Open Access

Gerhild Rudolf

• In our “House Europe” the exchange of ideas is going on intensively and the multi-cultural societies are in continuous transformation. An interesting example for cultural transfer in a multi-lingual and multi-confessional society is the reception of the St. Martin’s Day combined with the lantern procession organized by the German schools in Transylvania. The schools with German teaching language in Romania became a practice area for intercultural communication. Since 1997, first grade students at German schools in Romania learn from a new reading primer. One of the reading passages, “Our Lantern Festival”, initiated the spreading of a feast which had not been popular before neither with the German speaking minority of the Transylvanian Saxons, nor with the Romanian majority. The Lantern Festival is closely linked to the celebration of St. Martin, who is a European figure of high symbolic power. We can allege that the cultural diversity is an additional value for Europe. In the era of globalization, when migration processes and cultural hybridization are getting more intense, the intercultural communication has to adjust its inherited paradigm to the contemporary dynamics and heterogeneity of cultures.