Austrian and Jewish German-Speaking Ukrainophiles from the Spring of Nations to the Holocaust: the Problem of European Identity

Author

Yudkin-Ripun Ihor

a Doctor of Art Studies, a Corresponding Member of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, a chief research fellow of the Screen, Stage Arts and Culturology Department of M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine).

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4616-302X

Austrian and Jewish German-Speaking Ukrainophiles
from the Spring of Nations to the Holocaust: the Problem of European Identity

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of the so-called imagology concerning the formation of a stranger’s image. In particular, in the German-speaking area, the image of Ukraine as the European Eastern frontier dates back to the epoch of Enlightenment, with the paragon being a Christian Fürchtegott Gellert's novel (1715–1769) from 1747 about the fate of the Swedish warriors exiled to Siberia. One of the novel’s peculiarities is that the heroes of the narration include a Polish Jew as an intermediary between Europe and the Siberian world. The next writer that has contributed to the German image of Ukraine was Friedrich Martin von Bodenstedt (1819–1892), who compiled the collection of the Ukrainian folklore Poetical Ukraine (1845). Within the Austro-Hungarian state, we can find especially favourable conditions for the development of images of Ukraine as evidenced, in the second half of the XIXth century, by such personalities as Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895) and Karl Emil Franzos (1848–1904). Of importance is the circumstance that the Halychyna Ukrainians and Jews are considered as the representatives of ethnic groups with such fates that are to be compared. In the XXth century, there are at least four persons worth mentioning. First of all, it is Wilhelm Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen (of the Emperor’s House, 1895–1948), who travelled incognito across the Carpathian lands and wrote verses in Ukrainian under the pseudonym Vasyl Vyshyvanyi. Another representative was Juliana Schneider (1860–1947), who belonged to the circle of Ivan Franko’s acquaintances and has entered the Ukrainian literature with the name Uliana Kravchenko. It was Joseph Roth (1894–1939) who essentially contributed to the promotion of images of Ukraine in Europe constantly describing Halychyna Ukrainians. It is due to his stories that the Europeans have got the opportunity of becoming acquainted with the particulars of the contemporary Ukrainian daily life in the 1920s. Jona Gruber (1908–1980) became a German-speaking Ukrainian writer and contributed to German translations of Lesia Ukrainka works.

Keywords

imagology, a foreigner’s image, identification, European integration, frontier.

References

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