Resettlers and Survivors: Bukovina and the Politics of Belonging in West Germany and Israel, 1945–1989. Gaëlle Fisher

In 1959, authors at both the Israel-based Die Stimme (The Voice) and the West German-based Der Südostdetusche (The South-East German) were united in their animated indignation at one Gregor von Rezzori, who had recently made a name for himself as an author. Rezzori was especially well-known for his sarcastic portrayal of the culture, everyday life, and people of his former home region, Bukovina. His mocking tone resulted in other former Bukovinians’ vehement disapproval, as seen in the rage pieces published in the Stimme and in the Südostdeutsche, which accused Rezzori of “throwing dirt” at, even “blaspheming,” the former cherished homeland (p. 165).

At that point in their history, there was little else on which the people behind the Stimme and the Südostdeutsche could agree. As Gaëlle Fisher shows in Resettlers and Survivors, the fact that Jewish Bukovinians and ethnic German Bukovinians shared a former homeland and a deep yearning for its past did not lead to harmonious dialogue or a sense of a common fate in the postwar era. Rather, in the aftermath of displacements, total war, and genocide, as both communities sought belonging in new, foreign homelands, they developed differing, oftentimes competing interpretations of Bukovina’s history and their place in it. Fisher’s book, among the first to focus on these two entangled communities simultaneously, offers a fascinating analysis of how both groups confronted material and emotional challenges following their forced removals and how they crafted memory cultures of Bukovina to address their evolving needs and goals.

Bukovina and its people provide a particularly rich site for the study of entangled pasts. A space long cohabited by multiple ethnic groups, Bukovina’s German and Jewish histories developed in tandem after the Habsburg Crown annexed the territory (which today is divided between Ukraine and Romania). Ethnic Germans and Jews were two of the largest groups brought to Bukovina as part of the Empire’s policies of internal colonization, and while at no point were they the largest minority groups there, they held political importance in the eyes of the Monarchy.

During World War II, the paths of Jewish and ethnic German Bukovinians continued to overlap even as they diverged in radical ways. As part of the Nazi program of “resettlement home to the Reich,” the ethnic German population was removed from the region, with some people scattered in German-occupied territories and others moved into Germany proper. Their forced settlement turned German Bukovinians into victims as well as beneficiaries of Nazi policy. They were uprooted, forced into degrading living conditions and used as pawns by the regime. Yet they were also given privileges at the expense of other communities brutalized by Germany’s war. Moreover, many Bukovinian Germans were drawn to Nazi ideology and eagerly participated in the regime’s violent policies. After 1945, those who were not already settled there found their way into in what became West Germany.

The displacement of Jewish Bukovinians took place under parallel but starkly different conditions. Romania’s fascist government intensified antisemitic persecution and violence against Jews in 1941. Alongside massacres and starvation, Jews were subjected to deportations to ghettos and forced labor camps. It is estimated that nearly two-thirds of Bukovina’s prewar Jewish population of about 120,000 perished in the Holocaust. The majority of those who survived in Romania tried to leave the country either immediately following its surrender in 1944 or shortly thereafter, with most of them seeking to immigrate to Palestine and later Israel.

The bulk of Fisher’s book centers on the decades that followed. She devotes a chapter for tracing the paths of Bukovinians in West Germany and one for Bukovinians in Israel. The two following chapters analyze various entanglements between ethnic German and Jewish Bukovinians in the postwar era, which, tellingly, rarely took the form of direct engagement. Indeed, one of the fascinating threads of the book reveals the many points of synchrony that characterized the postwar experience of both groups, which emerged in the absence of meaningful contact and despite radically different conditions during and after the war.

In the first decade after their arrival to their new countries, displaced Bukovinians attempted to define their histories as not only compatible but primed for belonging in the emerging new societies of West Germany and Israel, respectively. This required a creative rewriting of the region’s history and of their past lives there. Fisher aptly shows that what was at stake was more than a declaration of intent toward integration, but a claim to material protections and political rights. The founding of organizations (Landsmannschaften), as well as papers like the Stimme and the Südostdeutsche, stemmed from these efforts and was important in crafting a commemorative narrative meant to further the immediate needs of each respective community. Though Fisher acknowledges that such images of Bukovina were constructed by a cadre of self-appointed leaders, and that their organizations were not necessarily representative of the community, she does not really examine the relationship between these bodies and their supposed constituents, nor does she seek a more comprehensive analysis of the positions of “everyday” former Bukovinians. This is unfortunate, especially since Fisher alludes to examples and available sources that could have shed more light on this dimension.

Fisher does, however, show that for both communities, their constructions of the past entailed a contradictory relationship to Bukovina that, on one hand, adopted a nostalgic gaze, relating to Bukovina as metaphoric space where a rich collective culture thrived, and, on the other hand, identified Bukovina as a tangible site of injustice and loss as a means to secure rights. But if in both cases this process was shaped by similar impulses, the historical image of Bukovina that emerged for both communities was markedly different: Jews remembered Bukovina as a Jewish space, while the ethnic Germans remembered it as a German one. This required erasure of the other group’s history. In the case of the ethnic Germans’ exclusion of Jewish Bukovinians, such erasure was steeped in antisemitism and in völkisch ideology. A fascinating example of these dynamics is found in Fisher’s analysis of disputes over the legitimacy of Bukovinian Jews’ claim to a German identity as part of their efforts to obtain reparations from West Germany.

While the book focuses mainly on the internal dynamics of these two communities (and how they responded to the political realities of their new states), the international context of the Cold War is never quite absent. With postwar Bukovina situated behind the Iron Curtain, anti-communist and anti-Soviet sentiments played an important role in shaping narratives of Bukovina as a lost homeland (especially but not only in West Germany). Fisher thus offers an insightful exploration of the development of regional identities as they were constructed with transnational resonance and at the backdrop of global geopolitical conflicts.

Readers with diverse interests and expertise will find the story at the heart of this book and Fisher’s astute analysis of it valuable. It is a powerful demonstration of the importance of writing entangled histories. In its exploration of two displaced communities negotiating their (dis)connections, the book offers a strong and unique example of how politics of belonging and memory are dynamically and flexibly produced in response to changing demands and conditions.