From the Editors

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 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...