Czernowitz/Cernăuţi/Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi/Czerniowce: A Testing Ground for Peaceful Coexistence in a Plural Society

In light of the growing xenophobia, racism, and neo-fascism evident in our world today, pre–World War II Czernowitz gains added significance. For Czernowitz was a center of intense intercultural exchange in a multiethnic sociotope where several different nationalities and religious denominations coexisted relatively peacefully. For the residents there, the homeland produced a multifaceted Austro-German, Austro-Jewish, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish literature. Some Bukovinian writers, journalists, historians, and political figures portrayed their homeland as a haven of peace and mutual understanding, while others invoked the conflicts that undermined ethnic and religious interrelations in the region. Several authors considered the precarious balance between tolerance and intolerance as Bukovina's salient feature. This essay analyzes the ways in which the master tropes inherent in different discourses about Czernowitz and Bukovina disclose the dynamic interrelations between several paradigms of pluralistic societies in their relationship to images of the "Other," calling into question epistemological premises of contemporary debates on multiculturalism.