The full title of Gaëlle Fisher's book reveals the work's scope and ambition: taking a microhistory as its starting point, it tells a wide-ranging and complex intertwined (or entangled) history with broad implications for major developments in the twentieth century, such as forced migrations, communal recovery from violence, the interplay of politics and memory, and the formation and development of group identities. Fisher's focus is on the German speakers of Bukovina, both those who could be classified as Volksdeutsche (two-thirds of whom lived in West Germany after 1945, after having been resettled first to the occupied East as part of the Nazi Heim ins Reich program) and those who could be classified as Jews (two-thirds of whom perished in the Holocaust, while most of the survivors migrated to British Palestine/Israel soon after 1945).
Fisher argues that these ethnic categories only became so clearcut in World War II and the postwar era, the violence of which “unmixed” more fluid populations, yet this unmixing did not mean a clean break from Bukovina. On the contrary: Fisher asserts that both the Bukovina Germans and the Bukovina Jews maintained and nourished their sentimental attachment to it—the imagined natural and cultural landscape they chose to remember rather than the actual place, “lost” for good through its permanent division after 1945 between Romania and the USSR (today Ukraine). Bukovina served as a major group identity marker, even as both groups navigated the complicated and often wrenching processes of integration and assimilation into new societies. Key to these processes were Bukovinians’ Landsmannschaften, which monopolized community discourse on such topics as suffering, guilt, and group belonging, but so were complex interactions between the two communities as well as literary production by poets and fiction authors with roots in Bukovina.
The challenge of charting a truly entangled history becomes evident in the book's structure. The first of five chapters provides a useful overview of Bukovina's history through the end of World War II and explains how the Jews were partially assimilated both into German language and culture and into becoming agents of Habsburg rule before 1918. The non-Jewish Germans were themselves far from a homogeneous or nationally conscious group before these identities became reified and seemingly incompatible under the impact of Nazism as well as interwar Romanian politics. Chapters two and three split the story into two strands, one set in Germany and the other in Palestine and Israel in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Even with the wealth of fascinating detail the author provides, the stories are very similar and concern a small community learning to exist and even thrive in a new society while maintaining a version of its past identity that served both community building and, somewhat paradoxically, assimilation into the new polity. Folded into chapter two is the kernel of a fascinating urban and local history and study of the politics of expellee integration, about the cities of Stuttgart and Darmstadt, their sometimes contentious acceptance and accommodation of Bukovinians, and the latter's navigation of socio-political currents in their “new Heimat.” Chapters four and five return to a fully intertwined tale concerning, respectively, the West German and Israeli Bukovinian Landsmannschaften's negotiation of changing socio-political realities from the 1960s through the 1980s, and the role of literature in cultivating a selective, simplified, reassuring vision of the “lost” Bukovina, which reoriented communal identity around supposedly non-contentious markers of belonging like language and culture divorced from politics, violence, and the legacies of genocide.
It is a testament to the book's ambition that it opens up so many questions which would add even more complexity to an already complex tale. For example, exploring the Romanian, Soviet, and Ukrainian dimensions of the story of Bukovina as a site of memory and identity would be fascinating. The book poses a challenge to historians working on Nazi resettlements of Volksdeutsche: our understanding of postwar memory would benefit from more knowledge of the extent of resettlers’ involvement in Nazi crimes during their first, wartime, displacement to occupied Poland and Ukraine. On a more critical note, it is somewhat unclear why the author did not make more use of the oral history interviews she conducted with more than thirty Bukovinians. Finally, while Fisher laudably set out to tell something more than an institutional history of the Landsmannschaften and to bring out the fluidity of communal memory, exactly who drove or monopolized these processes is sometimes a bit hard to discern. Did anyone have such a monopoly, since the author says that many ostensible Bukovinians did not join the organizations that claimed to speak for the whole community? The meaning of silence and the absence of evidence pose a special challenge to scholarship; the polyphony of voices is clearest when the author examines the intention behind or possible readings of published sources, somewhat less so when she charts how these sources were received, especially by less engaged Bukovinians.
But these are minor objections that come out of the desire to know even more, to go even deeper into the multilayered narrative Fisher presents. Scholars working on issues of minority integration (or majority creation), memory, and the aftermaths of violence will profit especially from the author's bedrock argument that both the Bukovina Germans and the Bukovina Jews remained intensely aware that the other group had existed and continued to exist and have its own memory narrative: “they were always aware of each other and always defining themselves with other stakeholders of the region's history and identity in mind” (4). Group identities could be unmixed by force or convenience (or necessity in a changed postwar world), but the past and the present could not be fully disentangled.
