Joachim Wittstock’s novella Forestiera Feltrinelli, translated into Romanian by Maria Sass, appeared under the aegis of the Honterus publishing house in Sibiu, in 2019. Combining present-day economic realities, with a parallelism of temporal planes, and the antonimy between the mythical past and the disillusioning present, Wittstock manages to interweave in his most recent volume social and historical analyses, love stories and subtle eroticism, existentialist concerns and political dimensions. The volume can be regarded as an important contribution to a better relationing of the Romanian readership with German literature in Romania, and to a better understanding of the complex thematic and narrative mechanisms in Joachim Wittstock’s works. A fascinating page of the history of Sibiu, of the Romanian Saxons, and of the author’s biography, the volume is a succesful and innovative attempt in the landscape of contemporary Romanian and European literature, and its Romanian translation a welcome and necessary initiative in view of a multicultural understanding of the literatures of ethnic minorities in Romania.
