Gedichte und Briefe aus der Verbannung (“Poems and Letters from Exile”)

Wolf von Aichelburg, a German-speaking poet and composer who came from an Austrian noble family and then acquired Romanian citizenship, became a persona non grata during the years of the communist dictatorship in  after 1945 due to his West-European education and humanistic attitude. In 1959, as part of the well-known “Writers' Trial”, he was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment and forced labor. Poems and letters he had written during a period of forced residence in Măicănești, which the “Securitate“ “Securitate“ The Securitate was the secret police and intelligence service in communist Romania from 1948 to 1990. Memories and knowledge of its harsh crackdowns, wiretapping and torture still endure today. had confiscated from colleagues, were used as evidence in the trial. They were found by Laura Laza in the Securitate's archives, which are now managed by a national authority responsible for the processing of Securitate files (“Consiliul Național pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securității”, CNSAS). Aichelburg's poems and letters from the time of his exile can also be found in other public archives (including the Institute for Culture and History of Southeastern Europe (IKGS) and the German Literature Archive in Marbach (DLA)), as well as in private collections at Măicănești. They are being collected as a material basis, which will be used to assess the production of poems and letters, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Letters that refer to this period or to the circumstances of life resulting from it are also included. This necessitates ambitious research, the first time this has been done on such a scale for a Romanian-German author.