The heroes have grown tired [...] Remarks on the use of the catchword hero/erou in German and Romanian

The paper undertakes to study the lexeme "hero" on different linguistic levels in both German and Romanian. The paper follows two theses. The first thesis is that thanks to the compositeness of German, the free morpheme "hero" is part of many composite, either as a first member or as a second member of a composition. Besides the composites that can be discovered in digital and printed dictionaries, there are many other composites, some of which are occasionalisms and some of which are linguistically assertive. The second thesis is that the colloquial and ironic use of the word and the pejorative connotations are becoming more and more important so that a different importance in the meaning representation of the lexeme is detectable in both languages, but to different degrees.