Hi, all.
I am in a webinar now on a new special issue of the Journal of Austrian
Studies that is devoted to Czernowitz.
ANK: The Journal of Austrian Studies: Webinar: Czernowitz (19.02.2021)
The Journal of Austrian Studies presents a JAS Webinar: Czernowitz
Co-sponsored by the Center for Austrian Studies and the Center for
Jewish Studies
of the University of Minnesota.
I have not yet read the journal, but I am sure it will be of interest to
list members.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction.
"In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
"From the Editors
Leslie Morris and Joseph Moser
"Czernowitz, the legendary city of German-speaking Austrian culture in
Eastern Europe and the birthplace of Paul Celan and Rosa Ausländer as
well as many other writers and artists, has not received much attention
in Austrian Studies. Situated on the edge of the contiguous
German-speaking territories of Europe, Czernowitz was a linguistic
exclave in which Yiddish-speaking Jews from Galicia settled after the
Austrians took control of Bukovina in 1775. Famous not only for the
prominent German-language poets it produced, Czernowitz also played a
major role in the formation of a modern Yiddish literature, as the site
of the first international Yiddish Conference in 1908. Within this
multilingual environment under Austrian rule, where Romanian and
Ukrainian were the main languages, Galician Jews assimilated from
Yiddish to German and built an almost utopian German-speaking
Austrian-Jewish city. By the turn of the twentieth century, Czernowitz
was a model Austrian city, culturally, linguistically, and
architecturally. German-speaking Jews, who formed a large minority in
the city, felt more secure here than anywhere else in the Habsburg
Empire, yet this utopian sense of harmony was undermined by underlying
ethnic conflicts and a deeply embedded antisemitism and was interrupted
by World War I. Notwithstanding, Austrian-Jewish culture had established
itself so firmly before 1914 that it was able to continue under Romanian
control, despite oppressive language laws, until the Soviet invasion in
1940, which was followed by the invasion of the Romanian Fascists and
the German Nazis a year later in 1941, which destroyed Jewish life and
culture in the city.
"Czernowitz has long served as a cipher of sorts for thinking about the
now-lost spaces of Jewish life in eastern Europe. Certainly, in the
field of German Studies, the prominence of the city's two best-known
poets, Celan and Ausländer, have brought some attention to the role
Czernowitz played in the formation of a multilingual Jewish poetics. And
yet, despite scholarship [End Page xi] in the field on the foundational
role Czernowitz played for Celan and Ausländer, not to mention for the
development of modern Yiddish culture, scant attention has been paid to
the cultural and historical significance of the city and to the complex
mechanism of nostalgia and memory in reclaiming this legendary lost
space that, nonetheless, still exists. This special issue of the Journal
of Austrian Studies attempts to address this gap in scholarship about
Czernowitz. The idea for this issue emerged from a three-panel series,
organized by Leslie Morris and Joseph Moser at the 2017 German Studies
Association conference in Atlanta, aimed at covering a wide range of
cultural and literary topics on the former capital of the Austrian
crownland Bukovina. The goal of this special issue with six articles is
to present Czernowitz from a variety of angles and to enhance the
understanding of this complex, fraught, yet celebrated place in Austrian
and Jewish cultural history.
"Andrei Corbea-Hoisie's article "Die Czernowitzer deutschsprachige
Presse vor und nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg" examines the role of the
Germanlanguage press in Czernowitz as a tool for colonizing the eastern
portion of the Habsburg Empire between 1848 and 1914, in the context of
other Germanlanguage newspapers across Austria-Hungary. Journalism in
Czernowitz was unique, as the newspapers were not written by an exclave
German minority but rather by Jewish journalists who had assimilated
from Yiddish to German, carrying out this effort of colonization on
behalf of the Habsburg officials. The Jews saw in German a supranational
language that could stem the nationalist trends of the time and area and
support the multicultural ethos of the Habsburg Empire that was so
beneficial to the Jews. This Jewish German-language press in Czernowitz
was confronted with a reactionary and nationalist antisemitic press in
Czernowitz. Even after the takeover of Bukovina by Romania in 1918,
Czernowitz's Jewish bourgeoisie managed to maintain a German-language
press in the city until the Soviet invasion in 1940, even if the ties to
Vienna were severed with the end of World War I. Corbea-Hoisie makes the
important argument that the German language served less to nurture
Habsburg nostalgia after 1918..."
The full issue is available through Project Muse.
Jim
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Received on 2021-02-19 16:19:46