Читать книгу Diversity in the East-Central European Borderlands - Группа авторов - Страница 19

Under Austrian rule (1774–1918), the former small Moldovan town Cernăuţi developed as the capital Czernowitz of the crown-land Bukovina into a “little Vienna,” a melting pot of cultures, receiving Germans, Poles, Jews, Armenians, and others, with a remarkably high level of cultural, scientific, and commercial life. Of 87,000 inhabitants in 1910, 33% were Jews (47% in 1919), 17% Ukrainians, 17% Poles, 15% Romanians and 14% Germans. All five major nationalities had their own palaces of culture, open to visitors of all ethnicities, in the tolerant “Czernowitz spirit” (Geist von Czernowitz). German was a lingua franca and mother tongue of around 40%, including the Europe-oriented “emancipated” modern Jews, who had a crucial position in commercial, cultural, and scientific life.

The old town core around Springbrunnenplatz40 and Syna-gogengasse was an early center of Jewish culture, with the Old Synagogue, prayer houses, Jewish institutions and the ritual Mikwah bath at Türkenbrunnen. From this “lower town,” the settlement gradually grew uphill southwards in the “upper town” towards the Austria Platz, 105 meters higher than the Prut River and 70 meters higher than Springbrunnenplatz. Monumental buildings supported the metropolitan character.41 The largest complex was the residence of the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Austria and Dalmatia.42 Stately hotels, commercial and office buildings lined the popular corso Herrengasse and other main streets. This rapid development and strong belief in the future was interrupted by World War I and the collapse of the Habsburg empire. The base of Czernowitz now disappeared, and the city did not fit into the new postwar pattern of European national states.

From 1918, under Romanian rule, Romanian was the only official language. Romanian street names and memorials replaced Austrian ones, but still, much of the “Czernowitz spirit” survived. Modern times were reflected in architecture, city growth, and aviation. The Jewish theater Scala from 1920 was a precursor of modernist architecture, which in the 1930s developed in parallel with the Romanian national romantic Brâncoveanu style.43 In 1930 the city had 111,000 inhabitants.44

Figure 2.4. Chernivtsi. Streets where inhabitants or property owners in 1912, 1936, or 1940 are registered, based on archival material. Map by the author, based on background map from the 1930s: Planul municipiului Cernăuţi. Comp. De Ing. Cad. I. Lerch. Exec. De C. Arh. I. Tomorug. Provided by Ihor Piddubnyi from the City Museum in Chernivtsi.

Figure 2.5. Chernivtsi. Buildings and property owners at Springbrunnengasse (interwar Strada Fântanei, present-day Vulytsya Petra Sahaydachnoho) and Synagogengasse (interwar Strada Wilson, later Vulytsya Henri Barbusse’a, now again Vulytsya Synahohy) in 1912 in the “Lower Town.” Most buildings are preserved. This was within the ghetto area in 1941–42. Map by the author, based on archival materials from the municipal archive in Chernivtsi, gathered by Mykola Kuschnir, participant in the Memory of Vanished Population Groups research project.

Most inhabitants in the old, “lower” town were Jews, many of them merchants, shopkeepers, tailors, furriers, carpenters, other craftsmen, and different kinds of teachers and clerks. In the upper parts of the city there lived many lawyers, physicians, artists, university professors, and middle-sized entrepreneurs, the largest group Jewish. Successively, more Romanians settled in the city, but still many Germans lived in the western suburban hills, cultivating fruits and wine.45