“What Is Your Price?”

Abstract This article focuses on the Cold War operation “Retrieval,” a ransoming agreement between West Germany and communist Romania. It engages with the German and Romanian perspectives, as articulated in a volume of documents published by the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives ( cnsas ; 2011) and in one by Heinz Günther Hüsch (2016), the main West German intermediary. It elucidates how cultural representations of the ethnic German exodus from Romania contribute to the understanding of the diverging perspectives of the German and Romanian parties involved in the operation. Herta Müller’s short novel Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt (1986), Răzvan Georgescu’s documentary film Trading Germans (2014), and Carmen Lidia Vidu’s recent documentary play Humans. For Sale (2022) provide nuanced representations of the operation, while highlighting the human drama that otherwise remains hidden behind numbers, lists, and prices per capita.