Im Anderen das Eigene. Die außenpolitischen Ereignisse der Jahre 1905 und 1907 in der Czernowitzer Allgemeinen Zeitung

Abstract

On the strength of its geographical position alone, historical Bukovina, part of the Habsburg monarchy since the end of the 18th century, is also part of the larger transition space of the Pontus (Black Sea) and its surrounding empires. At the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, the Austrian Crown land found itself in the midst of a Triplex Confinium, which on the one hand increasingly attracted the attention of international (European) politics, certainly from the Crimean War onwards. On the other hand, in its character Bukovina is located on the periphery of the Habsburg Empire. Especially its capital Czernowitz used to be mainly oriented on Vienna, but at the same time this periphery allowed a very specific bourgeois public to evolve in its urban centre. This urban public differed significantly in its German culture based Jewishness from most of the other cities of the empire. The Russian Revolution of 1905 and the 1907 Peasant Revolt in Romania occupied the international public for a long time from afar but took place in Bukovina’s immediate neighbourhood. On the ground of Austrian internal politics and a developing mass media these events became the reason for an intensive reflection on the bourgeois self-identity in Czernowitz. This article therefore aims not to outline the events themselves as reflected in the Bukovina press (Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung) but to draw out the underlying inner context of public and mass medium unique to this city. The traditional centre-periphery rela - tion of historical analysis of Empires, with its focus on the centre, is decisively expanded in the opposite direction if one takes into account an open transition space (Zwischenraum) across linear state borders. Reporting and reflecting the local take in Czernowitz on the events mentioned above allows teasing out the organic inner cohesion between the social substrate of a specific bourgeois public like in Czernowitz and its media through the sens - itive membrane of the space circumscribed by Bukovina.