A sudden decision: go across the border.
The liberating attempt to reach foreign territory.
The almost expected failure, the arrest by border police, resulting in three months in prison.
In October 1970, Anton Sterbling, seventeen years old, a student in the eleventh grade at the Lyceum in the small town of Großsanktnikolaus in the Romanian Banat, made this daring attempt at “flight as a provocation”.
It also has literary implications: one day later, a discussion event takes place at his school with writers and editors of the magazine “Neue Literatur”, such as Anemone Latzina, Gerhardt Csejka and Paul Schuster, who have traveled from Bucharest to talk about the possibilities for democratizing society and everyday school life want.
Classmate Richard Wagner from XII C, who is about to graduate from high school, insists that the dramatic escape from the day before be brought up for discussion.
The round trip of the Bucharest editors went back to unusual activities of the "Neue Banater Zeitung" (NBZ), whose editor-in-chief Nikolaus Berwanger - working as a party official in the German minority - subjected the German-language "Temeswarer Tageszeitung" to an attempt to modernize and in doing so young schoolchildren and students with his own student pages and the student supplement "Universitas".
Sterbling, Wagner, but also Johann Lippet, Werner Kremm and William Totok were among the students of the idiosyncratic and enthusiastic German teacher and NBZ employee Dorothea Götz in Großsanktnikolaus, the birthplace of Bela Bártok in the multi-ethnic region of Banat. set up a German circle and enormously promoted the understanding of modern literature among her students.
As early as the winter of 1969/70, the four young authors were involved in a student editorial team at the NBZ, where their poems were represented.
During this period also on the pages of Gymnasium No.
10 in Timisoara, which was named after Nikolaus Lenau, has already been published by Gerhard Ortinau and Herta Müller.
In the Neu-Arad editorial team, eighth-grader Albert Bohn, the youngest in the later action group, and high school graduate Werner Söllner come into focus;
Ernest Wichner also publishes his first poems on the student website.
Rolf-Günther Bossert from the industrial city of Reschitza is particularly poetically outstanding. Due to his studies in Bucharest, he is rarely able to take part in the group's readings and happenings and whose poems are highly valued as a "corresponding member".
Werner Kremm – to this day the only member of the “action group” still living in Romania – uses Lippet to formulate the final greetings of the 12th
Class of the Gymnasium in Großsanktnikolaus: “What was school for us, what is it for us?
None of our colleagues share the opinion of George Bacovia, who compares the school to a tomb: 'Liceu, mormînt al vieții mele' ('The lyceum, tomb of my life').
On the contrary: the school years are among our best so far.”