Winkler’s study, his 2006 doctoral thesis (University of Portsmouth), now appears as volume 4 in the series The European Jewish Press: Studies in History and Language. Thanks to the miraculous fact that the city library of Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi) survived World War II and Soviet rule, its entire collection of Jewish periodicals, spanning the end of the nineteenth century to 1940, has now become available to scholars. This book is one of the first to study intensively this fascinating material.
In the introduction, the aim, scope, and theoretical outline of the study are succinctly delineated. The author focuses mainly on the role of the Jewish German-language press in shaping a new awareness of Jewish identity in Czernowitz from after World War I until 1923. In his first chapter he plunges immediately into the history of the press in the province of Bukovina and Czernowitz. Although he later provides some historical background to the region and its capital, a historical introduction, however brief, is absolutely necessary for an understanding of the subject.
The history of Czernowitz and Bukovina is complicated and mirrors the vicissitudes of eastern European history after the division of Poland in 1775. In that year Bukovina, with its capital Czernowitz, was incorporated into the Habsburg Empire. During Habsburg rule the region flourished, and Czernowitz, an important garrison town, soon became a centre of German culture, with a German gymnasium, a German theatre, and many other cultural institutions. The Germanization of the city was greatly enhanced by an influx of Germans during the nineteenth century and by the Jewish population, which comprised almost 30 per cent of the total population. While the Jews of Galicia, another part of Poland which had come under Habsburg rule, had opted for Polish, in addition to their native Yiddish, during the nineteenth century, the Jews of Bukovina chose German as their cultural language.
During World War I, Bukovina was part of the battlefield of the Eastern Front. Czernowitz fell into Russian hands several times, before being recaptured by German and Austrian troops. After the fall of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, Bukovina became part of the kingdom of Romania and the name of the city was changed to Cernauti. In 1940, the Red Army occupied Bukovina, but the region was recaptured by Romania. From 1944 to 1991 Bukovina was part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and in 1991 it became a province of the Ukrainian Republic. Its capital is now called Chernivtsi. The chequered history of Bukovina is clearly shown by the diversity of its population, which comprised Romanians, Jews, Germans, and Ukrainians. In Czernowitz the Jews formed the greater part of the population and their cultural influence extended far beyond the region’s borders.
In 1889, the first regional German-language daily paper, the Bukowiner Rundschau, appeared; it was soon followed by several other German newspapers. At first, Jewish financiers and journalists participated freely in several of those newspapers, but in the first decade of the twentieth century religious and political dissent among the various national groups, but also within those groups, gave rise to a wide variety of new daily newspapers and weekly and monthly journals. Several political and ethnic groups were active in Czernowitz’s Jewish community. Under Habsburg rule those different national groups coexisted peacefully, while retaining their language and cultural differences. Modern social and political ideas penetrated Bukovina at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the Jewish community too was divided into several factions, all of which had their own journals in German, Yiddish, and Hebrew.
From the beginning, all daily newspapers and journals were censored, first by the Habsburg authorities and later by the Russians. The only period during which the press was not officially censored was from 1918 to 1923, when Bukovina was more or less independent. In 1923 the Romanian authorities embarked on an extensive programme of Romanianization. The Romanian language became obligatory in primary and secondary education, and German newspapers were heavily censored.
That is why this period was chosen for a deeper analysis of the German-Jewish press and the Jewish theatre. The five most important German-Jewish daily newspapers were the Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung (1903–1940), the Czernowitzer Morgenblatt (1918–1940), Das Volk/Neues Cernowitzer Tageblatt (1918–1923), the Ostjüdische Zeitung (1919–1937), and the Volkspresse/Vorwärts (1899–1937). They represented the different political and cultural tendencies among the Jewish population: conservative, liberal/assimilatory, Jewish nationalist, Zionist, and socialist.
The same tendencies were represented in Czernowitz’s German theatre, which was sponsored mainly by Jews. From 1905 onward, when a new theatre was opened, all kinds of German groups played there, with guest performances by Yiddish groups. But from 1921, the German theatre became the victim of Romanian nationalist and anti-Semitic hostility, two years before the official Romanian cultural policy was launched. Romanian students frequently disturbed German performances. At the end December 1921 the Romanian authorities decreed that theatre performances would henceforward be given only in Romanian. The German theatre moved into an old concert hall, but after two seasons it was forced to close.
In his detailed study, the author gives an insight into the unique cultural situation of Bukovina and its Jewish population. His attempt to combine a history of the press and the theatre is new, and daring. The list of all daily newspapers and journals in Bukovina from 1882 to 1940 provided at the end of the book is useful; it shows how important the German-speaking Jewish population was for the culture of the whole region. Winkler reveals for the first time the rich panorama of German-Jewish culture in Czernowitz and Bukovina during the first half of the twentieth century. A great amount of hitherto unknown material is now available for further study and deserves to be followed up by a series of other equally important books.
