Looking Forwards through the Past: Bukovina’s “Return to Europe” after 1989–1991

Introduction

The events of 1989–1991 have been described by historians and other scholars as a “spatial revolution.” ¹ Indeed, the most visible immediate consequence of the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War in Europe was spatial. This moment marked the end of the bipolar world and of the division of the continent; it enabled people across the region to travel, trade, communicate, and migrate on an unprecedented scale; eventually, it opened the way for the European Union to expand. These events resulted in a new map of Europe, pulling down the barrier between what was thought of as “East” and “West.” As the widespread slogan read, the East “returned to Europe.”

In practice, however, what occurred was less a spatial revolution than “a profound reordering of the spatial imaginary of Europe.” ² The changes had more to do with mental maps than real maps and history than geography. In itself, the notion of “return” suggests a process of normalization—the realization of a status quo ante. Indeed, after 1989–1991, many people dismissed the Iron Curtain as an artificial border and performed the exploration of the area behind it by drawing on an earlier past: Former administrative boundaries and names were reinstituted; past social and ethnic diversity celebrated; so-called historical traces were given special attention. The area was not so much discovered as rediscovered, resurrected, reconstructed, and even reinvented on the basis of existing ideas and assumptions.

This was the case in the area known as Bukovina, once the easternmost and most ethnically diverse province of the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire. Bukovina disappeared from the map of Europe as an independent political unit in 1918 when it became part of Romania, and as a continuous piece of land in 1944 when it was split between Romania and the Soviet Union. After the end of the Second World War, divided, ethnically “unmixed,” and isolated behind the Iron Curtain, the region, which was once defined by its cosmopolitanism and diversity, was widely described abroad as “lost,” “sunken,” and “forgotten.” In the words of its most famous native, the poet Paul Celan, it had “fallen prey to history-less-ness.” ³ With the political transformations in the region in 1989–1991, however, it re-emerged, seemingly alive and well. In the German-language space in particular, it became the object of a range of projects: newspaper articles, books, films, and exhibitions as well as trips, exchanges, partnerships, and even political agreements. In the decade and a half following 1989–1991, Bukovina was a popular topic in the German and Austrian media and, with some delay, in academia as well.

Over the last three decades, a number of scholars have discussed critically the resurrection of post-imperial spaces in the wake of the collapse of communism. In the first years after 1989 in particular, a range of influential studies drew attention to the role of (often foreign) professional writers and intellectuals for the construction and image of these areas and the wider region, and attendant processes of inclusion and exclusion. ⁴ Others, tracing the roots of this discourse within the regions, have focused on the appropriation and political instrumentalization of historical claims for domestic and regional political purposes. ⁵ More recently, however, these insights have been complemented and qualified in interesting ways: For one thing, some scholars have pointed to the very real political sociological grounding for such claims and the need to account for this in the process of construction. ⁶ For another, some scholars have drawn attention to the fact that local processes are shaped by global trends. When exploring local phenomena, therefore, we need to take into account transnational structures, agents, and practices and link narrative construction and agency. ⁷ As Aline Sierp and Jenny Wüstenberg have argued, people involved in symbolic politics, “memory entrepreneurs,” including state and non-state actors (civil society and intellectuals), have become increasingly numerous and diverse since the end of the Cold War. ⁸ Similarly, Eleonora Narvselius has drawn attention to the “democratization of intellectual work” in Central and Eastern Europe in particular, where institutions are weak. ⁹ For this purpose, she has even coined the term “memorians,” which she defines as “diffuse epistemic/interpretative communities and networks of various actors making regular intellectual ‘interventions’ in the public debate on the past.” ¹⁰

Indeed, considering the full range of different agents involved in the resurrection and reinvention of Bukovina after 1989, produces a complex picture. One can distinguish between German, Austrian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Israeli, and American actors among others; artists, intellectuals, academics, and politicians; non-governmental organizations and official institutions; collectives and individuals. Further, and this has to do with the specific timing of the end of the Cold war, these can also be divided into: members of “communities of experience” (people who were contemporaries of Habsburg rule, the interwar period, and the war and the Holocaust in Bukovina); members of the “communities of connection,” whose ties to the first group link them to the region in a manner that feels like a duty or an obligation; and members of the “communities of identification,” whose interest is purely voluntary and may rely, more or less firmly, on their contacts to either of the former. ¹¹ The distinction between the groups may be compared to Jan Assmann’s differentiation between “communicative” and “cultural memory” ¹² or Marianne Hirsch’s separation between the “generations of memory” and “the generation of post-memory.” ¹³ However, as Uilleam Blacker has suggested, in the case of Bukovina, it may also make sense to include locals in the community of post-memory. ¹⁴ The threefold categorization put forward here thus makes it possible to differentiate more precisely between groups of actors.

Most importantly, this framework reminds us that what is often undifferentiatedly called “memory” involves, in fact, a range of different relationships to the past. This is especially obvious if one considers the case of Germans and Austrians with an interest in the region in the first decade and half after 1989–1991, who are the main focus of this article. These include Bukovina-Germans, who once lived in the region and have a distinct understanding of its history derived from their experiences; members of the 1968-generation with a strong interest in Jewish history; and younger, liberal, and cosmopolitan intellectuals as proponents of a less emotionally-charged and more comprehensive view of the region’s past.

All of these people took a stake in the reinvention of the region after 1989–1991. As Erica Lehrer has suggested with her work on Poland, rather than speaking of “lieux de mémoire,” we may be able to think of contested spaces such as Bukovina as “milieux de mémoire” bringing together a range of perspectives and actors. ¹⁵ Indeed, though connected by their object, all those involved in Bukovina’s post Cold War resurrection pursued different goals. Yet they nevertheless interacted, overlapped, contradicted, and influenced each other. Recent work on memory has drawn attention to processes of dissemination, reinterpretation, and re-appropriation as well as generational differences and transmission. ¹⁶ Appeals to the past are like trajectories that need to be viewed in light of their very real links to past experiences as well as changing present circumstances and visions of the future. With this in mind, it is possible to categorize, analyze, historicize, and shed new light on Bukovina’s and the wider region’s proclaimed “return to Europe” after 1989–1991.

“Europe’s Forgotten region”: A Return to the Past

In the summer of 1990, a group from southern Germany set off on a study trip to the region of Bukovina. They went by bus from Augsburg via Munich through Slovakia to L’viv in Ukraine. They then went on to Chernivtsi in the Ukrainian north of the historical region of Bukovina, and Suceava in the Romanian south—their final destination. On the way back they drove through Debrecen, Budapest, and Vienna. ¹⁷ This was, of course, a trip to “the new Europe” made possible by the opening and relaxing of borders. However, many of the participants were also retracing the steps of a journey they had made decades earlier during the war. Indeed most of the participants on the trip, which was organized by the newly founded Bukovina-Institute in Augsburg, belonged to the group of some 80,000 Bukovina-Germans who had been resettled in “home to the Reich” (Heim ins Reich) by the Nazis in 1940. For them, this was “Europe’s forgotten region” because it was their “lost home” (verlorene Heimat).

Fifty years on, they were delighted to be able to visit their native land Bukovina once again. While some had travelled there during the Cold War, their access to sites and contact with locals had been limited, particularly in the northern half of the region, which was part of the Soviet Union. ¹⁸ Now, in contrast, they could freely visit the landmarks of their youth, meet up with childhood friends, and reconnect with distant relatives. Under the new circumstances, they could liaise with remaining members of the German minority in Romania and Ukraine which had recently obtained the right to form cultural associations. They could even help them. The region’s diverse cultural heritage was no longer taboo or threatened with disappearance; the “German houses” dating from the Austrian period, for example, were beginning to reopen; the German churches and cemeteries could be taken care of and renovated.

Upon their return to Augsburg, the participants contributed to the organization of an exhibition and the publication of a book about their trip. The aim was to let other Germans know what they had seen and that this faraway place was indeed part of Europe. The exhibition was entitled “Bukovina/Buchenland: A European Region.” ¹⁸ The book, published a little later, put the contemporary situation and the region’s European-ness in the foreground too. In fact, its title was changed from the planned “Looking for Traces of German Culture” to “Looking for Traces into the Future: Europe’s Forgotten Region Bukovina.” As the editors explained in the foreword,

The participants of the study trip searched in north and south Bukovina “traces of the future” and they found many. Traces of the coexistence of many peoples and confessions. Those who attended the exhibition “Bukovina / Buchenland: A European Region” saw this too. Even if they often searched for traces of their own past, they—hopefully—also discovered traces for the future. These are traces in the buildings of many different epochs and styles, traces on the gravestones of Jews and Christians of all denominations, traces in the memories of the people we spoke to, together with the expectations of young people in particular regarding a happy future in peace. ¹⁹

On the book’s back cover, one could read further about the hope to draw useful lessons from the experiences of coexistence of different peoples and ethnic groups in the region. “Nationalism and communism” were mentioned in passing, but more importantly people had got along well before then. Bukovina had been “the Switzerland of the East”—Europe before Europe. From their perspective, therefore, it could not only “return to Europe”, but also be a model for Europe in the future. ²⁰

This view of the relationship between Bukovina, Bukovinians, and Europe among Germans from the region was not new. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the “Homeland Society of Bukovina-Germans” (Landsmannschaft der deutschen Umsiedler aus der Bukowina; later Landsmannschaft der Buchenlanddeutschen), an organization founded in 1949 to represent members of this group in the Federal Republic of Germany, had also emphasized their “European” traditions and roots. According to Hans Prelitsch, one of the society’s key members and the first editor of its newspaper, the figure of “the Bukovinian” known as homo Bucoviniensis, had been the symbiotic embodiment of the different ethnic, religious, and cultural groups. As for the system of rule in the region, which he called “Bukovinism,” it had been a model of supra-national compromise and cooperation. ²⁰ As such, Bukovinians (and therefore Bukovina-Germans) were not just “Europeans”; they were models of tolerance and, with this, “the first pan-Europeans.” ²¹

In general in this period, leading figures of the organization such as Rudolf Wagner repeatedly emphasized that, as a region under Austrian Habsburg rule, Bukovina had been part of the West. ²² In the first post-war decade in West Germany, these claims primarily served to demonstrate the “Western-ness” and hence “Germanness” of Bukovina-Germans who were sometimes dismissed as foreigners by locals in the areas in which they settled. But by conflating the concepts of “Western-ness,” “European-ness,” and “Germanness” in this way, not only did Wagner suggest that Soviet rule over the area was illegitimate but also that “German” could be equated with “Habsburg.” This, in turn, served to inflate the significance of the ethnic German minority’s contribution to the region’s history and development and downplayed their complicity in Nazi aims. Indeed, ethnic Germans had never represented more than 10% of the population in Bukovina and almost all of them had opted for resettlement by the Nazis in 1940. Yet in view of this group’s prerogative over the region’s history, in the German-speaking space in particular, this idealized version of the past was virtually unchallenged for the duration of the Cold War. ²³

What changed with 1989–1991 and in the midst of the developments that preceded this caesura was less the content than the political resonance of the Bukovina-Germans’ discourse and activities. In the new situation, their arguments were no longer marginal, but could be deployed for practical political purposes. The Regional Government of Swabia (Bezirk Schwaben), in southern Germany, for example, had held the “godfatherhood” (Patenschaft) over the group of Bukovina-Germans since 1955. At the time, this agreement had served to acknowledge “the return” of Bukovina-Germans to their ancestral homeland after the Second World War (many ethnic German settlers in Bukovina were believed to have originated in the southern German lands), alleviate their homesickness in postwar West Germany, and help with their social integration. ²⁴ But only in the mid-1980s, after thirty years, did they actually acquire anything concrete, namely, an institution—the Bukovina-Institute (Bukowina-Institut) in the city of Augsburg. And in fact, in the discussions about the creation of the institute, initiated in the early to mid-1980s, the homesickness or “integration” of Bukovina-Germans only played a minor role. ²⁵ Key to the arguments in favour of its creation was, rather, the arrival in Germany of thousands of ethnic Germans (so-called Aussiedler and Spätaussiedler) from Central and Eastern Europe and the need to understand more about their origins and background. ²⁶ Moreover, with the wave of liberalization in the Soviet Union, there was a sense of the need for the Federal Republic to open up to Eastern Europe. As its director explained, the institute was to be “a bridge to the East” contributing to Völkerverständigung (“understanding among peoples”) across the Iron Curtain. ²⁷ These tasks became all the more important when, between the institute’s founding and opening, the Berlin Wall came down, German reunification was set in motion, and the end of the Cold War began.

The activities of the Bukovina-Institute in the early 1990s capture the unique enthusiasm and optimism of this period. The institute not only offered study trips to the region but also language classes (German as a foreign language for ethnic German newcomers and central and eastern European languages for locals) and afterschool assistance for local (mostly newly arrived ethnic German) children. In the library, they collected huge amounts of newspaper cuttings and complete issues, magazines, journals, and books, as well as visual material and three-dimensional objects about both Bukovina and the wider region. They organized public events and conferences, published studies, brochures and a trimestrial journal (Kaindl-Archiv), and launched exchanges for students, teachers, and academics from Germany, and from either Romania or Ukraine. They even made contact with “Bukovinians” elsewhere, including Bukovina Jews in Israel. In particular, close links were established with the “Bukovina Institutes” founded in Romanian Rădăuți and Ukrainian Chernivtsi. ²⁸ In the mid-1990s, the “godfatherhood” was transformed into a triangular “partnership” between the regional government of Swabia, the two Bukovinian regions—the region of Suceava (judeţul Suceava) in Romania and the region of Chernivtsi (Chernivstsi Oblast) in Ukraine—modelled on postwar agreements between France and the Federal Republic. ²⁹ In this period, a relief organization (Das Hilfswerk Schwaben-Bukowina) was also created. ³⁰ This formalized the humanitarian and social work projects of the Bukovina-Institute and individual Bukovina-Germans, who had been sending or taking aid to the region since this had become possible.

Across the border in Austria, historical Bukovina was also the focus of political efforts. They too emphasized the relevance of historical ties and sought to rehabilitate the Austrian period and multicultural past for the sake of the present and the future. An official delegation of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Bundesministerium für auswärtige Angelegenheiten) visited Chernivtsi as early as 1990. ³¹ In 1992, the Carinthian town of Klagenfurt—where the ethnic German writer and poet Georg Drozdowski had settled after the war—established a partnership with the city of Chernivtsi. That same year, Austrians unveiled a memorial to Paul Celan and plaques on both Celan’s birth house and to honour the architects of the city’s theatre. Austrian institutions supported the creation of an “Austria-library” and a “Bukovina Centre” at the University of Chernivtsi, which led to considerable scientific cooperation in the following years. They also contributed to the renovation of the city’s German House. In 1999, the Carinthian Drozdowski Society even managed to secure a “Drozdowski Room” (Drozdowski-Saal) in this building, which functions as a space for seminars and events and a museum about this writer. ³² This culminated, in 2000, in the organization by the state of Lower Austria of an exhibition entitled “A Search for Traces: Bukovina Then and Now” (Spurensuche: Bukowina einst und jetzt). Effectively, the exhibition focused on the heyday of Austrian rule in the region, from 1775 to the opening of the German university in 1875. But the curators nevertheless emphasized that they aimed to display Bukovina’s “pan-European heritage” and strengthen its contemporary ties to the rest of Europe by showcasing its rich history. ³³

Ukrainians and Romanians largely welcomed these initiatives that brought them into contact with people from the West and opened up new opportunities for cooperation, investment, travel, migration, and even enrichment. The cultural work of the Bukovina-Institute certainly left a lasting mark on the human level and the Austrian cultural work on the city’s urban and memorial landscape. Moreover, both types of initiatives relied on an idealized reading of the region’s history, which allowed for a rehabilitation of the history of individual national groups and resonated with the national revivals in Romania and Ukraine in this period. Indeed, the rediscovery of Bukovina as “Europe’s forgotten region” and its positing as “a model for Europe” primarily served a kind of national restoration at a time of juncture and redefinition for Germany, Austria, and Europe. As others have argued, the discourse on multiculturalism and the distinctions between different cultures often functions as a cover for nationalism. ³⁴ In practice, therefore, much remained unchanged.

As Stefan Wolff and Karl Cordell have argued, after 1989, Germany’s aims of protecting co-ethnics and ensuring democratization in the region were premised on a conception of Germans as mediators and a distinct group with a positive historical contribution inherited from the Cold War. ³⁵ In effect, in the case of Bukovina, the objectives remained closely linked to those of the “community of experience” of the war in Germany and Austria, who, under the cover of a discourse on European reconciliation, sought recognition of their own losses, experiences, and historical narrative. In the early 1990s, the Homeland Society of Bukovina Germans and the Bukovina-Institute in Augsburg shared premises, personnel, networks, and aims. Though he died in 1987, Drozdowski’s idealized image of the region and “Old Austria’s” civilizing mission was central to the Austrian approach. ³⁶ The curator of the exhibition Spurensuche, Raimund Lang’s interest in the region stemmed from his decade-long involvement in Austrian student organizations. Despite all the talk about cooperation and about the future, this was first and foremost a return to the past as it had been imagined by traditional stakeholders of Bukovina’s history and identity during the Cold War.

“Europe’s Forgotten Cemetery”: Bukovina’s Jewish Return

Bukovina’s return to Europe as “Europe’s forgotten region” was based on a literal return to the past. This was the idealized “lost Heimat”: a celebration of diversity under benevolent German cultural domination and the recollection of a past before or even without the Second World War and the Holocaust. ³⁷ By the mid-1990s, however, sustaining and supporting claims concerning Bukovina’s—let alone Bukovina-Germans’—exemplarity proved increasingly contentious and difficult. In general in reunified Germany, the role of Germans in Central and Eastern Europe before and during the Second World War became the subject of unprecedented scrutiny, especially in relation to the Holocaust. At the same time, the renewed outbreak of war and ethnic cleansing in Europe both spurred memories of German victimhood and challenged the idealization of ethnic diversity in the region. ³⁸ In other words, the uncritical celebration of Bukovina as a peaceful and tolerant region seemed increasingly suspect to a growing number of people. According to them, not only had the version of history on which this relied ended, at the latest, in 1918, but this was also ahistorical—a past that had never been. Neither were the causes for the watershed at the end of the First World War, nor what followed, given sufficient consideration; most notably, it excluded almost completely the history of the Jews and the Holocaust in the region.

For decades, the community of experience of the war, in Germany and Austria, had dominated the discourse. But in the meantime, a number of people in Germany had developed a very different kind of historical consciousness. As a series of articles published in a Romanian-German newspaper in the early 1990s explained, the history of Bukovina was both one of “tolerance and intolerance.” In their view, pointing to the existence of a Jewish literary heritage was not enough; one needed to explain why it no longer existed. The author therefore called for more research into the Jewish character of the region. ³⁹ To some, the idealization of Bukovina was not only historically inaccurate but also morally questionable. As one could read in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 1998, “Where, if not from the heart of the European continent, do these endless stories of persecution, deportation, and death come from?” According to this author, the East was the West’s liability: “Europe’s guilt was also its duty.” ⁴⁰ From the point of view of those born after the war, members of the philosemitic 1968 generation and members of the community of connection, who stood up to their apologetic parents, Bukovina was not “Europe’s forgotten region,” but rather “Europe’s forgotten cemetery.”

The region’s opening in the early 1990s thus triggered a rediscovery of quite a different kind. A number of visitors started placing the events of the Second World War and the issues of Jewish life, German perpetration, and the Holocaust in the center of their interpretation. ⁴¹ For the writer, journalist, and academic Verena Dohrn, for example, who travelled through the region as soon as this was possible, what mattered were not the traces of multicultural life but rather the traces of its destruction. In her travel account entitled “Journey to Galicia: The Borderlands of Old Europe” in 1991, she wrote about Chernivtsi, at the time still known as Russian Chernovtsy, as follows:

Chernovtsy is the last stop on my journey through western Ukraine. Old Czernowitz is meant to be the high point, the measure for all of what Galicia and Bukovina were at their best. Legends about Bukovina had nurtured the desire to travel—poems by Rose Ausländer and Paul Celan, stories of the German-Jewish symbiosis, of the enlightenment, tolerance, and manifold cultural liveliness of this landscape. ⁴²

She went on to quote Rose Ausländer: “Rose Ausländer painted a picture for me in my mind of ‘Green mother / Bukovina,’ of the ‘back of the Carpathians / fatherly,’ of the ‘songs in four languages’ and ‘people / who understand each other.’” However, Dohrn concluded:

And yet, another image casts a shadow on this idyllic picture. The black milk of the Todesfuge runs across it and darkens it to the extent it is no longer recognizable. Paul Celan’s Todesfuge—composed out of his own and others’ words and suffering from Czernowitz—sings about the end of the dream of the related songs in four languages. ⁴³

In her narrative, Dohrn not only gave an account of the region’s Jewish past but also the German crimes and the contemporary Jewish absence. This was Europe—“old Europe”—not despite but because it had been trampled by the Germans.

Depictions of Bukovina as a scorched land of the Holocaust had predated 1989. Bukovina Jews, particularly in Israel where they were united in the World Organization of Bukovina Jews, had always commemorated the victims of the Holocaust from the region and, discussed their persecution. ⁴⁴ But for them, Bukovina no longer existed as a real place. It was a site of trauma and a time/place that could not be recovered. ⁴⁵ As Florence Heymann, who conducted interviews with Jews from Bukovina in France and Israel for her anthropological research in the 1970s, explains, “For the Jews of Czernowitz, the place of their childhood or of their adolescence has been lost and despoiled. It is in fact a ‘non place.’” ⁴⁶ This feeling was heightened by the fact that before 1989, research on the Holocaust in Romania remained limited and marginalized as a result of both restrictions on access to sources and archives in Romania and the Soviet Union and the Romanian and Ukrainian politics of forgetting, relativization, and denial. ⁴⁷ In many ways, these events were also, as some survivors have argued, overshadowed by the experience of Auschwitz. ⁴⁸

Efforts to draw attention to Jewish life and suffering in the region gradually increased over the course of the 1980s. Yet these first “rediscoveries” of the region’s Jewish past during the Cold War recorded first and foremost the advancing process of forgetting and erasure rather than what remained or what could still be saved. ⁴⁹ These works were created under the sign of the “last-ness”: survivors were dying, younger Jews were emigrating at an unprecedented rate, and traditional Jewish settlements and religious life were being destroyed by communist “modernization” projects. As Anna de Berg has argued, these accounts were primarily “historical epitaphs” of the Central European Jewish World. ⁵⁰ The shrinking Jewish communities and, in particular, the abandoned and overgrown Jewish cemeteries embodied this in a particularly powerful manner. These accounts were less a discovery than a denunciation of neglect.

The liberalization of the Soviet bloc brought with it considerable changes in the region itself insofar as it shifted the emphasis from absence to presence. Firstly, it made possible the revival of Jewish life and an interest in Jewish issues on the ground. A Jewish cultural society, the “Elieser Steinbarg Jewish Cultural Society,” named after the region’s most famous Yiddish-language storyteller, was founded in Chernivtsi in the late 1980s. At this time, the Yiddish-speaking writer Josef Burg, who became the society’s director, was able to re-launch the Yiddish-language newspaper Czernowitzer Blaetter, which he had published in the 1930s. By writing in Yiddish, Burg drew attention to both the history of the Holocaust and the remaining eastern Jewish heritage in the region. He thereby became, within a few years, a celebrity both at home and abroad, receiving international visitors and travelling internationally too. ⁵¹

Secondly, by facilitating travel from outside on a wider scale, the liberalization of the region opened the way for people living abroad to make return trips and others to visit too. Bukovina Jewish survivors, mainly from North America, were some of the first to take the opportunity, but in general, “Jewish heritage travel” developed into a veritable phenomenon. ⁵² To borrow from Erica Lehrer and Michael Meng, memory became “something one could visit.” ⁵³ The readers of the region’s mainly German-speaking Jewish writers such as Paul Celan and Rose Ausländer could suddenly experience the “authentic” places about which they had been reading. ⁵⁴ At this time, many other writers from the region such as Gregor von Rezzori, Aharon Appelfeld, Norman Manea, and Edgar Hilsenrath also started discussing their background more explicitly in their works and in the media, kindling and nourishing their audiences’ curiosity about Bukovina. ⁵⁵ This was all the more fascinating, as the writers themselves had previously declared that the region was “lost,” “sunken,” and “forgotten.” In turn, the memory of the region’s mostly German-speaking and Jewish writers, whose existence had been denied under communism, “returned” to their hometowns by means of publications, translations, exhibitions, and memorials. ⁵⁶

Last but not least, in this period, the taboo was slowly lifted on Jewish persecution. Already in the 1980s, the Ukrainian Eugenia Finkel had started gathering Jewish testimonies in the region. These were published in Ukrainian starting in 1991 with the help of the Elieser Steinbarg Society and later translated into German. ⁵⁷ Other, similar publications soon followed. ⁵⁸ Over the course of the 1990s, the number of memoirs of Jewish survivors from Bukovina living all over the world grew exponentially. These not only displayed the whole range of different variations of the Jewish tragedy in the region—deportation to Siberia by the Soviets, Transnistria by the Romanians, or precarious survival in wartime Cernăuţi (Romanian Chernivtsi)—but also bore testimony to life before the war. ⁵⁹ In the process, Jewish Bukovina was no longer about absence, but about the possibility of finding, recognizing, and protecting the traces of Jewish life in the region. The “international work camps” organized to clear the overgrown Jewish cemeteries, particularly in Chernivtsi, constitute a key and concrete symbol of this new approach to the region’s history.

As Winfried Menninghaus has argued, for a long time, Bukovina was not included on the map of the Holocaust. But over the course of the 1990s, it gradually became increasingly integrated into this topography of terror. ⁶⁰ The works of the region’s German-speaking Jewish writers were reinterpreted accordingly. In 1993, a widely reviewed and circulated exhibition, organized by the “Literature House” (Literaturhaus) in Berlin, dedicated to writers from Bukovina, was entitled “Czernowitz, Bukovina: In the Language of the Murderers.” ⁶¹ As this title shows, Bukovina was no longer conceived as the site of celebration of the German-Jewish symbiosis, but rather of its worst aberrations. In effect, this “literary landscape” stood for the fact that, in Central and Eastern Europe, the Germans had actually murdered and sought to murder German culture’s staunchest defenders.

With time, this became the region’s main source of interest in the German-speaking sphere. Volker Koepp’s documentary film Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann (1999), based on the life-stories and interactions of two elderly German-speaking Jewish survivors from Chernivtsi, Rosa Roth-Zuckermann and Mathias Zwilling, epitomizes this trend. ⁶² Part of Koepp’s wider series of documentaries on “the lost German East,” this film was not only the only one featuring Jews but also by far the most successful, being shown in cinemas in Berlin for over a year. Koepp’s film framed “Bukovina” as “Austrian Czernowitz,” “Austrian Czernowitz” as “a Jewish city,” and “Bukovinians” as “Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.”

The rediscovery of Bukovina as “Europe’s forgotten cemetery” needs to be seen in the context of growing interest in the Holocaust worldwide, the drive to collect testimony before it was too late, and a larger Jewish “return to Europe” in this period. ⁶³ In other words, it was part of a wider conjuncture of Holocaust memory and memorialization, and the rehabilitation of Jewish history in Europe as a whole. But the suddenness and the scale of interest in Jewish Bukovina had to do with how Bukovina’s history was interpreted in this period and how Jews from the region portrayed themselves too. There were many writers among Jewish survivors, but even those who were not identified with their region’s literary figures and were eager to write and tell of a mythical Czernowitz where all spoke High German and high culture was the norm. ⁶⁴ In turn, German-speaking audiences were eager to listen to these urban, educated, emancipated, liberal, and German-speaking individuals, who spoke of a lost world, while bearing witness to its existence.

Jewish Bukovina offered a politically-inspiring, ethically-rewarding, and aesthetically-pleasing way into Holocaust history and the region’s history as a whole. Indeed, depicting Jewish Bukovinians as the ultimate Europeans had a redemptive quality. Not only did it give their story long-overdue visibility, but their regionalism, cosmopolitanism, and supra-nationality also resonated with the alleged desire to overcome nationalism among many Germans and Austrians of the “community of connection”—the descendants of the various communities of experience of the war. As a result, by the turn of the millennium, Bukovina Jews who had been loyal to the Habsburgs long after the fall of the Monarchy had come to be identified as the “real people of Bukovina” even by some of the more traditional stakeholders of the discourse on Bukovina. ⁶⁵ Bukovina’s return to Europe had become a Jewish return.

“Europe’s Shatterzone”: Return from the Past

Bukovina’s rediscovery as “Europe’s forgotten cemetery” and as an almost exclusively Jewish space was not unanimously welcomed. Unsurprisingly, Bukovina-Germans felt misrepresented by these developments. ⁶⁶ But others also voiced ambivalence, skepticism, or even disapproval. Some pointed to the hypocrisy of the obsession with Jewish spaces among non-Jews: Not only was this “the right kind of diversity,” but also a convenient celebration of diversity away from home and once it no longer needed to be dealt with. Bukovina offered a perfect example of what Michael Meng has called “redemptive cosmopolitanism”—a means of locating of multiculturalism in particular spaces and performing Vergangenheitsbewältigung (the mastering of the past) at a comfortable distance. ⁶⁷ Besides, though the crimes of the Holocaust were different in kind and the attempt to eradicate Jewish life from the region unquestionably unique, as Marianne Hirsch, herself a descendant of Bukovina Jews, has noted, there is something rather essentialist about the Jewish search for traces and roots. ⁶⁸ Indeed, such a return suggested this was an empty space, where history had stopped after the Jews had left. It often implied indifference or even hostility toward contemporary inhabitants. At the very least, it resulted in the conflation of the place with its traces. ⁶⁹

Around the turn of the millennium, therefore, an increasing number of people started pointing out that what had been lost in Bukovina was not simply Jewish life but diversity more generally: The Jews had been deported and murdered, but the Germans, Poles, Hungarians, and Romanians had been resettled, the enemies of the Soviets banished, the region divided, the spaces re-appropriated, and the history distorted. What made Bukovina so exceptional was precisely the fact that the traces and the experiences were multiple and layered. Bukovina was not simply “post-holocaust,” but “post-imperial,” “post fascist,” “post-Soviet,” and “post-socialist” all at the same time. It was post-totalitarian in a more general sense. This was not simply “Europe’s forgotten cemetery”; this was, more widely, “Europe’s shatterzone.” ⁷⁰

To an extent, this had been present in previous depictions of the region. In her account, Verena Dohrn had not simply mentioned former shtetls or Bełżec but also Chernobyl, which “used to be shtetl” and was now “a desert of radiation.” ⁷¹ The fascination with Koepp’s film was undoubtedly linked not simply to the portrayal of two Holocaust survivors, but also the incongruity of their survival and Austrian identification against the backdrop of the post-socialist, Ukrainian present. Yet for many of those who discovered the region in the late 1990s, this dissonance was not a sideshow but the focus. Emphasizing the concept of “post,” many adopted what has come to be known as “the narrative of change.” ⁷² From their perspective, 1989, and not 1918 or 1945, had been the real turning point. Bukovina had been neglected, destroyed, but it was changing; it had recovered; it had returned. For the German historian Karl Schlögel, for example, the Chernivtsi he had visited in the 1980s and the city he arrived in in the 2000s were not the same: the first had been cut away from Europe, denied its roots; the second was embracing its heritage and its multifaceted history. ⁷³ The point was not simply the existence of traces but the attitude towards them.

For some, however, this was too naïve. The Habsburg heritage had not simply been rediscovered; it had been consciously and politically reactivated. This was addressed by two Austrians, the journalist Otto Brusatti and the photographer Christoph Lingg who published the illustrated book Apropos Czernowitz in 1999. ⁷⁴ This publication was intended as a corrective to recent German and Austrian representations of “Czernowitz” and “Bukovina.” Firstly, it portrayed the post-Soviet reality so often edited out of the memories of survivors from the interwar period. The black-and-white photographs captured a historical, but drab and run-down, city. This was Chernivtsi in the present and not through the lens of some rosy reminiscence. Secondly, Brusatti attacked the efforts of foreign “memory brokers,” from Germany and Austria in particular, to resurrect the historical region and its positive dimensions. According to him, what could be seen today was not Bukovina but “ex Bukovina”—a “strange relict” and a “reproach” (Vorwurf). ⁷⁵ As for the activities surrounding it, they were simply a manifestation of the German and Austrian “mountains of guilt.” ⁷⁶

Finally, the authors denounced the elevation of Jewish survivors to the status of icons and the reliance on their nostalgic views to understand the region’s past. They included a portrait of Mathias Zwilling and Rosa Roth-Zuckermann, the characters of Koepp’s film, but also of the ethnic German Johann Schlamp, who had been persecuted as a communist and whose story they believed offered a counterimage that of the Jews. ⁷⁷ Most notably, the book included portraits of young Ukrainians who spoke about their hopes and fears. Brusatti pointed out that for them, the myth was not “Bukovina” or “Czernowitz,” but “Germany” and “the West.” ⁷⁸ For him, this stood for the enduringly uneven power relations between eastern and western Europe inherited from Habsburg times and which had only been made worse by the fact that the region now was stuck “between Russia and the West.” ⁷⁹

Even if not all rediscoveries of the region were as pessimistic as Brusatti’s, many depictions from this period were characterized by this kind of negative exceptionalism. This interpretation was supported by the growing number of biographies of Bukovinian writers, poets, and artists, who showcased both exceptional talent and harrowing experiences of suffering. ⁸⁰ The concept of negative exceptionalism typified a series of more or less academic books, that appeared in the early 2000s, mixing sources, first-hand accounts, and historical overviews and bearing titles such as “Czernowitz: A Sunken Cultural Metropolis” or “From the Edges of Times: Czernowitz and Bukovina; History, Literature, Persecution, and Exile”. ⁸¹ These representations offered a multiplicity of perspectives in an attempt to reproduce the wide array of voices from the region—especially those of members of the different ethnic groups—and their different experiences. Often, the stories constituted a series of parallel accounts rather than an integrated history and bourgeois, liberal, middle-class and often German-speaking Jews (rather than more religious, poorer, left-leaning, and Yiddish or Russian-speaking Jews) continued to feature most prominently. ⁸² But through their composition, these collections nevertheless reflected and triggered increasingly complex and critical discussions about the meaning of “tolerance” and “peaceful coexistence” in Bukovina before the Second World War. ⁸³ They made clear that the “Bukovina myth” consisted of both pluralism and its destruction.

These representations also highlighted the paradox that Bukovinians’ common denominator was not so much place as the experience of dislocation. In less than a century, Austrian Czernowitz had been Romanian Cernăuţi, Soviet Chernovtsy, and Ukrainian Chernivtsi. Within the space of a lifetime, political systems, populations, official languages, and citizenships had changed four or more times. Many were displaced, but even those who stayed had been “displaced without moving” as the borders and political regimes shifted around them. As a result, Bukovina was now somehow both everywhere and nowhere. Volker Koepp even made this the focus of his second film about the region, entitled “Next Year in Czernowitz” (2004)—a play on words on the Zionist phrase “next year in Jerusalem.” ⁸⁴ For this film, Koepp brought Bukovinians of different backgrounds and generations from their new homes in Vienna, Berlin, and New York back to the place of their origins and into contact with locals and the space of their roots. By choosing people from these cities and casting famous individuals such as the American actor Harvey Keitel and the writer Norman Manea, Koepp emphasized the paradox of Bukovina’s physical remoteness and its cultural significance. But what was at stake in this film, as in the multiple rediscoveries of Bukovina after 1989 in general, was the relationship between the real place and its people as well as the relationship between the real place and its manifold constructions in memory and imagination, and the broken link between the two.

This dislocation was not only experienced by individuals, but also inscribed in space, on the urban landscape, visible and tangible on the ground. As Tanya Richardson has argued, the way states write history onto space is normally taken for granted. But in the case of Odessa or, here, Bukovina and especially Chernivtsi, these efforts were layered and the phenomenon therefore crude, conspicuous, and dissonant. ⁸⁵ This was, by the start of the new millennium, a source of fascination among an ever larger and more diverse group of people in Germany, Austria, and beyond. Those engaging with the region and its history, by the mid-2000s, were members of what can be called the “community of identification,” including locals, whose connection to events was voluntary rather than imposed. They had learnt to read the signs in the environment thanks to the initiatives of previous groups. However, they did not simply see Bukovina as a site of multiethnicity or the Holocaust but rather as a site of layered traces—a site of time-space compression. By the mid-2000s, the symbol of the city of Chernivtsi in much of the literature was no longer the German House or the overgrown Jewish cemetery but rather Czernowitz’s largest Jewish temple, now known as the Kinagoga—a mix of words kino (cinema) and synagoga (synagogue)—after the Soviets turned it into a cinema. On the one hand, the re-appropriation or misappropriation of this central and prominent building symbolized the former status of the Jewish community in the town, its destruction in the Holocaust, and its repression under communism. But on the other hand, it also simply stood for the relentless pace of historical change, which affects all humans, regardless of ethnicity, and which is particularly visible in this location.

For many, this dissonance made Bukovina not less, but more European and not lacking, but rather suffused with opportunity and potential. The city of Chernivtsi in particular became the object of a range of projects. The urban landscape and its layers was perceived as an ideal starting point for international cooperation and a more complex reflection on the nature of the modern world. In the summer of 2006, for example, a group of students from Germany, Austria, Romania, and Ukraine met for a “summer academy” focusing on architecture and urban regeneration in Chernivtsi, which resulted in the publication of a book titled Czernowitz Tomorrow. ⁸⁶ The idea here was that the tangible past would foster new perspectives on potential futures.

Increasingly, the image of the region in Germany and Austria was being discussed and shaped together with young intellectuals from the region itself who embraced the dissonant heritage and engaged with the discourse on Europe. They pointed to the fact that the region’s traces, good and bad, were primarily traces of European modernity. ⁸⁷ In an essay entitled “My Europe,” for example, the contemporary Polish and Ukrainian writers Andrzej Stasiuk and Juri Andruchowicz described Bukovina and the wider region as divided and populated with ruins. ⁸⁸ But as they insisted, this was not a curse. Rather, it meant the underlying truths of which one was usually not aware, including the arbitrariness of borders and the fragility of our political beliefs and systems, were laid bare. This was the space of the post-historical, the space of the post-modern—Europe’s shatterzone. ⁸⁹ But this was Europe, their Europe, and even more European than its typical bastions.

From this perspective, therefore, Bukovina was not a model to emulate or denounce, but a place from which to launch a reflection on the meaning of European modernity and its consequences. Bukovina’s “return to Europe” was not to be conceived of as a return to something that had already existed or had been destroyed but as a return from a conception of history as a source of stability and knowledge. It was a return not to, but from the past.

Conclusion

The popular resurgence of Bukovina in Germany and Austria in the first decade after 1989–1991, Bukovina’s “return to Europe,” at least in the German and Austrian media, has often been noted but seldom analyzed. And yet, this was not a straightforward phenomenon. Neither was it simply a result of nostalgia, political maneuvering, or instrumentalization of the past, nor did it involve a homogenous group of actors. Moreover, the different ways in which the history of Bukovina was mobilized, and why it was mobilized at all, has much to tell us about how different Europeans perceived themselves, others, and Europe as a whole in this moment of juncture. Indeed, the engagement of Germans and Austrians with Bukovina and its history in this period had complex longer roots and changing dynamics. It refracted wider identity issues linked to past experiences and a changing historical consciousness—different relationships to the past and vision of (Eastern) Europe among Germans and Austrians of different backgrounds and generations.

In the first years after 1989–1991, a number of Germans and Austrians emphasized human and historical links to Bukovina and drew on a positive heritage in order to engage with Central and Eastern Europe culturally, politically, and economically. Declaring that Bukovina was “Europe’s forgotten region,” they hoped to erase the differences between East and West created by the Cold War by drawing on the notion of Europe as a community of peoples. Yet rather than bringing down the barriers between “East and West,” let alone “Europe and the rest,” this return to the past based on a static and idealized vision of the past, ultimately reproduced old hierarchies and beliefs. This vision was met with a powerful counter-reaction. For others, particularly members of the younger generation born after the Second World War, the region constituted, rather, an ideal prism to discuss what were perceived as repressed aspects of German and Austrian history during the Cold War: the destruction of the region’s diversity during the Second World War, and the Holocaust. For them, the region was “Europe’s forgotten cemetery” and its German-speaking Jews in particular, the embodiment of real European-ness. This Jewish return was not a matter of politics but ethics, and Bukovina served to define Europe not in terms of peoples but in terms of values: as a moral community. However, this version was also soon viewed as too exclusive and narrow. Bukovina came to be conceived of more widely as “Europe’s shatterzone,” a negative exception, constituting an ideal case-study for discussing the tensions between past and present, concepts of East and West, and different identities in Europe. From this perspective, Bukovina’s return to Europe was not a return to but from the past and a chance to acknowledge the fluidity and constructed-ness of Europe as a whole.

An analysis of the different reinventions of Bukovina after 1989 shows that these were not just different versions of the past, independent from one another, but part of one same process of symbolic politics, aiming at defining Europe in the midst of changed and changing political circumstances after 1989–1991. Indeed, these were consecutive attempts to look forwards through the past, and they not only competed with each other but influenced and built on each other as well. By looking at the representations of Bukovina over the period 1989 to 2005 from the perspective of Germany and Austria, therefore, it is not only possible to identify different actors, stances, and types of interventions but also trace the conjuncture of the discourse on Europe over time. This development reveals a transition from the united national stances typical of the Cold War to a pluralization, transnationalization and democratization of voices after the end of the Cold War under the effect of generational change, growing civil society engagement, and the influence of globalized trends on local environments. This eventually led to the integration of different perspectives and locals gaining voice and visibility. The fifteen years after 1989–1991, in this sense, were a protracted moment of change, revealing a slow shift of narrative and agency. The region’s return to Europe, therefore, should not be understood as a literal development—a policy that could be measured, succeed, or fail. Rather, it was the discursive symptom of the multiple and continuous efforts to define Europe by looking eastwards and looking backwards at a particular historical moment. With this, it came to define that particular moment itself.