Abstract
In my interpretation, starting with Helmut Böttiger’s topobiographical formula Orte Paul Celans (1996), I am following not only the most famous poet of Chernivtsi, but also other important writers of the capital of Bukovina, such as: Rose Ausländer, Klara Blum, Olga Kobylanska, Dusza Czara-Rosenkranz, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, Else Keren, Immanuel Weissglas, Alfred Margul-Sperber, Alfred Gong, Isaac Schreyer, Georg Drozdowski, Moses Rosenkranz, David Goldfeld, Alfred Kittner, Jona Gruber, Manfred Winkler. Other supporting concepts will probably prove to be: the formula of “the search for Jewish identity in German-language poetry of Bukovina”, created by Peter Rychlo (in particular the special incorporations of the myths of Jerusalem and Atlantis in the poetry of Chernivtsi); the status of the German language as a creative and also deadly oxymoron Muttersprache/Mördersprache (mothers language / murderers’ language) in the poetry of the Jews sentenced to extermination; the reflections about the incarnation, the liveliness and the rapid negation of the myth of Austria felix (Ewa Wiegandt, Maria Kłańska); the Heiddeger’s trace, resulted from the reading of Friedrich Hölderlin and finally Tadeusz Sławek’s etymological-nomadic reflections about ORT/WORT. As a literary phenomenon and especially as a poetic one, Chernivtsi can become an exemplification of the widely understood geopoetics, but its localization on the borderland of Ukraine, Romania and Moldova and its multiculturalism (several religions, several alphabets and languages, several ethnical groups), which is a consequence of the long-lasting and complicated history of the region, make this city something far more interesting. In Chernivtsi, poetry became a very expressive synecdoche of the culture, figure of self-identification of a certain urban culture.