Romanian Germans came to exist as a group under the pressure of political circumstances after 1918. In the century that followed, Romanian Germans tried to make sense of their experiences in modern Europe through their stories and memories. If the story is ostensibly about a shrinking group of German speakers mainly from the Banat and Transylvania in Romania, the introduction frames their century as a study of practices of identity, memory, and transnational migration. In an introductory excursion into Romanian Germans as a group, this chapter sets out ground-breaking ways of understanding minorities. The introduction challenges scholars to reassess the performative element of identity and memory, moving away from essentialist explanations of minorities and diaspora towards a more vibrant and transnational approach.