“Landscape, what invented me”: Identity Formation of Rose Ausländer under the Influence of Cultural-Historical Space of Bukovina

Abstract

The article deals with the influence of cultural, literary and historical context of Bukovyna on the identity formation of a German-speaking Jewish poet Rose Ausländer, who spent much of her life in exile in the United States and Germany, wrote that her true home was the word itself. Her poem “Mutterland” (“Motherland”) distinguishes between national identity and individual identity which is informed by language: “My fatherland is dead / they have buried it / in fire. / I live / in my motherland / word”. Happy childhood and youth and also war and ghetto in the home town have made a decisive influence on her identity and oeuvre. Among constant lyric motives of Rose Ausländer’s works during the period of her oeuvre, first of all after the painful experience of the Holocaust, started to appear those connected with irretrievable loss of the home land. Her longing after home land made her emblaze and idealize the prewar city. Analyzed have been in the given survey the following poems: “Niemand” (“Nobody”), “Mutterland” (“Motherland”), “Dorf Sonntag” (“Village Sunday”) ,“Bukowina II” (“Bukovyna II”), which are many-sided retrospective metaphor. In these poems, that recalls Ausländer's idyllic childhood and the multiple cultures and languages coexisting in this geographic area, poet captured the landscape and culture of Czernowitz and the Bukovina.