“A land where people and books used to live”: this is Paul Celan’s description
of Czernowitz. A plural space par excellence, which bears witness to
diversity in its many names, Czernowitz is an accretion of stories in itself.
Especially in the Austro-Hungarian years, Czernowitz is a place where languages
and cultures meet, where the various constituents – the German, the
Jewish, the Yiddish, the Ukrainian, the Rumanian – turn the town into a
mirror of Austro-Hungarian multiculturalism. The various definitions of
Czernowitz as “little Vienna” “Babel of south-eastern Europe”, “Jerusalem
upon the river Pruth”, “European Alexandria” date back to these years.
The article begins with an introduction on the spatial dimension of the
town, within the borders of the Bukovina region. This first section is followed
by a description of its most relevant component: the Jewish German
group. Having probed into the physical and symbolic space of
Czernowitz, the article moves on to consider the literary testimonies of the
kaleidoscope Czernowitz was. Among the many voices of Jewish-German
intellectuality, it analyzes the images of the town in the works of Karl
Emil Franzos, Rose Ausländer, Alfred Margul-Sperber and finally the
public speeches given by Paul Celan.
