Albert Carmen

The Banat is a territory where the ethno-confessional diversity always represented one of the principal characteristics, offering new investigation perspective, such as history of mentalities, imaginary, sensibility that were specific to the new history of Annales. Not ultimately, the history of private life is a fragmentary studied domain until now, although we could have big surprises in a comparative perspective.
The difficulty consists in not only lack of specialists but also most of all in the sources dispersion, or even in their absence. An extraordinary chance for the collective mentality approaching regarding the family issues is represented by the researches of the Banat-Crişana Social Institute during the inter-war period. The investigations along the monographic campaigns in the Plain as well as in the Mountainous Banat focused on varied subjects including from the beginning the family as a social unit. The motivation of rural family research in the complexity of its events was given by the deficiency of population due to decreasing demographic level, as it was observed each time the census had been made.
Searching for causality the monographs reached the mixed marriages problem in their approaches, inherent within a space where ethno-cultural diversity had been a constant value for centuries. Responses to a qualitative survey reveal the subjective perception of the population concerning this issue, the answers being recorded in published studies and registering papers. A brief analysis shows the population’s attitude and opinion concerning the perspective of marriage with foreigners as being a negative one: almost all the inquired persons declared themselves against to such a matrimonial alliance. It is hard to believe that the answers reflected the view of an entire community, even more that those who had been asked referred to still existing mixed families so that it could have not been a majority against that type of marriage.
Nevertheless we may conclude that the inter-war collective mentality did not approve the idea of mixed marriages. This fact can be explained by the mixed marriages low frequency during the centuries of the multi-ethnic coexistence, although this part of historical and demographic research in the Banat is missing. For a proper conclusion, we proposed a case study, looking for mixed marriages frequency in Reşiţa civil marital state Registers during 1895/1911. The population of Reşiţa was extremely diversified ethno-confessionary after the colonization started in the 18th century and it is unlikely that after more than 100 years when transition from coexistence to cohabitation had been done, the ethnic minorities should have not entered into mixed marriages. This fact should have happened even more that the settlement of colonists of different religions made nearby the Romanian already formed localities or in prolongation of those. Reşiţa is such a case we have approached.
After the marriages analysis within the period we mentioned, if the scores are low, they confirm the fact that the collective mentality had opposed to such a marriage until the inter-war period when the Banat-Crişana Social Institute investigated it. On contrary if the cases are frequent and specially ascending, we may talk about a real “cohabitation” in the Mountainous Banat; and what is more important is that it means an open mentality to “acceptance of others”, and the responses of those who were investigated by the Banat-Crişana Social Institute, just a manifestation of a very cultivated ideology that time.

Am scris această carte pentru cei interesaţi de istoria şi cultura Banatului, istoria sociologiei, istoria socială, istoria elitei bănăţene, cea din urmă un deziderat necesar încă şi posibil de atins. Am încercat să surprind şi să înţeleg profilul unui intelectual la cumpăna între secole, acţiunile şi uneori neimplicarea, convingerile şi frământările, temerile, aspiraţiile, nu numai ale sale, ci a unei  întregi generaţii. Contribuţia sa la existenţa Institutului Social Banat Crişana este considerabilă, cu atât mai semnificativ fiind faptul că performanţele acestuia rămân în epocă excepţionale. Demersul nu s a dorit a fi exhaustiv, oricând se mai pot opera reinterpretări, mai ales că accentul a fost pus pe inserarea de informaţii noi, pe selecţia şi prelucrarea surselor de arhivă, a periodicelor, cele din urmă fiind în număr extrem de redus, cu colecţii incomplete şi dificil de identificat. Desigur a fost nevoie de integrarea evenimentului, a faptului istoric, a reacţiilor în vertijul începutului de secol XX, apoi a complicatei perioade interbelice, a relaţionării cu istoria europeană, apoi cu cea naţională. Ceea ce a rezultat este nu numai o biografie a personalităţii lui Cornel Grofşorean, un intelectual provincial al Mitteleuropei care trăieşte sfârşitul unei lumi şi începutul alteia, dar şi o pagină a interbelicului bănăţean, plin de necunoscute încă.