Returning Chernivtsi to the Cultural Map of Europe: The Meridian Czernowitz International Poetry Festival

Abstract

This article is part of the special cluster titled Bukovina and Bukovinians after the Second World War: (Re)shaping and (re)thinking a region after genocide and ‘ethnic unmixing’, guest edited by Gaëlle Fisher and Maren Röger. Drawing on tropes, stories, and symbols emanating from lost layers of urban cultural diversity has been an important resource in post-socialist city branding in many cities in Eastern and Central Europe that saw significant ethno-demographic changes in connection with World War II. In Chernivtsi, this is usually framed by narratives emphasizing tolerance, cultural diversity, and Europeanness, notions that are prominent in myths about the city in German-speaking Central Europe. A common strategy here, found in municipal city branding and in commercial efforts to draw on the multiethnic past in restaurants and cafés, is to deemphasize difficult questions about what actually happened to the celebrated cultural diversity and soften or ignore the temporal break. The article analyses how the International Poetry Festival Meridian Czernowitz, that has taken place in Chernivtsi since 2010, works with the city’s culturally diverse past and its literary dimensions, drawing on tropes from both local multiculturalist narratives and on the Bukowina-Mythos popularised by intellectuals from German-speaking countries. Although the festival is not a venue for working through traumas, locating events in symbolically charged places such as the Jewish cemetery and highlighting Holocaust themes in poetry readings opens up for difficult questions where the lost cultural diversity might become something more than only a resource.

Diversity in the East-Central European Borderlands

“…Much of the more recent academic literature on the case of Bukovina explores the last decade's memorial discourses, practices, and disputes from a contemporary standpoint and focuses on the situation on the ground, especially in the urban space of Ukrainian Chernivtsi (see Frunchak 2010b;Heymann 2011;Koziura 2014Koziura , 2019Wanner 2016;Bernsand 2019). 3 However, by considering external agents involved in the resurrection and reinvention of Bukovina as a whole in the first fifteen years after 1989 and the narratives developed outside of the region it is possible to shed new light on a key, extended historical moment.…”