The Status of the German Minority Within the Multi-Ethnic Educational System of the Banat Region – a Historical Overview Focusing on the Multicultural Character of the Region

AbstractIt is widely known nowadays that pure monolingual cultures are exceptions rather than common occurrence and that Europe's largest cities constitute the cradles of multi-ethnic and cross-cultural societies. This study would like to draw the attention to the today's Romanian region of Banat, which housed over the last 200-300 years a multicultural avant-garde society, within which the Romanian, German, Hungarian, Serbian, Bulgarian or Jewish inhabitants successfully intermingled, granting the multilingual community an emancipated transcultural character, also reflected on the local educational system. The historical approach on this matter reveals a functional multicultural educational system that survived due to the open-minded and forthcoming attitude of the Banat population over two or three centuries, in spite of the numerous unfavourable governmental policies, and could serve as a basis of comparison to further studies on multi- or intercultural language teaching