Lecture with Prof. Stefano Bottoni (University of Florence), organised by the Mobilities in History working Group.
For almost two decades, the official representative of the Weimar Republic, and of the Third Reich since 1933, to the largest city in Romanian Transylvania was a Romanian citizen of Saxon (German) ethnicity. He was born in Sibiu/Hermannstadt/Nagyszeben, but had been based in Cluj/Kolozsvár for many years.
Dr Józef (Iosif) Kauntz was a lawyer, wealthy businessman and member of the Transylvanian urban elite with experience in Central European consular affairs.
He served as Germany's consul in Cluj from at least 1925 until 1940, when the Nazi authorities replaced him with diplomatic and military staff who were more ideologically committed.
His career illustrates how Habsburg-era professional and social networks survived and reconfigured within the radically transformed diplomatic environment of interwar Romania.
Rather than being understood simply as a German diplomat, Kauntz can be viewed as a locally embedded intermediary who established links between German diplomatic interests and Transylvania's multilingual political, legal and commercial society.
Stefano Bottoni is an Associate Professor at the University of Florence, where he teaches Global History and the History of Eastern Europe. Between 2009 and 2019, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Research Centre for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was a visiting fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, and a fellow at the Imre Kertész Collegium in Jena. His main research interest is the entangled social history of East-Central Europe in the 20th century.
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