Resettlers and Survivors

Located on the border of present-day Romania and Ukraine, the historical region of Bukovina was the site of widespread displacement and violence as it passed from Romanian to Soviet hands and back again during World War II. This study focuses on two groups of “Bukovinians”—ethnic Germans and German-speaking Jews—as they navigated dramatically changed political and social circumstances in and after 1945. Through comparisons of the narratives and self-conceptions of these groups, Resettlers and Survivors gives a nuanced account of how they dealt with the difficult legacies of World War II, while exploring Bukovina’s significance for them as both a geographical location and a “place of memory.”

Gaëlle Fisher is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, Germany. She holds a doctorate in history from University College London and has published articles in a range of journals, including German History, The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, and East European Politics and Societies.

“This book makes a significant contribution to the field of German-Jewish history after the Shoah. Fisher's focus on Germans and Jews from a particular Central European region proves fruitful for studying the negotiation of postwar belonging in both a comparative and an entangled perspective…This book gives an important impulse to think further about the continuous entanglement of German and Jewish histories from a historical Central European vantage point, without endorsing all-too-jubilant rediscoveries of ‘German-Jewish symbiosis.’" • AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies

“The strength of Fisher’s book lies in her detailed and insightful analysis of how Jewish and Christian German speakers from Bukovina imagined their past and present German identities. Studying the two groups in tandem illuminates not only their respective worlds but also the very contested meaning of identity, homeland, and belonging.” • Histoire Sociale/Social History

“By establishing a new approach for Bukovina research, Resettlers and Survivors makes the reverberations of World War II visible for Europe as a whole and particularly for Bukovina Germans and Jews. It offers answers to how and why their experiences effected new conceptualizations of the past, of identity, and of home.” • Markus Winkler, LMU Munich

“Gaëlle Fisher manages, on the one hand, to provide insight into a lesser-known episode in the history of World War II. At the same time, through her own interpretation of the historical record, she illustrates through this special case a theoretical issue relevant to the concepts essential for a sociopolitical understanding of modernity and postmodernity: identity, alterity, difference, space, place, and memory.” • Andrei Corbea-Hoişie, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iași, Romania