Petru Weber
Petru Weber
Petru Weber is a doctoral student from Romania, who is also fluent in German, English and Hungarian. His interests lie with inter-ethnic relations in Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. He studied at the Babes-Bólyai University in Cluj and at the Freie Universität in Berlin.
The research he has done was mainly centred on working in archives exploring journals, newspapers and official records, as well as private correspondence and memoirs from archives in Cluj, Berlin (Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes), Budapest (Magyar Országos Levéltár) and Szeged. Mr Weber started his activity at the University of Sussex in April 2002 investigating the political and cultural context of Arnold Daghani's early work, emphasising the connections between the private destiny of the artist and the changes of political regimes of the period 1930-1960.
The project hopes to show how the upheavals of the Second World War influenced the identity of the German-speaking Jews from Romania and how their tragic experiences under the Antonescu regime have been reflected in public memory. The research focuses chronologically on the period starting with Daghani reaching adulthood and ending with his final departure from the communist Romania in December 1958.
In a historical context, this is the period that coincides with the emergence of the extreme right towards the end of the 1920s and the end of the period of de-Stalinisation in the late 1950s. This was a period of spectacular upheavals in the political life of the country, which affected dramatically above all the Jewish population of the Bukowina and Moldavia. Mr Weber's doctoral dissertation on 'Public Memory, Politics and Identity in Romania and Germany, 1930-1960' forms an integral part of the project 'Pictorial Narrative' in close co-operation with Professor Edward Timms and the art historian Dr Deborah Schultz.
Publications
Millennium Ungarns bei den Rumänen (Hungary's Millennium by Romanians)
in: Interethnische- und Zivilisationsbeziehungen im siebenbürgischen
Raum, Cluj-Napoca, 1997
Millennium and Nationalities in Dualist Hungary in: Transylvanian Review, nr.4, Cluj-Napoca, 1998
From Kolozsvár to Cluj. The Last Episode of the Hungarian Statehood in the 'Capital' on Somes river in: Altera, nr.11, Tîrgu-Mures, 1999
The role István Apáthy's in Romanian-Hungarian political confrontations between 1918-1920 in: Convietuirea, nr. 4, Szeged, 2000
Co-author, with Hungarian historian Nándor Bárdi of the study Kissebbségben és többségben: Iuliu Maniu nézöpontjai 1906-1945 (In Minority and in Majority: Iuliu Maniu's Points of View in the Period 1906-1945) in: Limes, Tatabánya, 1998
Contact: p.weber@sussex.ac.uk