a moment that reveals how individuals tried to adjust and express loyalty and ethnicity, also revealing loyalty's three theoretical aspects. The non-Romanian ethnicity of examinees was assigned to them and led to the testing of their language skills as a proxy for loyalty. The participation of minority officials in public service was based on a professional understanding of this activity, and the status of public servants constituted a legal and institutional form of the mutual relationship important for the existence of loyalty. Devotion—a certain emotional attachment to the modernizing goals of the state and to the role model of urban-middle classes—offered both the ethical and emotional element, also important for loyalty's emergence. Their duties and responsibilities implied certain practices of acceptance that were predictable and sanctionable. These practices appeared in their texts, which often aimed at performing this loyalty while focusing on professional conduct and the social role of public servants outside their office as agents of a modernizing state or representatives of (mainly urban middle-class) social norms. Finally, the essays themselves reflected different discursive options to negotiate one's self-understanding as a minority public servant.
Most candidates accepted this identification as minority public servants in their public and private life. They emphasized their loyalty beyond the walls of their office, for example listing Balchik or other Romanian holiday destinations and silently omitting vacations abroad, or not mentioning the Budapest radio among the stations they listened to.Footnote 101 The world that unfolds from the language exam texts revolves around the Romanian state and its administrative structures, and loyalty was performed as enthusiastic acceptance of its goals and confirmation of the leadership's perception of the state as a modernizing force. One can suspect that sometimes examinees wanted to counterbalance their deficiencies in Romanian language knowledge with praise for the state, but even in these cases their essays still offer a window into their preexisting loyalty. The younger generation of minority officials sometimes went even further and exhibited acceptance or even internalization of elements of Romanian national discourse, contradicting Hungarian or German perspectives.Footnote 102
Expressions of nationality and national identification among groups of public servants represented a peculiar genre. They held an officially-assigned, immutable nationality that made it futile and almost impossible to express national indifference.Footnote 103 Whatever they thought of their own national allegiance and however they would have tried to distance themselves from its typical performative acts, nothing would change their official categorization as minorities. Nevertheless, the way that minority public servants performed their ethnicity was different from the variety that was seen as authentic Hungarianness or Germanness in the respective national discourses. Therefore, their identity was questionable to minority national activists, except when they were threatened with dismissal. In such situations, when they finally shared in minority victimhood, they were suddenly regarded as minority co-nationals, regardless of their dubious national loyalty, social practices, or affiliation with the Romanian state. In this sense, their nationality was dependent on circumstances, and as such extremely situational.
The dominantly-professional identification of public employees, born out of a combination of officially-ascribed nationality and a discourse much closer to the Romanian national one than the minority version, was mutual between the state and the minority public servants. It provided a basis for professional solidarity in a body with specific status. The long calm period before 1934 helped to crystalize the relationship necessary for the appearance of loyalty, reinforcing solidarity. Although rarely occupying higher positions, minorities were still integrated into public services and could rely on support from their Romanian colleagues and superiors.Footnote 104 Being outside the public's attention certainly helped to preserve the careful balance. As soon as public servants became visible (due to a scandal, political claim, accident, or similar reason) or targeted by nationalists, nationalizing tendencies easily prevailed and even solidarity of their superiors could not always save them.
The language exams signify a visible shift from an institutionalized form of loyalty to a more asymmetric and personalized one. Minority public servants suddenly found themselves bound by solidarity not to an institution and a public body but to their immediate superiors and colleagues who, in the aftermath of the exams, delivered on the promise of solidarity in exchange for loyalty. Meanwhile the state—at least the central organs and thus its institutionalized and more abstract form—renounced mutual institutional loyalty through its attempted purge, reversing the process of development of a modern society and returning to the era of personalized patronage relationships. It was also a sign of a significant reconfiguration of the relationship between the normative aspects (the national character) and the functioning of the state. The undermining of institutionalized loyalty demonstrated that the gap between the nation-state's nationalizing goals and its more tolerant day-to-day functioning started to narrow or even disappeared. While minority public officials could still rely on personal bonds to salvage their careers, these ties could prove fleeting in a modern bureaucracy where superiors were likely to be transferred to other positions and nothing could guarantee that their successors would establish personal solidarity and revive the resemblance of institutional loyalty. Nevertheless, the strength of these personal relations, as it was revealed during the prefects’ battle for their minority public servants, testifies to the fact that regardless of the unquestionably nationalizing intentions and rhetoric of Romanian political discourse of that era (rather than support for minority rights), minority service in Greater Romania was—for a long decade—not the national heresy it might seem.
