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Rise and Fall of an Austrian Identity in the Provincial Historiography of Bukovina1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2015

Bálint Varga
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During the nineteenth century, most European countries transformed into integrated nation-states, based on the principle of nationalism. Probably the only major European exception to this rule was the Habsburg Empire. Created in 1804 to replace an early modern composite state, the Austrian Empire had to cope with the long historical traditions of its numerous and highly diverse Crownlands. This diversity prevented an effective integration of the Empire, leading, on the one hand, to the introduction of home rule in Hungary and a restricted form in Galicia and in Croatia-Slavonia and, on the other hand, to the maintenance of a large space of action for the other Crownlands.

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Articles
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Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 46 , April 2015 , pp. 183 - 202
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Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2015 

During the nineteenth century, most European countries transformed into integrated nation-states, based on the principle of nationalism. Probably the only major European exception to this rule was the Habsburg Empire. Created in 1804 to replace an early modern composite state, the Austrian Empire had to cope with the long historical traditions of its numerous and highly diverse Crownlands. This diversity prevented an effective integration of the Empire, leading, on the one hand, to the introduction of home rule in Hungary and a restricted form in Galicia and in Croatia-Slavonia and, on the other hand, to the maintenance of a large space of action for the other Crownlands.Footnote 2

To run this complicated empire as a unit, an effective ideology was needed. The Habsburg Empire was a unique phenomenon in contemporary Europe, as its centrally proposed identity reinforced the unity of the state without relying on ethnic terms.Footnote 3 Instead of a single nation-based identity, the Austrian state idea rested on three key concepts: first, on the unity of the Habsburg lands under the ruling dynasty; second, on provincial patriotism (in the sense of relating territorial identity to the Crownlands instead of to ethnic nations); and third, on the civilizing mission of the empire in its Eastern provinces. Similar to contemporary Europe, historical scholarship was intensively utilized by the government, intellectuals, writers, artists, and at all levels of education, for the sake of underpinning these ideological claims.Footnote 4

This article analyzes the construction and limitations of imperial identity in the historiography produced within the small, relatively underresearched Crownland Bukovina. Bukovina had been acquired by the Habsburg Empire in 1774. The local elite, boyars and the Orthodox Church, were far weaker here than were the estates or diets in any other Austrian Crownland; until the mid nineteenth century, they could hardly rely on privileges supported by historical rights and arguments, either, to argue for local autonomy. In 1849, Bukovina was given the rank of a Crownland, and an imperial identity in a Crownland framework was constructed. This identity was constructed ex-nihilo; Bukovina was thus one of the late laboratories of the Austrian state idea.Footnote 5 Here, history was also intensively utilized by the provincial government and local intellectuals, particularly after 1875, when a university was founded in the provincial capital Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi, Ukraine). This article argues that the professionalization of historical scholarship in the province—particularly at the University—led to the monopoly of a supranational Austrian state idea until around the turn of the century. After that point, however, historical scholarship became increasingly dominated by ethnonationalist content and no longer served the earlier imperial identity function. The Austrian identity proposal ultimately failed under the pressure of the Romanian, German and Ukrainian national master narratives, which classified Bukovina in the imagination of their respective national bodies.

The Context

In 1774, the Habsburg Empire decided to conquer Northern Moldova for strategic reasons, in order to build a direct territorial link between Transylvania and the recently annexed Crownland of Galicia. A Habsburg army entered Bukovina in 1774 and, despite Moldovan protest, Austria's annexation of the region was sanctioned by the 1775 Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji. Until 1786, a military government ruled the recently acquired province. In spite of local opposition, Bukovina was then integrated into Galicia until 1849, when it was reorganized as an independent Crownland within the Habsburg Empire and given the rank of Duchy.

The Habsburg administration found cultural, economic, and social conditions in Bukovina poor and, therefore, undertook a large-scale policy of development during the one and a half centuries of Austrian rule. An important element of this policy was the increase of population. The original Romanian, Ruthenian, and Armenian population of the province was now supplemented by German, Jewish, Polish, Magyar, Slovak, and Russian Old Believer immigrants, making Bukovina the most linguistically and religiously heterogeneous Crownland of the Habsburg Empire by the second half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, several nationalist movements emerged in the province, the most vocal being the Romanian. Nevertheless, the competing nationalist elites of the province did not fight each other so aggressively as did their contemporaries elsewhere in Austria, as for example, in Bohemia. Rather, in 1909 they agreed to an electoral compromise that regulated the relations between a Romanian, Ukrainian, German, Jewish, and Polish electorate.Footnote 6

The Vision of Austrian Bukovina

Until the Austrian occupation, Moldova was virtually a terra incognita for the Western world.Footnote 7 The only comprehensive source of knowledge about the region was the Descriptio Moldaviae, a book authored by former Moldovan prince and prolific scholar Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723) in 1714–16.Footnote 8 Although Cantemir had a profound interest in history (his magnum opus being the first history of the Ottoman Empire ever), in the Descriptio he focused much more on issues of contemporary government, and did not deliver a detailed historical analysis.

Although Moldova in general was unknown, Bukovina was indeed an undiscovered region. Before the Austrian occupation, Bukovina had not formed an administrative unit but was known as Upper Land of Moldova (Ţara sus). No particular studies were devoted to this area until its Austrian occupation. In 1773, General Karl Enzenberg (1725–1810) submitted a study about the potential advantages of the province in order to help Viennese authorities to decide Bukovina's future. Based on the arguments made in this paper, Austria annexed the region a year later.Footnote 9 In order to map the province in detail, the military commander of the province, General Gabriel Splény (1734–1818), drafted the first comprehensive study on Bukovina immediately after its annexation.Footnote 10 Similar to Cantemir, these manuscripts focused on contemporary conditions in the province and omitted its historical aspects.

Academic literature on Bukovina emerged in the following decades, mostly in Galicia, into which Bukovina had been incorporated in 1786. Members of the Galician administration and professors of the University of Lemberg (today L'viv, Ukraine) collected documents and published works on Bukovina's political and social conditions, ethnography, geography, and economy. History was, however, not among the disciplines that these Enlightenment scholars preferred. Ignorance about the past of the region derived less from limited interest than from limited research possibilities: there were hardly any published sources about Moldovan history, and most Austrian intellectuals were not trained in church Slavonic and Romanian to be able to read existing documents. Furthermore, most of them worked in the provincial capital Lemberg, far away from Bukovina, and focused their efforts on Galicia en gros.Footnote 11 These authors actively participated in the invention of Eastern Europe; they were inspired by the Enlightenment and strongly believed that their mission was to civilize the allegedly backward Galicia and Bukovina.Footnote 12 Remarkable here is the argumentation of Friedrich Lindner, a well-known German journalist and author. Lindner claimed in 1810 that the basic layer of each nation's soul was good, but at the very moment, Bukovinians were in the purest state of barbarity. The solution was to have “unbiased observers” teach the locals about virtues, which they were definitely able to learn.Footnote 13

This outside production of knowledge was replaced by the emergence of Bukovina-based scholarship starting in 1849, when the province received the status of Crownland. The Duchy's administration attracted several bureaucrats and intellectuals to Czernowitz, which now ranked as a provincial capital. The most important figure of this period was Franz Adolf Wickenhauser (1809–1891), a Lower Austria-born financial expert in the provincial administration.Footnote 14 To overcome the limits experienced by the previous generation, Wickenhauser learned Romanian and church Slavonic during his Bukovina service and was the first to publish original sources in German translation. Although Wickenhauser's academic work was far from outstanding, his source collection laid the foundations of historical research on Bukovina.Footnote 15

This kind of amateur historical scholarship was replaced by professional standards in 1875, when the Francis Joseph University of Czernowitz was founded to commemorate the incorporation of the province in Austria a century before. Remarkable is the argumentation the Bukovinian elite employed to convince the Austrian Parliament (Reichsrat) to give preference to Czernowitz over other possible locations for a new institution of higher learning: the new Francisco-Josephina was meant to be a supranational institution to distribute progress and civilization to a backward province and not a “national-university” (i.e., a university instructing in a local language rather than in German). The first rector, lawyer, and liberal deputy in the Reichsrat from Bukovina, Constantin Tomaszczuk, symbolized well the mission of the university. Coming from a Romanian- and Ruthenian-speaking family, he did not subscribe to any nationalist idea, but had a strong Orthodox confessional, provincial, and imperial identity.

The University had three faculties—one for law, one for philosophy, and one for Orthodox theology; the former two worked in German, the latter mostly in Romanian, but some Ukrainian language chairs were also established.Footnote 16 In 1875, two chairs for history were founded, one for world history and another for the history of Austria. As research and education became more specialized in the following decades, new chairs were established for Eastern European (1895), ancient (1899), and South East European history (1912).Footnote 17 The University Library (founded in 1851 as the Provincial Library) made certain that recent up-to-date academic work was available in Czernowitz.Footnote 18 The establishment of the University also produced a breakthrough in Bukovina-related research. As a festive album published in 1900, commemorating the twenty-five years of the University's foundation, proudly remarked, researchers at the University had produced a significantly higher output of Bukovina-related studies than ever before within the span of only twenty-five years.Footnote 19

The other institution devoted to professional local research was the Provincial Museum of Bukovina (Bukowiner Landesmuseum). Founded in 1863, and operated by the University between 1877 and 1893, it was open to the public as a separate institution within the framework of the Provincial Museum Association (Landesmuseums-Verein) in 1893.Footnote 20 The majority of the membership was comprised of secondary school teachers, clerks in the provincial and municipal administration, landholders, and representatives of free professions.Footnote 21 The Association published an annual bulletin starting in 1893 with the title Jahrbuch des Bukowiner Landes-Museums. This bulletin published historical, ethnographical, and archaeological studies and some original sources, like Cantemir's Descriptio. In 1907, the provincial government established an archive, though it did not manage to build a significant collection until World War I.Footnote 22 The imperial agency Central Commission for Research and Preservation of Monuments was also present in Bukovina, as it financed the exploration of the Suceava castle ruins.Footnote 23

Hence, by the turn of the nineteenth century, all relevant institutions of historical scholarship—a university, archives, a historical association, a museum, and a periodical—came into being. These institutions were financed either directly by the imperial or the provincial budget. Overlaps among them were obvious: professors of the University took the leading role in the Association, managed the archive, made up the editorial board, and authored most of the articles in the Jahrbuch. Hence, all these institutions were Imperial Austrian in their nature and had a twofold mission. On one hand, they aimed at “the improvement and expansion of regional studies in archeology, history, art history, ethnography and natural history.”Footnote 24 On the other hand, these studies were used to forge and distribute an Austrian-Habsburg loyalty.Footnote 25

Two figures played key roles in the construction of an Austrian historical narrative of Bukovina. The first person was Ferdinand Zieglauer (1829–1906), professor of Austrian history from the establishment of the University until his retirement in 1900. Born in Tirol and having studied in Innsbruck and Vienna, Zieglauer became a professor of history at the Academy of Law of the Transylvanian city of Hermannstadt (today Sibiu, Romania), a position he left for Czernowitz in 1875.Footnote 26 During most of his life, Zieglauer focused on Austrian imperial history in general, and on the history of Transylvania in particular; he turned to the history of Bukovina in the last decade of his activity only.Footnote 27 The other key character was the Moravia-born Johann Polek (1843–1920). Following his studies in philology and history in Vienna, Polek was appointed custodian of the Library of the University in Czernowitz in 1877 and was soon promoted as its director. Polek was the first trained historian to focus on the history and ethnography of Bukovina.Footnote 28

From the earliest Galicia-based intellectuals to Zieglauer and Polek, these authors shared one important feature. They were newcomers to Bukovina, originating from German-speaking environments of the core provinces of the Habsburg Empire, and all had studied at the leading imperial universities (mostly in Vienna). It was the inner-imperial mobility that brought them to Bukovina, because until the late nineteenth century, the Habsburg administration could not rely on local human resources for administration functions.Footnote 29 This meant that when moving to Bukovina and writing about their new homeland, these authors consequently followed the intellectual assumptions they had learned in the center of the empire.

Because no Bukovina identity had existed before the Austrian annexation (because the region had not formed an administrative entity within Moldova), Austrian intellectuals invented a particular idea of “Bukovinism,” especially after the province received the rank of Crownland. Historians used historical, ethnographic, and cultural characters to distinguish the qualities of the province more fully from those of Vienna and the other Länder of the empire. However, proponents of the Bukovina idea could not rely on the default argumentation of contemporary historians working on the other provinces of the empire: the concept of “historical rights”—i.e., the legacy of feudal particularism was absent in Bukovina. Medieval Moldova did not function as an estate society, nor had a legislative diet existed there.Footnote 30 Because precise historic rights could not be used to characterize the region, the Moldovan past of the province was exploited to distinguish Bukovina from the other lands of the empire. The pre-1774 history of the province was therefore read within the wider context of Moldovan history. Wickenhauser, for example, published his studies under the title Molda or Contributions to the History of Moldova and Bukovina. However, Moldovan history was not credited with any particular cultural value. For example, Wickenhauser justified a study about the Orthodox monastery of Bogdana in the following way: “This church deserves attention not because of its beauty, neither its artistic construction, but because of its peculiarity and as a monument of ancient times.”Footnote 31

Being influenced by the Zeitgeist of German historicism, the mere legacy of Moldovan history was enough justification of Bukovina's difference from the other provinces of the empire, but it was not used for the purpose of demonstrating any further value. In fact, for Austrian authors, the Austrian occupation of Bukovina was the most important event in the history of the province. Interpreting 1774 as the zero hour and Bukovina as a tabula rasa, they made a clear-cut division between the time before and after the Austrian annexation. Hence, they framed Moldovan history as an exotic antiquity without any influence on present conditions. Austrian authors, without exception, quoted Splény's report in detail to demonstrate the backwardness of the province under Moldovan rule. They referred to the insufficient size of the population, to low literacy rates of not only the peasantry but also the nobility and clergy, and to the few and poor schools, lack of infrastructure, industry, trade, proper government, judiciary system, and police. The annexation of Bukovina to Austria was the only way to civilize this wild province. In the eyes of the Austrian commentators, Habsburg rule had worked in a splendid way, because it had improved the school system, increased the population, introduced industries and mining, constructed roads, and even contributed to the development of the Orthodox Church by establishing the diocese of Czernowitz and lodging important relics in Czernowitz.Footnote 32

In this process of cultivation, historians emphasized the years of the military government (1774–1786) in particular, seeing them as a period that had laid the critical foundations of the cultural development of Bukovina. In fact, Zieglauer devoted his work completely to this period, and Polek also paid particular attention to it. The very achievements of the military administration made them characterize the commanding generals of the province, Splény and Enzenberg, as wise statesmen and the first heroes in an Austrian pantheon of Bukovina.Footnote 33 Yet, the central figure of this project, as of the age, was Emperor Joseph II. It was Joseph who, still as heir, had convinced his reigning mother Queen Maria Theresa to occupy Bukovina. Later, as emperor, he had visited the province several times and took a special interest in its development. In the eyes of Austrian commentators a century later, these achievements had made Joseph the ultimate savior of Bukovina from the pre-annexation darkness. The fact that it was precisely Joseph who had ordered the dissolution of the Bukovina military administration and the incorporation of the region into Galicia did not modify this view, even though later Austrian commentators saw the unification of the two lands as a mistake by Vienna that had brought negative consequences to Bukovina.Footnote 34

As the turmoil of the Revolution of 1848 led to the establishment of the Crownland Bukovina, and the province experienced rapid modernization in the second half of the nineteenth century, the other hero of the Austrian historians became Emperor Francis Joseph. They praised the emperor particularly for separating Bukovina from Galicia and for promoting it to the rank of Crownland in 1849. By that act, Francis Joseph had not only respected the historical peculiarities of the province, but also ensured its rapid development. For all Austrian authors, the year 1875 was the most outstanding, when the crown of Austrian civilizational process, the University, and a monument to Austria in downtown Czernowitz were established, turning Bukovina from Semi-AsiaFootnote 35 [Halb Asien in the words of author Karl Emil Franzos] to the easternmost outpost of Western civilization: “Wherever we turn our eyes, we see the cheerful landmarks of a steadily improving culture. … [Czernowitz] became a cultural center of the Orient.”Footnote 36

Besides embodying the Austrian cultural mission in the East, the other contribution of the province to an Imperial Austrian idea was its multiculturalism. As the Habsburg imperial identity lacked an ethnic component, the diversity of the province was not regarded as a shortcoming. Indeed, Austrian authors proudly recalled the colorful society of the province and interpreted it as a miniature Austria. In a festive book commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Francis Joseph's rule, Eduard Fischer, a Jewish infantry officer, proudly claimed that “all these peoples, who speak the most different languages and are manifold in their morals, customs, and religions, consider themselves as one people, as Bukovinians. They are all united in unswerving love and unshaken loyalty to the monarch and the ancestral ruling dynasty; united in the patriotic feeling belonging to Austria and in the unlimited love and attachment to their narrow Heimat, the green Bukovina, an emerald in Austria's imperial crown.”Footnote 37

Similarly, poet and dilettante ethnographer Ludwig Adolf Simiginowicz-Staufe declared with pride that any Austrian citizen coming to Bukovina could meet his conationals.Footnote 38 Its ethnographic diversity also dominates the Bukovina volume of the imperial-sponsored book series, the so-called Kronprinzenwerk. Compared to the other volumes, the disproportionately large amount of space taken up by the ethnographic section is remarkable, depicting the province as a warehouse of diverse folklore but giving far less consideration to contemporary culture (such as architecture and arts).Footnote 39

In these ways, the Imperial Austrian writers detached Bukovina from its allegedly barbaric Moldovan oriental past and placed it firmly in the cultural, political, and civilizational space of the Habsburg Empire. The linguistic and confessional diversity of the province merely reinforced the need for its “Austrianization,” which would enable cultural progress to reach the greatest variety of peoples.

Turning Austrian Bukovina German

During the nineteenth century, the supranational Habsburg state idea was contested from several sides. Radical Magyar, Romanian, and Italian national protagonists dreamed of breaking up the monarchy and establishing their independent nation-states. Other national activists were less radical and increasingly combined their imperial loyalties with national content. German nationalism appeared in various forms, ranging from the radical anti-Habsburg ideas of Georg von Schönerer to pro-Habsburg German concepts.Footnote 40 This latter concept arrived in Bukovina in the late nineteenth century. When Ferdinand Zieglauer retired in 1900, he was succeeded by the first native historian of Bukovina, Raimund Friedrich Kaindl (1866–1930). Kaindl had studied at the University of Czernowitz, earned a doctorate with a thesis on Bohemian history (1891), and habilitated with a study on medieval Hungary (1893).Footnote 41 As a child, Kaindl was amazed by the extraordinary diversity of Bukovina's population, which provoked his interest in ethnography.Footnote 42 He devoted his first studies to the Ruthenians, Hutsuls, Lipovans, and Germans, and he later compiled a handbook of ethnography (which he saw as an auxiliary discipline of history).Footnote 43 Beginning in 1888, Kaindl was the first to write a comprehensive history of the province, and he also drafted a history of Czernowitz. These works followed the approach of the previous generation: the pre-1774 history of Bukovina was discussed mainly to explain its difference from the neighboring provinces, but Kaindl ascribed no particular value to the Moldovan period. In his eyes, Moldovan princes had been aggressive and despotic rulers, whose violence targeted their own subjects and prevented the development of high culture.Footnote 44 The low material and spiritual culture of pre-1774 Moldova was only replaced by the Habsburg administration's mission to bring civilization to Bukovina.Footnote 45 For example, the decision of the Habsburg military government to make Czernowitz the provincial capital in 1774 had allegedly saved the town “from the woeful fate of becoming a monastery village [of the nearby Bochutin monastery].”Footnote 46

Kaindl not only summarized the arguments of the previous generation, however, but also expanded it by adding a novel dimension. Neither Wickenhauser nor Zieglauer and Polek had put much emphasis on German influence in Bukovina. For them, the Habsburg monarchy had been the main actor. For example, in a short study on the first German immigrants to Bukovina, Polek had placed the German colonists in the broader framework of the population increase after the Habsburg occupation, but he did not ascribe any civilizing mission to the German settlers.Footnote 47 In contrast to that, Kaindl stressed the role of the German population and the German-type town rights exercised by medieval Suceava, and he explained the Gothic elements in Moldovan monastery architecture as the product of German influence.Footnote 48 Kaindl's history of Bukovina and Czernowitz still rested on the Habsburg narrative but marked a slight move to an ethnic German understanding of the province's past.

By publishing the first comprehensive history of Bukovina, Kaindl emerged as the doyen of historical Bukovina-research, and in 1901, he was appointed to the vacant chair of Austrian history at the University of Czernowitz. Within the next few years, his interest finally turned to the history of German people in Central Europe. Between 1907 and 1911, Kaindl published his magnum opus, the History of the Germans in the Carpathian Lands.Footnote 49 In contrast to the contemporary usage of Karpatenländer, which included Galicia and Bukovina only, Kaindl added Hungary, Croatia-Slavonia, and Romania in order to cover the German minorities South-East from German-speaking Cisleithania. Hence, Kaindl created a new spatial category, classifying Bukovina as a province in a German-dominated Southeastern Europe.

Kaindl not only developed this novel spatial concept, but also chose an unusual place to publish his work. Up until this point, the series German Provincial Histories had included titles about the history of provinces that either belonged to the Holy Roman Empire or had been under German rule (Livonia) at some point. However, the Karpatenländer had belonged neither to the Holy Roman Empire, nor had they been directly governed by Germans in the past. Furthermore, they did not even form a single historic province or state. The series editor Armin Tille explained the contradiction between the series' other volumes and Kaindl's work in the following terms: Kaindl “reported about German diligence and German cultural work,” and although this had not made these lands completely German, nonetheless the history of this failure helped to understand why German colonization had succeeded in Austria and Silesia. The history of the Carpathian Germans also contributed to an analysis of the German Volkscharacter, argued Tille.Footnote 50

“German diligence and German cultural work” were thus the keywords of Kaindl's work. The core of his argumentation relied on the German town rights and German urban population in the Carpathian lands. Through these German cities, recent cultural and economic achievements in Germany had been transmitted to the East, making Germans key actors in the Carpathian lands' prosperity in the high Middle Ages. After the decline of Hungary, Wallachia, and Moldova in their Ottoman period, another wave of German immigration in the eighteenth century had contributed to the repopulation of devastated Hungary and Bukovina and conceived economic and cultural revival there, as well in Galicia and the Romanian principalities. The Germans were thus portrayed as the carriers of civilization in the East. In framing the history in these terms, Kaindl replaced the former Habsburg view, which considered German colonists to be important agents of civilization, albeit in the framework and under the guidance of a Habsburg administration.

This change of paradigm was highly political. Kaindl deeply believed in a grossdeutsch [greater German] concept of German politics and supported the idea of a federal Germany. In his concept, Grossdeutschland had its primary zone of interest in Central and South East Europe, where the German colonies functioned as the main actors of German national interest. Hence, he viewed the formation of the centralized, Prussia-led German Empire and its engagement in maritime rivalry with England as the most unfortunate event in modern German history.Footnote 51 Ironically, Kaindl feared the increase of Pan-Germanism in both Austria and Germany, because he believed that Pan-German ideologists ignored the Germans of Bukovina and even declared that the secession of the predominantly Slavic provinces of Galicia and Bukovina from Austria would not have harmed German national interests. Kaindl's answer was to construct the concept of the German nation's Carpathian minority branch and to locate it within the history of the German nation:

My work shall inform the German people about a glorious chapter of its history, which covers not only the distribution but also the cultural work of the Germans in the Carpathian lands. From this work, it will be obvious that the Carpathian Germans are neither a broken branch nor a blown away leaf of the German oak. … I hope that the German people will understand by this book not to withdraw but to maintain and strengthen these forward outposts [the Carpathian German settlements], which bring it honor and benefit. … The Germans of all these lands form an organic unity; their history and their destiny are closely intertwined.”Footnote 52

He openly declared that his book was a tool in the protection work (Schutzarbeit) of the German national minority of the Carpathian lands. In July 1911, he initiated and organized the First Popular Assembly of Carpathian Germans in Czernowitz.Footnote 53 The last volume of his work was, in fact, dedicated to this meeting.Footnote 54 With the support of Hungarian German activists, Kaindl was elected chairman of the board of the Carpathian German Assemblies, which he organized three more times in 1912 in Ruma (Slavonia), in 1913 in Vienna, and in 1914 in Biała (Galicia). He also became the chairman of the Association of Christian Germans in Bukovina, the leading German nationalist organization in the province. Because the Imperial Austrian (Altösterreicher) Polek authored his last works in the early 1900s and never actually managed to write a comprehensive history of the province, it was the German nationalist vision of Kaindl that constituted the most powerful historical narrative of Bukovina by the eve of World War I. However, fearing Russian invasion, Kaindl left Czernowitz in 1915 and never returned to his hometown. He became a professor of Austrian history in Graz and devoted his final years to German nationalist Schutzarbeit and to challenging the Prussian-kleindeutsch vision of German history.

Bukovina into Romania

While the Habsburg narrative became charged by ethnic German content, a definitely anti-Austrian Romanian reading of Bukovina's past also appeared. Romanian historical writing in Bukovina started slightly before the arrival of Romanian nationalism. In his Bukovina in the Kingdom of Galicia, Teofil Bendella (1814–1875), an Orthodox theologian, rector of the Czernowitz seminary and later archbishop, easily combined his Moldovan-Bukovinan identity with Habsburg loyalty.Footnote 55 Bendella praised the Habsburg occupation of the province, which he claimed had saved it from further decay under Phanariote rule and increased the civilizational level of the Moldovans.Footnote 56 He argued that a majority of Bukovina's population were Moldovans who spoke “Moldovan, called also Romanian.”Footnote 57 To Bendella a “Moldovan” majority did not imply any political consequence; indeed, he too regarded the ethnic and religious diversity of Bukovina as a positive feature: “there is hardly any country of such a small territory, where so many peoples and religions live together in an undisturbed harmony.”Footnote 58

Both components of Bendella's narrative were increasingly challenged, thanks to the arrival of Romanian nationalism to Bukovina in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 59 Since the mid nineteenth century, Romania had witnessed a dynamic expansion of its territory and sovereignty, alongside a professionalization of historical scholarship and elaboration of the Romanian national master narrative about history and space.Footnote 60 As a consequence, starting in the 1870s, Romanian historiography in Romania started an aggressive campaign to provide historical arguments for Romanian nationalism. The celebration of the 100th anniversary of Bukovina's accession to Austria was seen in Romania as a provocation. Mihail Kogălniceanu (1817–1891), the leading Romanian nationalist authority on history in the mid nineteenth century, published a collection of documents under the title Ravishment of Bukovina. Its introduction credited Bukovina as the most integral, most beautiful, and historically most valuable part of Moldova (thus, Romania), as demonstrated by its various monasteries and the grave of Stephen the Great. Kogălniceanu challenged the Habsburg right to this land that he characterized as genuine Romanian land and its unspoiled Romanian soul to the Habsburg Empire, which had occupied Bukovina only for materialistic reasons to build a road between Galicia and Transylvania: “It needed a road, and this road could pass only through Moldova! Here is what inspires the idea of taking of Bucovina! A single road!”Footnote 61 Furthermore, he not only saw the justification, but also the manner of the Austrian occupation as immoral. Kogălniceanu claimed that Vienna had actually bribed the officials of the High Porte to renounce Bukovina; needless to say, according to him, no Moldovan had participated in this sinful event.Footnote 62

In the following decades, the concept of ravishment ruled Romanian historiography about Bukovina. The leading historian of fin-de-siècle Romania, Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol (1847–1920) drew a less emotional, nevertheless equally clear, picture about the immoral Austrian and Russian empires, which had ravished Bucovina by giving the Putna Monastery and the old capital Suceava to Austria.Footnote 63 Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940), the doyen of Romanian historiography from the turn of the century to the 1930s, not only reinforced this narrative of ravishment, but also agitated so vehemently that the Habsburg authorities banned him from entering Austrian territory.Footnote 64

The militant historiography produced in Romania easily found its way into Bukovina through the strong personal and political networks between Czernowitz, Iaşi, and Bucharest. Out of twenty-five founding members of the Romanian Literary Society (the predecessor of the Romanian Academy) in 1866, for example, three were from Bukovina, among them literary historian Ion Sbiera (1836–1916), who was appointed in 1875 to the chair of Romanian at the University of Czernowitz. The Bukovina-born historian Dimitrie Onciul (1856–1923) not only became a professor of medieval Romanian history in Bucharest, but was also elected member of the Academy and even served as president in 1920–1923.Footnote 65 Besides academic relations, Romanian nationalist ideas arrived in Bukovina by other channels, too. Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of Stephen the Great, grandiose celebrations took place in 1904 in Putna. There, Nicolae Iorga demanded the unification of all Romanians.Footnote 66 Two years later, several associations and approximately fifteen hundred visitors from Bukovina visited the General Romanian Exhibition in Bucharest, where a separate pavilion portrayed the contribution of the province to Romanian national history and culture.Footnote 67

The prenationalist narrative of Bendella was thus increasingly replaced by a Romanian master narrative. The first phase of the Romanian nationalist historiography in Bukovina lasted from the 1870s to the early 1900s. Its institutional framework was provided by the Orthodox Church, whose upper clergy was traditionally dominated by Romanian clergymen, although the majority of Bukovina's Orthodox population spoke Ruthenian.Footnote 68 The emerging Romanian national reading of Bukovina focused on the following topics: original population of the region; the medieval glory of Moldova; the cultural conditions of eighteenth century; Orthodox Church history, and cultural and demographic achievements of the Habsburg period.

The most symptomatic product of this period is a collection of essays published in the 1880s, authored by Orthodox theologians.Footnote 69 In contrast to the Habsburg narrative, the editor-priest Constantin Morariu (1854–1927) questioned the civilizational mission of Austria. He claimed that the cultural level of Moldovan Orthodoxy had been satisfactory before the Austrian occupation (the Orthodox monks “were true protagonists of culture,” 135), the shortcomings in education had been only caused by the Phanariote rulers (i.e., the Ottoman Empire), and the educational standards of the Habsburg Empire had in any case remained underdeveloped. Despite acknowledging some contributions of the Habsburg military administration, he argued that in Moldova culture and education had developed faster than in Austrian Bukovina, especially regarding Romanian primary education.Footnote 70 The condemnation of the Habsburg Empire was, however, not univocal, as Isidor Onciul (1834–1897), professor of theology in Czernowitz, praised Joseph II in the same book for the modernization of the administration and the property management of the Orthodox Church. Yet, for Onciul, the Austrian administration had provided only the framework but not the content. The main actor and creator of the modern Orthodox theological education was the church itself.Footnote 71

Still, the Romanian narrative of Bukovina could comply with Habsburg terms, as shown by the Kronprizenzenwerk. Dimitrie Onciul authored the chapter that discussed the pre-Austrian history of the province. Onciul had studied in Czernowitz and earned a doctorate in history from Vienna; at the time of the publication of the Kronprinzenwerk, he was already a professor of medieval Romanian history in Bucharest and member of the Romanian Academy.Footnote 72 Although he did not hesitate to praise medieval Moldovan rulers and their cultural achievements, he clearly welcomed the Austrian conquest of the province, because Bukovina needed to be saved from the Ottoman barbarity and from “amalgamation in the Russian Empire.”Footnote 73 The following chapters, written by Polek and Zieglauer, could then easily follow this logic and demonstrate the various blessings of Austrian rule.Footnote 74

Although Habsburg rule could be interpreted in various ways, the ethnographic diversity of the province was less welcome to Romanian nationalist authors. Only one single Romanian author followed in the footsteps of Bendella and the Habsburg narrative. He was Dimitrie Dan (1856–1927), an Orthodox priest and self-trained ethnographer, and a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy.Footnote 75 Dan interpreted the ethnographic diversity of Bukovina in a very similar manner to his Austrian contemporaries: in the presence of Armenians in late medieval Moldova, for example, he saw the Moldovans' tolerance.Footnote 76 For all other Romanian authors of the age, however, Bukovina was an age-old, purely Romanian land, whose purity had been spoiled by the Austrian conquest and by the consequent immigration of other peoples. Bukovina-based Romanian authors frequently denounced the immigration of the non-Romanian inhabitants to the province and aimed at proving its pure Romanian character since the Middle Ages. These polemic works had less academic than political value. Their historical argumentation did not rely on original research but on citing authors from Romania.Footnote 77

This situation changed on the eve of World War I with the second stage of Romanian historiography in Bukovina, marked by professionalization and embodied in the work of Ion Nistor (1876–1962), a professor of South East European history with a focus on Romanian history at the University of Czernowitz since 1912. A chair for Romanian language and literature had already been established in 1875, occupied by the renowned linguist Ion Sbiera, a founding member of the Romanian Academy. In 1908, he was followed by the Transylvania-born linguist and literary historian Sextil Puşcariu (1877–1948). Sbiera's and Puşcariu's research and teaching touched upon history superficially, but the growing number of Romanian students demanded more specific courses on Romanian history. Volodimir Milkovich (1869–1916), professor of Eastern European history between 1898 and World War I, tried to satisfy this need by delivering a lecture on Romanian history in 1908; however, Romanian students boycotted these lectures because Milkovich was a Galicia-born Ruthenian and read in German.Footnote 78

Finally, in 1912, Ion Nistor was appointed professor of South East European history with special emphasis on Romania. Nistor thus became the first Romanian professor of history at any Austrian university. He had studied history in Czernowitz and earned a doctorate and a habilitation from the University of Vienna. He co-founded the literary journal Junimea Literară and organized several Romanian nationalist events, including the Putna festivities in 1904. When appointed to the University, he did not hide his strong Romanian nationalism: his inaugurating lecture, for example, was delivered under the title “The Historical Importance of the Romanians and the Beginnings of Their State Organization.” Nistor chose this subject to justify his teaching focus on Romanians, because they were plainly the leading nationality in Southeastern Europe. This was because they had maintained their state existence throughout the Ottoman era, they had served as a refuge for Balkan culture, and they had provided a base for Balkan national awakenings. He also reviewed key elements of Romanian medieval culture, including its outstanding painted churches, its theological and historical writings, and its educational contributions, including the Academy of Putna.Footnote 79

Nistor's first important book discussed medieval Moldovan economic history, in which he praised its wealth, international importance, and the wise policies of its rulers. For him, the glory of medieval Moldova proved the genuine high culture of Romanians; hence, unlike Kaindl, he denied a role to any major foreign influence.Footnote 80 Nistor also claimed the high cultural achievements of the Romanian Orthodoxy in schooling and accused Austrian rule of undermining Romanian culture.Footnote 81 His main work of this period, Romanians and Ruthenians in Bucovina, was already published in 1915 in Bucharest, where he found refuge from the Russian invasion of Czernowitz.Footnote 82 The book argued that “from this real chaos of the peoples, only the Romanians stood out as representatives of the indigenous, native race and the bearers of old historical and cultural traditions of this once Moldovan province. All other peoples in Bukovina are later immigrants, who settled mostly after the Austrian conquest in the new province.”Footnote 83 Because Nistor could not completely deny the presence of Ruthenians in Bukovina (too many documents proved the opposite), he consciously undervalued their significance and claimed that medieval Ruthenians completely assimilated into Romanians without leaving any remarkable cultural contribution. Present-day Ruthenians were therefore offspring of the Galician immigrants of the eighteenth century, who arrived in Bukovina thanks to the encouragement of the Habsburg administration. In order to legitimize their political endeavors, claimed Nistor, Ukrainian intellectuals had even created a fake history, arguing for the significance of a Ruthenian population in Bukovina. For Nistor, these claims did not make any sense, because Romanians were “the only representatives of the historical and cultural traditions of this Crownland.”Footnote 84

On the Way to an Ukrainian Bukovina

Beside the German and Romanian national historiographies, the impetus for a Ukrainian national concept also appeared. Ukrainian intellectuals in Bukovina had to cope with their marginal political influence, the lack of proper institutions (a small number of secondary schools, underrepresentation in the upper clergy of the Orthodox Church and in the provincial assembly), and the ambiguity of the very content of their identity. In Galicia, Ruthenian intellectuals had various identity options, the most powerful being the Russophil and the Young Ruthenian-Ukrainian ones.Footnote 85 In Bukovina, the setting was even more complicated, as local Ruthenians mostly belonged to Orthodoxy (rather than to the Greek Catholic faith as in Galicia), and for that reason, Russophilia remained the dominant intellectual position.

The complexity of this identity-making process was well reflected in the academic output of Ruthenians in Bukovina. At the University of Czernowitz, there were three chairs where Ruthenian identity could potentially be forged. Two of them were occupied by renowned linguists: Omeljan Kaluzhniackyi (1845–1914, professor of Slavic philology) and Stepan Smal'-Stockyi (1859–1938, professor of Ruthenian). Both of them were born in Galicia and had studied in Lemberg and Vienna; Smal'-Stockyi also earned his doctorate and habilitation from the latter. The two represented the very different ends of a possible identity-scale: Kaluzhniackyi was a devoted Russophile with little respect for vernacular languages, whereas Smal'-Stockyi played a leading role in promoting Ukrainian nationalism in Austria, as an advocate for the advancement of the vernacular language. Neither of their works touched upon history, and neither located Bukovina's past in any particular vision.Footnote 86 Nor did Volodimir Milkovich, professor of Eastern European history at Czernowitz between 1898 and World War I. Milkovich also came from Galicia, had studied theology in Lemberg, history and Slavic philology in Czernowitz and Vienna, and had earned a doctoral degree in history from the latter.Footnote 87 He published on various topics of Eastern European history, including Poland, Bohemia, and Carniola, but as a conservative Russophile, he did not aim at forging a modern national Ukrainian identity. His political position earned him several problems. In 1890, his habilitation was rejected by the University of Lemberg because of an insufficient knowledge of the Polish language. Four years later, a department chair of history in the Ruthenian language was created in Lemberg. Despite having powerful supporters, Milkovich's application was rejected in favor of the young Mykhailo Hrusevskyi (1866–1934), whose Ruthenian political position fit the actual needs of the Galician government better.Footnote 88 Finally, in 1898 Milkovich was appointed professor of Eastern European history in Czernowitz. There he insisted on his Russophilia; in his teaching, he ignored Hrusevskyi, who meanwhile propagated a Ukrainian national master narrative, becoming the most vocal leader of Ukrainian nationalism in Galicia. Milkovich labeled Hrusevskyi's History of Ukraine-Rus an “empty desert” and “Potemkin village,” a nonsensical concept, based on poor methodology.Footnote 89 Milkovich was not only reluctant to join Ukrainian nationalism, but also contributed little to Bukovina-related research. Although he served as the director of the provincial archives, he published only some unimportant studies on the history of the province.

As proponents of a Ukrainian concept of Bukovina could not count on Milkovich, they turned to Mykhailo Hrusevskyi. Hrusevskyi's gigantic History of Ukraine-Rus, however, touched only sporadically on Bukovina, because its core concept was the synchronization of Galician and Cossack history. Bukovina did not gain a central role with this concept because of its small size and geographical position outside of Kievan Rus, medieval Halych, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.Footnote 90

As the only professional institution with the potential to locate the province in Ukrainian national identity was led by a nationally indifferent Russophile, Ukrainian national historiography could not be anchored in the institutions of Bukovina. Instead, some amateurs tried to do this job. Sidir Martynovich (1837–1898), for example, was a teacher of Ukrainian at the Realschule in Czernowitz, later a priest in the village of Orshivtsi and school inspector in Kitsman, without any formal training in history.Footnote 91 In his Historical Testimonies about the Oldest Rulers and Inhabitants of Bukovina and Moldova, he claimed the complete opposite of the Romanian arguments. Martynovich argued that Slavs had been the earliest inhabitants of Bukovina and that they had civilized Romanians. Here, the author referred to the Slavic written culture of Moldova until the seventeenth century.Footnote 92 Whereas Romanian nationalist authors increasingly denounced Austrian rule over Bukovina, conservative Ruthenians did the opposite and glorified the Habsburg period. For Daniel Verenka (1877-?), a secondary school teacher, the Austrian acquisition of the province not only opened economic and cultural development, but also “respected the religion, the nationality, the morals and customs of the people.”Footnote 93

This meant that a comprehensive narrative about Bukovina's place in the course of the Ukrainian national history did not fully emerge before the outbreak of World War I. Nonetheless, its impetus was definitely present, as almost all its required components appeared. A master narrative, defining the borders of Ukraine along ethnographic terms, was elaborated by Hrusevskyi in Lemberg. His ideas could easily travel to Bukovina via the Ukrainian student associations in Czernowitz and the Ruska Beseda, a semi-academic association in Bukovina. Ukrainian nationalism only lacked a well-trained professional in an institutional situation. They hoped that the successor of Milkovich would be a “proper” Ukrainian. Milkovich, however, remained at the University during the entire Habsburg period. The fragments of provincial history elaborated by local Ruthenian intellectuals still held to the Habsburg reading of history but added to it some elements of Ukrainian nationalism.

Jewish Politics and History

Alongside the emergence of Romanian, German, and Ukrainian nationalist politics, the Jewry of Bukovina increasingly became organized in ethnonationalistic terms as well. Beginning in the 1890s, Jewish politics became radicalized, and its initially liberal character gave more and more space to Zionist nationalism. The implementation of the Bukovina Compromise of 1909 crowned Jewish efforts for recognition as a nation in the Habsburg monarchy by acknowledging the Jews of Bukovina as a political nation. This agreement reformed the provincial electoral system and introduced nationally based electoral curias. Alongside (Christian) Germans, Romanians, Ruthenians and Poles, Jewish voters were also granted their own curia.Footnote 94

Unlike their Christian contemporaries, however, Jewish ideology-makers did not elaborate a historical vision to underpin their political goals with historicized argumentation. Despite the fact that the University of Czernowitz was attended by a large number of Jewish students, among professors of history no Jews were to be found. Neither did Jewish intellectuals outside the University contribute to historical research on Bukovina. Instead, only some vague and journalistic arguments were made about the autochthony of the Jews in the province.Footnote 95

Conclusion

“The unity of Austria relies on common education. … This common education, the relatedness of the ideas, created and made the political nationality of Austrianness great,” wrote Constantin Tomaszczuk, the first rector, about the foundation of University of Czernowitz.Footnote 96 Until the turn of the twentieth century, historians of the university were successful at creating a supranational Habsburg reading of Bukovina's history, thus satisfying the demands of “relatedness of ideas.” A common higher education in Bukovina was also guaranteed, because protagonists of the Austrian state idea controlled all-important academic institutional positions, from university chairs to the provincial learned society and its yearbook. Within the province, professional historiography maintained the Habsburg concept of history. A potential challenger of this concept could only be the Orthodox Church, but as a result of its inner Romanian-Ruthenian conflict, its identity construction was nationally ambiguous, and because of the low professional standards, it could not compete in professional historical argumentation.

Although this imperial provincialism proved appealing, it could not prevent the emergence of ethnocentric concepts, imported from outside of the province (Germany and German-speaking Austria, Romania, Galicia). Their construction followed slightly different patterns. The German nationalist Kaindl had to fight pan-German nationalists in Austria to claim full consideration for the Germans of Bukovina in the body of the German cultural nation. He therefore acknowledged the multicultural reality of Bukovina and focused on the particular civilizational achievements he ascribed to the German spirit. Romanian intellectuals followed a radically different path: they argued for the pure Romanian character of the province and thus constituted the only group that actually denied the diversity of Bukovina (and denounced Habsburg rule). Despite the fact that a complete Ukrainian master narrative did not emerge before 1914, its constitutive elements were present, and they suggest a mixture of the previous two strategies: on one hand, establishing an original or authentic medieval Slav predominance with cultural achievements, and, on the other hand, portraying the Habsburg Empire as a protective power against the Romanians. Despite these differences, these three narratives shared an important feature: for none of them was the supranational Habsburg state concept completely satisfying. The most vocal critics were some of the Romanian intellectuals who did not hide their irredentism and wished to join Romania. Kaindl and the Ukrainian intellectuals remained loyal to Habsburg Empire, which they considered a protective power for their national groups; nonetheless, they charged the supranational and imperial state idea with nationalist content. Hence, all imagined that their national territory (Romanian, South East European German and Ukrainian) included Bukovina, and each challenged the spatial concept of the Habsburg Empire.

The breakup of a common, provincial historical narrative into ethnocentric, national ideas was by no means a Bukovinian phenomenon. In the mid nineteenth century, several Crownlands of the Habsburg Empire witnessed a similar process among historians. Among them, probably the best known is František Palacký, whose famous History of Bohemia was commissioned by the Bohemian estates, and later became the foundation of a Czech national narrative and historiography. Even though Palacký himself remained loyal to Austria (as an advocate of Austro-Slavism), his work established an ethnic reading of history and space incompatible with supranational, imperial provincialism.Footnote 97

The decline of the non-national Austrian vision of Bukovina's history and the emergence of the nationally loaded concepts reinforces the arguments of Trude Maurer, who claims that the University of Czernowitz followed the same path as the University of Prague, just with a certain delay. The University of Prague was divided into German and Czech sections in 1882, and despite the fact that they shared some institutions (such as the library), in fact both students and professors abandoned relations with the other group.Footnote 98 The fact that Kaindl and Nistor were appointed to the history chairs, and the youth of the Francisco-Josephina demanded lectures on national history delivered by co-nationals, also hints that at least a certain part of the elite of Bukovina was on the way to ethnocentric social separation. That the University of Czernowitz, founded as the embodiment of the Habsburg state idea, played an increasing role in this process of separation, is perhaps the greatest irony of this history.

This tendency toward separation is reinforced by the evolution of politics in late Habsburg Bukovina, particularly by the 1909 electoral compromise, which divided the electorate of the province into five nationally organized bodies. This agreement was inspired by a similar reform in Moravia in 1905. The Moravian experience showed that dividing voters into strictly nationally organized curias undermined elastic and multiple identities and contributed to fixing national identity.Footnote 99 As such, the Moravian electoral compromise can be seen as a small, but definite step toward national separation. Politics in late Habsburg Bukovina might well have followed a similar trajectory.

Footnotes

1

Hungarian Scientific Research Fund—OTKA, proposal number: K 108670. Research in Bucharest, Vienna, and Berlin for this paper was generously funded by scholarships of the New Europe College, Bucharest, and the Marc Bloch Center, Berlin. Editor of the Austrian History Yearbook Pieter M. Judson gave valuable and detailed feedback, for which I am very grateful.

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44 The interpretation of Stephen III of Moldavia (1433–1504) is remarkably different. For Romanian authors, Stephen (called Stephen the Great and Holy), was the most important figure in medieval Moldovan history, an undisputable hero not only in Romanian history, but also to the entire Christian world. Kaindl, however, acknowledged only his military achievement; otherwise, Stephen was to him a ruthless, despotic, and barbaric ruler: “What concerns [his] peaceful activities, he hardly deserves the sobriquet Great.” Kaindl, Raimund Friedrich, Geschichte der Bukowina, 3 vols. (Czernowitz, 1895–1898)Google Scholar, 2:88.

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53 Pinwinkler, “Raimund Fridriech Kaindl,” 147.

54 In contrast to that, Kaindl dedicated his 1898 volume of History of Bukovina and his 1904 History of Czernowitz to Francis Joseph.

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58 Ibid., 1.

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62 Ibid., XXI.

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85 From around the mid nineteenth century, the Ruthenian Greek Catholic population of Eastern Galicia was targeted by competing nationalist movements. The most powerful concepts were Russophilia (claiming that Ruthenians were a branch of the Russian nation) and the so-called Young Ruthenians, who argued for the cultural unity of Ruthenians in Galicia and in Tsarist Russia. From the end of the nineteenth century, they more often called themselves Ukrainians. Despite being mostly Orthodox, the Ruthenians of Bukovina experienced the same nationalist movement. Hence, throughout this paper, the term “Ruthenian” refers to a person or group being nationally indifferent, whereas the term “Ukrainian” is reserved for Ukrainian nationalists.

86 Nowosiwsky, I. M. and Kolotylo, Basil, “Die Ukrainistik an der Universität Czernowitz,” in Alma Mater Francisco Josephina: Die deutschsprachige Nationalitäten-Universität in Czernowitz: Festschrift zum 100. Jahrestag ihrer Eröffnung 1875, ed. Wagner, Rudolf (Munich, 1975), 188–231 Google Scholar.

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