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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Resettlers and Survivors: Bukovina and the Politics of Belonging in West Germany and Israel, 1945–1989 by Gaëlle Fisher Jannis Panagiotidis Gaëlle Fisher. Resettlers and Survivors: Bukovina and the Politics of Belonging in West Germany and Israel, 1945–1989. New York: Berghahn, 2020. x + 291 pp. With this important book, Gaëlle Fisher joins a series of recent publications dealing with the entangled histories of Germans and Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. In contrast to works that treat the Shoah as the endpoint of this entanglement, like most of the contributions to the volume edited by Tobias Grill, Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe: Shared and Comparative Histories (de Gruyter, 2018), her study focuses on the period of time after 1945, when the majority of both groups did not live in the region anymore but in their respective "ethnic homelands," Germany and Israel. It can thus be seen as an attempt to extend the history of multicultural Central and Eastern Europe in time and space. Fisher's monograph is distinctive in its focus on the postwar histories of Germans and Jews from one particular region, Bukovina, which was well known for its lively German Jewish bourgeois culture. Though published in the Berghahn Worlds of Memory series, the author points out in her introduction that this is not just a "history of memory" but a "history of the aftermath," which she defines as analyzing the "'meaning-making processes' at work in the wake of the conflict" (14). Bukovina and the associated "Bukovina myth" (8) serve as a "prism" to look at what the author calls "politics of belonging": German and Jewish Bukovinians had to negotiate their place in postwar national societies which left more or less space for their specific origins, cultures, and memories, but also in a contested shared past. In that sense, the book is in close dialogue with my monograph, The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany (Indiana University Press, 2019), which traces the entangled migration trajectories of Germans and Jews from Eastern Europe after the war. Where The Unchosen Ones [End Page 452] studies the state practices of attributing belonging, Resettlers and Survivors focuses on intracommunal and societal processes. Chapter 1 provides the historical background until 1945. It is a story of how the ethnic and linguistic diversity created by Habsburg internal colonization broke up into often-rival nationalities, both under the Habsburgs and under Romanian rule after the First World War. The ultimate separation along ethnic lines took place during the Second World War, when the Nazis resettled "ethnic Germans" (Volksdeutsche) "Heim ins Reich," while Jews were ghettoized, deported, and murdered. In a sense, this was the radical consequence of previous völkisch distinctions between volksdeutsch and sprachdeutsch (linguistically German). According to that logic, Jews could be the latter, but not the former—a distinction that remained relevant into the postwar period. The next two chapters follow the postwar trajectories of the establishment of Bukovinian Germans and Jews in "their" respective national states. Chapter 2 deals with the history of Bukovinian resettlers in West Germany after the war. Unlike other expellees who insisted on their right to return to their original Heimat in the East, Bukovinian discourses were more complex, given that the resettlers had voluntarily forfeited their homeland at the beginning of the war. Instead, the identity entrepreneurs of the Bukovinian German Landsmannschaft construed Germany as the original Urheimat where they could now stake a claim to belonging. At the same time, institutionalized Bukovinian identity remained relevant, for instance, when it came to claiming compensation for losses suffered during the war. "Integration" was thus achieved "as the result of a careful balance of sameness and difference, a combination of Germanness and otherness" (95). In chapter 3, Fisher studies the survival, migration, and integration of Bukovinian Jews between Romania and Israel. While acutely aware of the differences in experience between German resettlers and Jewish survivors, the author shows the structural similarities of integration processes in Israel and West Germany. Here, too, a Landsmannschaft was the main actor tasked with striking the balance between claims to belonging in the assimilationist setting of early Israel while maintaining a distinctive...