Resettlers and Survivors

Reviewed by: Resettlers and Survivors: Bukovina and the Politics of Belonging in West Germany and Israel, 1945–1989 by Gaëlle Fisher Marsha L. Rozenblit Fisher, Gaëlle – Resettlers and Survivors: Bukovina and the Politics of Belonging in West Germany and Israel, 1945–1989. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. 291 p. In this extremely interesting book, Gaëlle Fisher explores the meanings of German identification for two distinct groups of "Germans" from Bukovina. Bukovina was a province of the Habsburg Monarchy inhabited by people who spoke Ukrainian, Romanian, German, and Yiddish. It became part of Romania in the interwar period before being divided between the USSR (later Ukraine) and Romania after the Second World War. Fisher focuses both on the so-called ethnic Germans—Volksdeutsche—whom the Nazis resettled in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Alsace-Lorraine, and Poland as part of their ethnic engineering policy in 1940 to bring Germans "home to the Reich," who then fled or were expelled primarily to West Germany in 1945–1946 and on German-speaking Jews who survived the Holocaust and left Romania for Israel after the Second World War. Interested in the ways that both groups emphasized their unique pasts as Germans as they integrated into their new homelands, she reveals how they remained distinct communities of experience. In so doing, she has much to say about German and Israeli society, the impact of the Cold War, and how people construct identities under the influence of violence and displacement. [End Page 194] Fisher does an excellent job analyzing how Bukovinian Germans—who numbered about 60,000 in West Germany in the decades after the Second World War—understood themselves as expellees from their ancestral homeland. They may have regarded Bukovina as their old home, but they had no intention of returning. They imagined Bukovina as German space, whose Ukrainian, Romanian, and Jewish inhabitants barely existed except occasionally as ethnographic curiosities. Refusing to admit any German responsibility for their displacement, they preferred to see themselves as victims of Soviet aggression. Fisher traces the activities of the "Homeland Association (Landsmannschaft) of German Resettlers from Bukovina," in West Germany, as well as the articles in its newspaper from the 1950s through the 1980s. She has also thoroughly mined the West German archives for the petitions, appeals, and activities of these Bukovinian Germans. She emphasizes their continued use of Nazi and völkisch terminology to describe themselves, and that many leaders of the Landsmannschaft had joined the Nazi Party and the SS during the war. She also demonstrates how they, in their role as advisors to the German government on compensation claims, argued against defining Bukovinian Jews as Germans. Bukovinian Germans successfully integrated into post-war West German society, benefitting from Cold War attitudes to territory behind the Iron Curtain, and they continued to commemorate their lost homeland while happy to be Germans at home in West Germany. The situation of German-speaking Jews from Bukovina in Israel was different, although, interestingly, there were structural similarities between the two groups. Both were nostalgic about their old homes in Bukovina that had disappeared, and neither group wanted to return. They both imagined a wonderful, old Bukovina, but they imagined the space very differently. Jews imagined Bukovina as a German-Jewish space with no other Germans (or anyone else for that matter). They saw it as an Austrian-Habsburg space in which Jews benefitted from beneficent Habsburg policies and created a vibrant, creative German culture. Bukovinian Germans, on the other hand, utterly ignored the Jewish role in German culture in their former homeland. Both groups also regarded their new countries as their ancestral homes, and both groups sought to integrate into societies that wanted them to assimilate quickly. German-Jewish Bukovinians also created a Landsmannschaft, the "Club of Immigrants from Bukovina," which published a German-language newspaper, which Fisher thoroughly mines. What is most interesting is that German Jews and German non-Jews created utterly exclusive visions of what it had meant to a German in Bukovina, each excluding the other. Those visions probably derived from the fact that they had inhabited different space in Bukovina, with German Jews, mostly merchants, craftsmen, and professionals, largely living in the big

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