Friday, April 15, 2016
Rhapsody (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
In light of growing xenophobia, racism, and neo-fascism affecting the relationships between Europe's heterogeneous peoples and their attitude towards the influx of refugees, the safeguarding of peaceful coexistence is a major challenge. As paradigm of relatively peaceful plural societies, pre–World War II Czernowitz, once regarded as a "Europe en miniature," gains added significance. For Czernowitz (as the city is known in German), also called Cernăuţi (in Romanian), Chernovtsy (in Russian), Chernivtsi (in Ukrainian), and Czerniowce (in Polish), was a center of intense intercultural exchange in a multiethnic biotope where Romanians, Ukrainians, Germans, Austrians, Jews, Poles, Armenians, Hungarians, Slovenes, Turks, Greeks, Hutsuls, Lipovanians and several different religious denominations co-existed relatively peacefully for centuries. Their homeland was the Bukovina, split today between Romania and the Ukraine. It was a world of “people and books” (Paul Celan) that produced a multifaceted Austro-German, Austro-Jewish, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish literature, with many authors being fluent in several languages.
Time and again some of these writers portrayed their homeland as a haven of mutual understanding, while others pointed to a precarious balance between tolerance and intolerance in the region.
My presentation will focus on the ways in which Czernowitz as paradigm of a peaceful plural society gives insights into current problems of EU-Member States and Non-Member States, shedding light upon questions concerning the preconditions for the fruitful interaction of peoples from different ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds as well as questions concerning the causes of violence in European communities that had enjoyed peace.
