THE CULTURAL IMPACT OF THE EMIGRATION OF GERMAN ETHNICS FROM ROMANIA

The aim of this article is to analyze the situation of the german ethnics from Romania and to establish a corelation between their departure and the evolution of the communities they belonged to. We started from the idea that the massive exodus of the members of a group has the ability to affect its structure and to influence it regarding values, traditions and culture. In the first part of the paper we performed a brief analisys of the way in which the ethnic germans left Romania, reffering to both the period before 1989, as well as after. In their case, the ethny was an obvious element structuring the migration flows and directions, in some situations even the geographical settlement of the destination towns resembling the ones of origins. Very sugestive for the size of the migration flows from romania to Germany are the statistical data collected from the National Institute of statistics, data that shows, in figures, which is the total amount of Romanian migrants that settled in Germany in two distinct time periods, 1980-1989, and 1990-2003. We also thought that calculating the percent that the total amount of these people represent from the total amount of Romanian emigrants would be interesting, especially to show the fact that the number of those who chose Germany as a destination country represented a far bigger number than the ones who chose different destinations. Furthermore, we analysed information and theories regarding the way in which the international migration phenomenon, which nowadays grows bigger and bigger in size, influences the cultural destiny of communities, especially the departure ones. This situation is most often to be seen in the case of the communities from which a significant number of members left, such as the saxon or swabian communities in Romania.