In 1902, a new political alliance was born in the Viennese apartment of Koko von Wassilko. A native of Bukovina, Austria-Hungary's easternmost crown land, Wassilko came from a family of Romanian landowners but entered politics as a representative of the region's Ukrainian population. By 1902, he had become one of Bukovina's most prominent Ukrainian politicians—although he had to hire tutors to teach him the Ukrainian language. The first to join Wassilko was Aurel Onciul, from a middle-class Romanian family, and the founder of a Romanian nationalist association that would later evolve into the Romanian Democratic Party in Bukovina. A fervent anti-Semite, Onciul was nonetheless profoundly loyal to the Habsburg monarchy, believing it reflected the “natural instinct” of unification “for defense purposes” shared by “all peoples of the Danube.”Footnote 1 Wassilko and Onciul's alliance expanded to include Wassilko's friend Benno Straucher, a German-Jewish liberal turned Jewish nationalist, as well as a Polish-Armenian and a German representative. This odd alliance between a Jewish nationalist, a Romanian anti-Semite, and a Ukrainian representative whose origins were Romanian fractured after its members secured seats in Bukovina's local parliament in 1904. But the three men reunited in 1909 to support the Bukovinan Compromise, an electoral reform that sought to guarantee separate political representation to each of the region's national groups. Nevertheless, Austria-Hungary's collapse in 1918 caught these men off guard.
Recent scholarship on Central Europe's transition from empires to nation-states has emphasized continuities across the 1918 divide. Historians have shown how post-imperial states repurposed imperial institutions, legal frameworks, and personnel, rarely breaking with the past as radically as nationalist rhetoric suggested.Footnote 2 Pragmatic considerations, we now know, often outweighed ideological commitments, forcing successor states to compromise with the imperial past.Footnote 3 Some scholars have even likened successor states to “miniature empires.”Footnote 4 Other scholars have defined Central Europe as a testing ground for post-imperial sovereignty—a process that later played out globally in the post-1945 decolonization process.Footnote 5 Many of these studies examine the transition process from a local and biographical perspective. Dominique Kirchner-Reill, for instance, has shown how Fiume's residents leveraged their experiences of Habsburg rule to promote local interests after the empire's collapse, perpetuating “imperial frameworks and mindsets.”Footnote 6 Similarly, Iryna Vushko has traced the trajectories of Habsburg administrators who survived the collapse of empire and continued their careers by repurposing their bureaucratic expertise in new national settings.Footnote 7
The three men at the center of our story also weathered imperial collapse. Their political capital remained valuable to the successor states and nations they represented. In this sense, their story mirrors recent narratives highlighting institutional continuities in Central and Eastern Europe across the 1918 divide. Yet unlike most of Vushko's bureaucrats and administrators, our protagonists were nationalists who helped bring the post-imperial order into being only to find themselves alienated, sidelined, or undone by it. Bukovina's Onciul, Wassilko, and Straucher all championed the nationalization of politics under imperial rule. After 1918, their vision of pragmatic cross-national cooperation appeared increasingly out of step with the exclusivist forms of nationalism that gained ascendancy in Greater Romania, of which Bukovina was now a part. Some were pushed aside by younger co-nationals who deemed their politics insufficiently radical; others withdrew in disillusionment, finding the new order inhospitable. Onciul, the representative of a winning nationality, was the most disillusioned of the three. He faced imprisonment at the hands of his co-nationals, his political career in ruins and his life's work seemingly in vain. Wassilko clashed with fellow Ukrainian nationalists who saw him as insufficiently committed to the cause. Straucher managed to secure a seat in the Romanian parliament by allying with ruling Romanian parties. However, he was also increasingly marginalized, especially by younger Jewish nationalists, who dismissed him as a relic of a bygone era.Footnote 8
In other words, these three men's fates highlight not so much the endurance of administrative imperial structures into the post-imperial period, as the growing obsolescence of nationalist politicians who had once thrived within those structures. The postwar lives of Onciul, Straucher, and Wassilko were marked not primarily by continuity, but by tragedy and paradox. All three politicians had actively contributed to Central Europe's nationalization under imperial rule, only to find themselves sidelined by the very process they had set into motion. Taken together, their stories reveal the profound differences between prewar and postwar nationalisms in Central Europe.
Together and Apart through Compromise
Bukovina was one of Austria-Hungary's most ethnically and linguistically diverse territories, often likened to a miniature Danube monarchy. The largest ethnolinguistic groups in the province were Romanians, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), Poles, Jews, and Germans.Footnote 9 Incorporated into Austria in 1775 after a Russo-Turkish war, Bukovina was initially placed under military administration, then absorbed into Galicia as an administrative subdivision (Kreis).Footnote 10 Following several constitutional reforms, the province gained administrative autonomy in 1860, and its first parliament (Landtag) convened in 1861.Footnote 11 Initially the Landtag consisted of thirty delegates, chosen based on a curial system that reflected Bukovina's socioeconomic hierarchy rather than its ethnic composition. Ten seats were set aside for great landowners, seven for cities and the chamber of commerce, twelve for rural communities and small landowners, and one for the Orthodox (Greek-Oriental) metropolitan.Footnote 12 This electoral system ensured that the Romanians, who were dominant among landowners, constituted the largest number of delegates. Ruthenians, meanwhile, remained almost unrepresentedFootnote 13—even though the 1880 census showed that they had become more numerous than the Romanians.Footnote 14 Jews comprised nearly one-third of Czernowitz's population and were represented in the Landtag's curias not as a distinct national group, but as landowners, merchants, and townspeople.Footnote 15
The 1873 economic recession shattered the Austrian Liberal party's dominance, paving the way for a new generation of politicians who capitalized on the crisis to challenge the liberal hegemony previously maintained through the curial electoral system. Their “politics in a new key”Footnote 16 gained traction from electoral reforms that expanded the franchise and mobilized social groups previously excluded from politics.Footnote 17 The 1896 electoral reform introduced a fifth curia consisting of all male citizens over the age of twenty-four. A second reform, instituted in 1907, introduced universal male suffrage, replacing the curial system entirely. No longer in the hands of conservative elites, national politics was increasingly championed by “progressives” claiming to represent the interests of the lower-middle classes and peasantry.Footnote 18 Starting in the 1880s, when the Austrian census began recording language use, national politics in the empire was increasingly organized “around linguistic difference.”Footnote 19 National activists, teachers, and civil servants promoted education in national languages,Footnote 20 leading to a proliferation of schools and growing competition over so-called “nationally indifferent” children.Footnote 21
While language conflicts in Bohemia and Moravia between Czechs and Germans escalated into a full-blown political crisis in the 1870s, nationalization was still in its early stages in Bukovina. It was not until 1892 that a unified national Romanian party emerged, reflecting concerns over the growing Ruthenian presence in the province.Footnote 22 Even then, national politics was still dominated by landowning and religious elites. Only in the early twentieth century did a new generation of Bukovinan politicians begin to advocate for the democratization and nationalization of provincial politics. In 1900, Romanian lawyer Onciul founded the Rural Democratic Party (Partidul Țărănesc Democrat), promoting agrarian reforms and peasants’ and teachers’ rights.Footnote 23 In his periodical Voința Poporului, Onciul called for various social reforms, some more radical than others—including the demand that the Orthodox Church lease its land to small farmers. While championing peasants’ interests, Onciul declared himself prepared to put “national claims” on the back burner. As he explained in Voința Poporului, “the peasants’ needs are not national; they are neither Ruthenian nor Moldavian. Needs are needs, and you combat them together with whomever you can. This is how the sly boyars do it. They would cozy up to the devil if this would help them keep the stove burning.”Footnote 24 To displace the “sly boyars,” Onciul was ready to take a page from their book and “cozy up” to politicians from other national camps who shared his belief that electoral reform and democratization were desirable and necessary.
Onciul found his first ally in Nikolai von Wassilko, who then brought Benno Straucher into the alliance. They were later joined by Arthur Skedl, the leader of German liberals in Bukovina, who hoped that working alongside other national groups would help Germans break out of their political isolation. The fifth alliance member was an Armeno-Polish representative, Stefan Stefanowicz, who, like the others, championed reform. The alliance, called the Freisinniger Verband or Progressive Union, was more a matter of political convenience than an expression of ideological unity. For its participants, being progressive did not mean abandoning their nationalist commitments—no matter what the Union's conservative rivals argued. Wassilko scolded the Union's critics in Bukovina's Diet: “Do you think that Dr. Aurel Onciul… is a fiber less Romanian than any of you?” He continued, defending his colleagues: “Do you think that [Ruthenian] Mr.Stotsky and Mr. Pihuliak, these two farmers’ sons, have given up even a bit of their national program only for Onciul's sake? That they feel even a bit less national? Do you think that Dr. Benno Straucher would tolerate even the slightest insult or the slightest bad thought against the Jews in order to have the honor of being part of our association? Nothing, gentlemen, have we given up, but we are connected on the basis of Freisinn (progressivism).”Footnote 25
Wassilko was right: the Alliance's members remained nationalists, temporarily setting aside national conflicts to push through the electoral reforms they believed essential to revitalizing the province's political life. In the July 1904 elections to the Landtag, the Progressive Union secured seats in the provincial Diet, though not enough to amend the provincial constitution. Nevertheless, the Union successfully pushed through key reforms, such as establishing a regional state bank and increasing teacher salaries. But by May 1905, the former allies had turned on each other,Footnote 26 competing for leadership positions within the Orthodox Church and the new provincial bank.Footnote 27 Wassilko mobilized his newspaper, Bukowinaer Post, against Onciul, launching what Onciul's press condemned as a “veritable libel campaign.”Footnote 28 Wassilko, in turn, was accused of using his official positions for personal gain. Despite its short-lived existence, the Progressive Union played a key role in accelerating Bukovina's national segregation. It relied on multiethnic cooperation to entrench rather than transcend national differences, and its founders were adamant that “each ethnic club should act independently and not get mixed up in the affairs of another nationality.”Footnote 29 When the Union split, Onciul assured his followers that his conflict with Wassilko and Straucher was a logical continuation of his old politics, which had “always served the nationality principle and autonomy” through “whatever tactical alliances were necessary.”Footnote 30
The push for national segregation culminated in an effort to restructure Bukovina's electoral system based on nationality. In 1908, Onciul was summoned by Bukovina's governor, Freiherr von Bleyleben (a Moravian by origin), to form a special commission on electoral reform.Footnote 31 The commission, which also included Wassilko, proposed the Moravian Compromise as a model for reforming the electoral process in Bukovina.Footnote 32 A constitutional experiment at the regional level, the Compromise was meant to ensure that Moravia's Czechs and Germans were granted proportional representation in the local Diet, schools, and administration. Local authorities assigned voters to either the German or Czech electoral groups; voters were allowed to vote only in their own curia. Individuals could dispute their assignment, but the municipal authorities had the final say. Onciul, a former civil servant in Moravia, looked to the Moravian Compromise as a model for electoral reform in Bukovina. Unlike Moravia, however, Bukovina had at least five major national groups. The commission thus proposed five separate electoral lists: Romanian, Ruthenian, German, Polish, and Jewish. This new system was designed to ensure that members of each national group, no matter where they resided in Bukovina, could elect their own representatives. The proposed Compromise's overarching goal was to guarantee the different national groups proportional representation, so that the number of seats each group secured in the local Diet reflected its share of the population.
The Viennese authorities approved the plan with only one caveat: that Bukovinan Jews should not be granted a separate electoral list, but be included in the German list.Footnote 33 Officials insisted that recognizing Jews as a distinct national group would reverse decades of Jewish acculturation in the monarchy and pave the way for anti-Jewish discrimination. Moreover, they feared that granting Jews separate electoral mandates would negatively impact Germans since Jews bolstered German numbers in the census.Footnote 34 Although Jews were officially registered within the German electoral college, in practice, representatives of Bukovina's nationalities made informal arrangements to ensure a certain number of mandates for Jewish candidates. The new system, granting Jews a few separate electoral districts, allowed them to win ten seats in the Landtag in the elections of 1911. It also led to an increased presence for Ruthenians, who now won seventeen mandates.Footnote 35 As a result, as historian Gerald Stourzh noted, Bukovina became the only province in the monarchy where Jews were de facto recognized as a nationality.Footnote 36 However, Bukovina's extraordinary ethnic diversity made the practicalities difficult.Footnote 37 To help officials keep track of all the different constituencies, electoral rolls were now color-coded by nationality—light blue for Ruthenians, bright red for Romanians, orange-yellow for Poles, white for Germans (including Jews), and violet for large landholders.Footnote 38 Unlike the Moravian Compromise, which replaced the previous curial system of representation almost completely with national curias (with the exception of the great landowners’ curia), the Bukovinan Compromise blended the old and the new into a new systemFootnote 39 based on national voting lists (cadasters) and socioeconomic curias: a general curia comprised of voters paying 2 Gulden (or less) in taxes (with a total of 18 seats: 6 Ruthenian, 6 Romanian, 3 German, 2 Jewish, 1 Polish); a communities curia consisting of voters paying more than two gulden (with 28 seats: 10 Ruthenian, 10 Romanian, 4 Jewish, 3 German, 1 Polish); and a third curia representing special interests (virilists, chamber of commerce, great estates—with a total of 17 seats).Footnote 40 The new system created a deceptive appearance of unity within national groups, assuming that each nationality voted and thought as one.
The outbreak of the First World War curtailed this experiment in managing Bukovina's nationality question.Footnote 41 Successive Austrian and Russian occupations sharpened ethnic tensions in Bukovina, as both sets of authorities targeted some ethnic groups as collaborators while privileging others.Footnote 42 By 1918, total warfare led to the collapse of the Austrian and Russian empires, unleashing a period of revolution, counter-revolution, and civil wars in which states appeared and disappeared.Footnote 43 Ideas about postwar governance varied widely, and even among those who championed national self-determination, there was no clear consensus on what the new political order should look like. Elites from all corners of Europe's crumbling empires advanced their own visions for reform, resulting in a proliferation of competing proposals. In Bessarabia, on the periphery of the former Russian empire, regional elites who had formed a provisional legislative council during the revolutions of 1917 proposed establishing autonomy for Bessarabia within a reformed, federalized Russia.Footnote 44 In the territory of Austria-Hungary, a variety of national councils emerged—some formed in Vienna by representatives of various historic provinces and nationalities, while others took shape far from the capital, led by regional elites moving into the power vacuum to advance their own visions of reform. In Bukovina, multiple factions championing national determination appeared, though they differed on what it should entail. Some Bukovinan Romanian representatives in Vienna advocated for a unified, autonomous all-Romanian territory under Austrian rule, while a separate National Council of Romanians formed locally, independent of Romanian elites in Vienna, and began demanding unification with Romania. Ultimately, Bukovina's fate was determined by those who acted fastest. To everyone's surprise, the province fell into Romanian hands.
Aurel Onciul: the Traitor
Onciul was little known until 1902, when he joined the Progressive Alliance. As a young man, he had left Bukovina to study law in Vienna, later working as a civil servant and bank employee in the Moravian city of Brünn (today Brno, in the Czech Republic).Footnote 45 Though immersed in Moravian politics, he kept an eye on political developments in Bukovina. In 1902, he launched a newspaper in Bukovina called Voința Poporului (The People's Will); while in Brünn, he published another Romanian-language periodical, Privitorul (The Observer). The following year, he founded a new political association, Unirea (The Unification), with the Romanian politician Florea Lupu. The association provided the nucleus for what would later become the Romanian Democratic Party. Determined to break the conservatives’ hold on Bukovinan politics, Onciul mobilized the party to bring lower-middle classes and peasants into the political process. The party's goal was reform—electoral, agricultural, and educational.Footnote 46 To push through these wide-ranging reforms, Onciul realized he needed the support of like-minded politicians such as Nikolai von Wassilko and Benno Straucher. As soon as they secured seats in the provincial parliament, the three politicians began advocating for reorganizing primary schools along national lines and dividing the teachers’ institute in Bukovina's capital Czernowitz into separate national sections.Footnote 47
After the alliance fractured, Onciul assured his followers that under the new circumstances, the idea of “progress [Freisinn] has become an anachronism.” Footnote 48 Instead, he turned his attention to bridging divisions within the Romanian national camp in Bukovina, insisting that Romanians were “too small, weak, and neglected to afford the luxury of internecine warfare.”Footnote 49 However, national unity was elusive, and once again Onciul had to go outside his national group to achieve it. This time, he allied himself with other Christian politicians who shared his commitment to breaking the so-called Jewish monopoly on Bukovina's economy. Anti-Semitism was, he insisted, the new progressivism.Footnote 50 Initially, progressivism had been about expanding the franchise—reforming elections to empower the lower-middle classes, particularly teachers and peasants, whom Onciul saw as his primary constituency. Once the traditional elites—landowners and clergy—lost power with the introduction of universal suffrage, progressivism took on a different meaning. To be progressive now, Onciul argued, meant displacing or dismantling the influence of Jewish economic elites, whom he blamed for the backwardness and impoverishment of Christian peasants in Bukovina.
With Romanians in the leading role, Onciul hoped to form a Christian alliance modeled on Karl Lueger's Christian Social party, the most energetic anti-liberal movement in turn-of-the-century Austria. Its program, Onciul thought, could offer a “platform for the unification of conservatives and democrats” within a greater national Romanian party. Mixing “racial hatred” and “economic protest,”Footnote 51 Christian Social members combined mass political mobilization and “older social traditions,” and appealed primarily to artisans, teachers, and clergy.Footnote 52 Onciul sent his associate Florea Lupul to Vienna to take notes on Lueger's party in preparation for implementing a similar program in Bukovina.
There was already a Christian Social association in Bukovina. Formed in 1897, it was a national defense association comprised mainly of German university students and professors who feared that Germans in Austria were on the brink of extinction.Footnote 53 Onciul had a different idea, calling for an alliance of Christian nationalities—mainly Germans and Romanians, but also Ruthenians—whom he saw as “peasant people,” to form a “spiritual movement of elements subjugated economically and politically.”Footnote 54 Bukovina, he explained “is the most favorable terrain for anti-Semitic, Christian Social propaganda without national coloring.”Footnote 55 In April 1908, he reported that “a few months ago a purely anti-Semitic Christian Social movement started in the suburbs of Cernăuți,” bringing together representatives of all nationalities in Bukovina.Footnote 56 Above all, he believed Christian Socialism would help Romanians face their two most dangerous enemies: “Slavs and Jews”—the former “threatening to wipe them out as a nation,” while the latter condemned them to “economic slavery.”Footnote 57 His suggestions were met with resistance in Vienna, where the Christian Social party claimed an alliance with Romanians was “inopportune at the moment” as their movement had a “purely German character.”Footnote 58 Nevertheless, Onciul continued to try to unite Bukovina's Romanians into one party, managing this feat only briefly in 1908 by conceding the party's leadership position to Iancu Flondor, an old political rival. The party only survived until 1910, however, finally breaking down under the weight of mounting personal disagreements.
The outbreak of the First World War thus found Romanians in Bukovina disunited. A small nationalist faction defected to the Old Kingdom, where they contributed to wartime propaganda efforts against the Central Powers.Footnote 59 Most Romanian politicians, including Onciul, stayed behind. As Bukovina's foremost Romanian nationalist, Onciul resented that Regat (Old Kingdom) Romanians presumed to speak on behalf of their co-nationals in Austria.Footnote 60 As early as 1906, he had denounced “Dako-Romanism” and Romanian irredentism as “absurd lies, as the Romanian nation, situated in Russia's path to Constantinople is interested more than any other people in Europe in the existence of a strong Austria.”Footnote 61 Like many other nationalists of his time, Onciul had empire built into his “mental infrastructure.”Footnote 62 When the war broke out, he mobilized volunteer units to support Austria's war effort and argued that Romania should join the Central Powers. He was absolutely convinced that the monarchy should be preserved and defended, as it was a “political necessity”—and a resilient one, at that.Footnote 63 When a nationalist colleague in the Bukovinan Diet challenged his views, Onciul did not shy away from using “a chair, a water glass, and ink blotter as key points for his argumentation,” giving the man a black eye.Footnote 64
That is not to say that Onciul saw the monarchy as flawless. He had long been preoccupied by what he called its “language problem.” In an 1898 treatise on the subject, he argued that Austria's “language problem” was as old as the empire itself, dating to at least the sixteenth century, when the first institutions were set up to unite Austria with the newly incorporated kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary.Footnote 65 Although the Constitution of 1867 had granted all Austrian citizens equal language rights, no explicit provisions existed to implement these rights. Some pinned their hopes on bilingualism, though Onciul believed it was not sustainable to expect individuals to master two languages.Footnote 66 Instead, he proposed dividing provincial administrations into separate districts by language. German would remain the official language of “business” conducted at the central level, while lower-level institutions would be free to regulate language use as they saw fit.Footnote 67 This system, Onciul insisted, would be to everyone's advantage:
The state is guaranteed by these provisions that the official language of business, that is, the language of negotiation, consultation, decision-making, and execution at the central offices, must be German, and that documents in official communication must be written in the language of the recipient, meaning that those addressed to central authorities must be written in German. This fully ensures the general means of communication that the state cannot do without in fulfilling its tasks. Furthermore, the fact that the German language, due to historical development, is commonly used in all countries without exception, combined with the provision that all offices down to the smallest municipality must accept documents written in a commonly used national language, which includes the generally used German language—even if it is not the official business language—ensures immediate communication in emergencies, such as during mobilizations, war manifestos, and similar situations.Footnote 68
Onciul's proposals to restructure the monarchy were part of a debate over the empire's political organization that dated back to the 1840s. Proposals to federalize the monarchy were often linked, as Holly Case has argued, to broader concerns about security.Footnote 69 As early as 1843, for instance, Miklós Wesselényi proposed a federal reorganization of the Habsburg empire and the creation of a German-French-English bloc to contain Russian expansion. In 1848, Romanian politicians from Transylvania submitted a memorandum to the emperor advocating for the unification of all Romanian-inhabited territories under an Austrian prince.Footnote 70 The Kremsier Constitution, issued later that year but never implemented, called for reorganizing the empire's historic provinces into national districts.Footnote 71 After 1867, non-dominant nationalities within Austria-Hungary advocated for the empire's federalization as a way to renegotiate the balance of power within the monarchy and grant their respective groups greater representation.Footnote 72 By the late nineteenth century, federalism had become increasingly important as a way to advance national goals and interests. A growing number of nationalists, including Onciul, insisted that Austria-Hungary be reorganized along national lines. The best-known proposal of this kind came from Transylvania in 1906. Its author, Aurel Popovici, envisioned a radical restructuring of the empire into a series of autonomous states: a new United States of Austria.Footnote 73
Like Popovici, Onciul believed the Habsburg monarchy should be restructured into a federation of larger national units or blocs granting the empire's nationalities the self-determination they sought while ensuring their security within a broader imperial framework. In his view, geography and geopolitics justified the empire's continued existence. “Geographically, Serbia belongs to us,” he argued in Bukovina's Diet in December 1917; “just like Bohemia belongs to Austria, since all of its rivers flow into the Danube.”Footnote 74 For this reason, Onciul advocated a personal union between separate ethnic blocs, including a South Slavic and a Romanian one—meaning that they would share one monarch but have separate governments and laws. To achieve this and simultaneously resolve the Serbian and Romanian questions, he suggested that Austria might cede parts of Galicia to Russia in return for Bessarabia.Footnote 75 Ever the pragmatist, Onciul urged fellow Romanian nationalist politicians to adopt his realistic approach. While national unification was inevitable, he believed the formation of independent nation-states was not. Not even the ongoing First World War could guarantee such an outcome: “if we do not allow ourselves to be drunk with national illusions, we can be almost certain that the current war will not produce complete order within national matters and will still not allow the peoples [of the monarchy] to reach a stable equilibrium—that is to say, national saturation through unification into states of their own.”Footnote 76
By the time Emperor Charles issued his manifesto to the nationalities in October 1918, the empire's federalization seemed like a foregone conclusion. Yet national representatives quickly went from demanding autonomy to proclaiming independence. On October 27, 1918, a Romanian Constituent Assembly convened in Czernowitz, voting in favor of Bukovina Romanians’ union with their co-nationals in Transylvania. The assembly elected a National Romanian Council presided over by Iancu Flondor, Onciul's old political rival.Footnote 77 Flondor then requested that Bukovina's Austrian governor von Etzdorf hand over the province's administration to the Romanian National Council. Etzdorf refused.Footnote 78 Meanwhile, Onciul agreed with Omelian Popovych, leader of Bukovina's Ukrainian National Council (Rada), to split the province into two halves: one Romanian, the other Ukrainian. On November 3, Onciul and Popovych requested of Etzdorfthat he transfer power to them. This time, Etzdorf agreed, and soon after, Ukrainian troops began seizing administrative buildings in Czernowitz.
Fearing Bukovina's loss to the Ukrainians, Flondor invited the Romanian army to intervene and restore order. A shower of manifestos announcing the Romanian army's approach poured down on southern Bukovina on November 6.Footnote 79 Alarmed, Onciul rushed to Suceava to beg General Jacob Zadik, the head of the small Romanian military division already stationed there, to stay out of Bukovina.Footnote 80 He reportedly carried with him a draft constitution for a federalized Austria, which his co-nationals from the Regat saw as incriminating evidence of Onciul's “antinational behavior.”Footnote 81 By November 11, when the Romanian troops entered Czernowitz and took over Bukovina's administration, Onciul was under arrest in Iaşi.Footnote 82
Onciul's only hope was that Iancu Flondor—recently appointed minister-delegate of Bukovina—would intervene on his behalf. In letter after letter to Flondor, Onciul begged his old rival to obtain his release, insisting that “it is pointless to keep me any longer in Jassy, where due to the cold and unfamiliar food I got sick and am slowly dying.”Footnote 83 Flondor intervened, and the Romanian authorities agreed to release Onciul. However, the release order was revoked at the last minute, and Onciul could not return home. “I am ready to abandon politics completely…. I have no luck with it,” he complained to Flondor. “What I have been building for decades collapses overnight. Even though I always did everything in good faith, I only drew hatred upon myself. I am sick of it.”Footnote 84 While still in prison, Onciul had written that if he were ever released, then he would withdraw from politics completely, “for now Austria is dead and with it, my politics died too. Any kind of revival is out of the question and my temperament won't allow me to change myself completely.”Footnote 85
The Romanian authorities had other plans for him. Instead of sending him home, they dispatched him to Bucharest to assist with the legal and administrative unification process. Although they provided him with an apartment and everything he needed to do his work, Onciul was deeply unhappy. He felt he was surrounded by corrupt and arrogant politicians with grandiose but delusional plans for administrative reform. “I suffer all the more under this hostility,” he wrote Flondor, “as I don't recognize the right of people here to judge me, since they have no idea about our circumstances or even wish to find out about them. They only allow themselves to be led by blind chauvinism and a kind of infallibility that is anything but well-founded.”Footnote 86 What Bucharest officials called reform, Onciul regarded as the feeble attempts of a politically and culturally inferior people to impose their backward system upon a region he deemed superior in every way. These sentiments were widely shared by Bukovinan elites—both Romanians and non-Romanians alike—and were also common among Transylvanian elites.Footnote 87
Romanian elites from the former territories of Austria-Hungary looked down upon the institutions of the Old Kingdom, having internalized the notion that the Regat was too Balkan, plagued by corruption, arbitrary rule, and an inefficient political system. They assumed that by joining the Romanian nation-state, they would be able to retain their regional specificity and even help introduce some of their own institutions into the newly unified state. However, they were quickly struck by what they perceived as Bucharest's arrogance and disinterest in what the newly annexed provinces had to offer. George Grigorovici, Bukovina's most prominent Social Democrat, voiced these frustrations in the Romanian parliament in 1920, condemning the imposition of “backward administrative traditions” from the Old Kingdom into Bukovina after the province's annexation. Among these, he singled out the introduction of beatings as a form of punishment, declaring: “People who for generations hadn't seen this kind of punishment are now made to bear the worst kinds of barbarism! … the government should absolutely have to take measures to civilize the administration transplanted into Bukovina. The population of this province can't easily accustom itself to the brutal procedures of the current administration.”Footnote 88
In Bucharest, Onciul grew increasingly depressed and sick, burdened by the realization that his lifelong work had amounted to nothing. “In the interest of your prestige,” he begged Flondor one last time, “I pray you recall me from Bucharest. I feel like a complete stranger here and am becoming melancholy. My stomach hurts again.”Footnote 89 In September 1921, he died, his reputation tarnished by his support for greater autonomy for Bukovina within Greater Romania and his well-known loyalty to Austrian rule. Since then, Romanian historians have portrayed him as an “Austrophile,” a “capable politician, but immoral, scheming,” and even as a traitor to the national cause.Footnote 90
The National Chameleon: Nikolai von Wassilko
Nikolai von Wassilko, also known as Mykola Vasylko—or Koko—was born into a Moldavian boyar family in Lukawetz, a village his ancestors had owned since the fifteenth century. As a young man, Wassilko left Bukovina to study at the famous Theresianum academy in Vienna, where he rubbed shoulders with the sons of government officials, ministers, and princes.Footnote 91 Back in Bukovina, he joined the Romanian Conservative Party, as most of his relatives had done before him. However, he soon abandoned that party to advocate for the national rights of Ruthenians (Ukrainians) in Bukovina. Although this might seem like a strange choice, at the time, Wassilko's decision made perfect political sense. Ruthenians were the majority of voters in his electoral district. By positioning himself as a Ruthenian rather than a Romanian, Wassilko significantly improved his chances of winning local elections. In 1897, he won a seat in the Landtag as a representative of the Old Ruthenians, the dominant political movement in Galicia and Bukovina once the Austrian government granted Poles cultural autonomy in Galicia in 1867.Footnote 92 Disappointed by Austria's pro-Polish policies, which confined Ruthenians to a subordinate role in Galicia, many Old Ruthenians looked to the Russian empire as a protector of all Slavs, including Ruthenians in Austria.Footnote 93
During the late 1880s, the Young Ruthenians or Ukrainophiles overtook the Old Ruthenians in popularity in Austria. They emphasized the non-Polish, non-Russian aspects of Ruthenian or Ukrainian identity, defining Ukrainians primarily as a language community that stretched from the Carpathians to the Caucasus.Footnote 94 In Bukovina, the Ukrainophile cause was most actively championed by the Galician-born Stepan Smal-Stocky, a Ukrainian language and literature professor at the university in Czernowitz. Under Smal-Stocky's influence, Nikolai von Wassilko, a man whose origins were anything but plebeian, became a populist Ukrainian nationalist. His political flexibility astonished his colleagues, including Smal-Stocky, who wrote about Wassilko: “Who on earth knows him? He turns around, moves in every direction, a clever and capable beast.”Footnote 95 In 1899, Wassilko won a seat in the Austrian parliament (Reichsrat) as a member of the Ukrainian Club, whose cause he defended in numerous speeches lamenting the Ruthenians’ inadequate representation in imperial politics. Having reinvented himself as a representative of “the most underrepresented and economically disadvantaged nationality in the empire,” Wassilko advocated socioeconomic and cultural reforms to improve the lives of peasants and the lower-middle class.Footnote 96
In his numerous interventions in the Landtag and Reichsrat, Wassilko skillfully mixed professions of loyalty to the monarchy with subtle and not so subtle critiques of Austria's policies toward Ukrainians. Among other things, he accused the government of neglecting Ukrainians in Bukovina, leaving them prey to Romanianization efforts. Peasants, he claimed, were on the verge of extinction since their “entire property” was in danger of falling “into the hands of money lenders,” while they would “sink into [the condition] of proletarians and workers on their own forefathers’ land.”Footnote 97 Ironically, given his own history of side-switching, Wassilko had nothing but contempt for Ukrainians who gave in to Romanian assimilationist pressures. “I do not need to explain to you what it means when a member of a nationality abandons it,” he explained. “These are always the bitterest enemies of the people in question since they have to do extra work for the new nation.”Footnote 98 In his opinion, the surest way to further Ukrainian interests was to merge them with Austria's own. Ukrainians, if well-treated, could be a major asset to Austria's internal and foreign policy interests. As a result, he insisted that Ukrainians’ interests would be best served by securing national autonomy within the monarchy.Footnote 99
When the First World War broke out, Wassilko went to great lengths to convince the Austrian government that the monarchy's interests aligned with those of Ukrainians. “We never appealed to Russia for help,” he said in May 1914, “and for the future, we in Austria also have no requests of Russia except that it does not disturb our cultural and economic development (…) on which we are working under the protection of the Austrian constitution despite all obstacles, not without success.”Footnote 100 Ukrainians, he insisted, “have no reason to exchange the Austrian administration for Russian rule, which is akin to slavery.”Footnote 101 Wassilko believed that Ukrainians could tip the balance of power in Europe in Austria's favor. Granting Ukrainians national rights would weaken Russia, while neglecting them risked pushing them “into the arms of the Russians.”Footnote 102 As the Russian troops approached Czernowitz, Wassilko fled to Vienna, where he led the Bukovinan Committee for Refugees, advocating on behalf of Ukrainians in Bukovina and pleading for Ukrainians who had been unfairly suspected of treason to be released from internment camps.Footnote 103
As deputy chair of the Ukrainian National Council (Ukrainska Natsionalna Rada) formed under the leadership of Kost Levytsky in Vienna, Wassilko also helped draft a document on the Ukrainian question in Austria. The document presented Ukrainians as waging war on two fronts: against Russians in the east and against Poles in the west. The authors insisted that Ukrainians needed security in the west in order to fight Russia in the east and further Austria's cause. This security could be provided by the Austrian government, partitioning Galicia along language lines (into two halves: one Ukrainian, the other Polish) and allowing all territories in the monarchy with Ukrainian-speaking majorities to unite. To remove any remaining doubts about Ukrainians’ loyalties, the document's authors demanded that German be introduced as an “official language of state and communication in Austria,” and Galicia and Bukovina be tied more firmly to the state—which they believed would also be in Ukrainians’ best interest.Footnote 104
For all his professions of loyalty to Austria, in March 1918, Wassilko surprised the Austrian authorities by making common cause with Ukrainians in the former Russian empire. After the February 1917 revolution, a Ukrainian National Council (Rada) had formed in Kyiv, demanding territorial autonomy within a democratic Russia.Footnote 105 Then, after the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, the Rada proclaimed the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR). Unsuccessful in seizing Kyiv, the Bolsheviks established a rival state with its capital in Kharkiv in December 1917: the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets. As hostilities between the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers escalated, the UNR declared complete independence in January 1918.Footnote 106 By March, the Bolsheviks were forced to sign a humiliating peace at Brest-Litovsk, ceding much of the former Russian empire's western borderlands to the Central Powers. Austrian Foreign Minister Ottokar von Czernin specifically requested that von Wassilko, an old acquaintance, join the Austrian delegation at Brest to help mediate between Austria and Ukraine. However, Czernin was taken aback by Wassilko's intervention: “although evidently excited by the part his Russian-Ukrainian comrades are playing at Brest, Wassilko speaks nationally, far more chauvinistically than when I thought I knew him in Vienna.”Footnote 107 The Central Powers’ desperate need for grain gave Ukraine leverage to secure guarantees of independence. But in practice, the Central Powers dictated the country's fate, and they soon dissolved the Rada and installed Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi as head of the Ukrainian government, effectively turning Ukraine into a puppet state.
By October 1918, the war had turned decisively against the Central Powers, whose armies were now disintegrating. Across the monarchy, new national councils sprang up, including a Ukrainian National Council in Galicia, led by Kost Levytsky, with a separate Bukovinan branch. By November 1918, Ukrainian legions had split from the Habsburg army, seized Lemberg (Lviv), and declared the independent Western Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR). Wassilko quickly returned to Czernowitz, where, on November 3, ZUNR representatives gathered to declare that they had annexed Bukovina's northwestern districts. Almost immediately, fighting erupted in Lviv between Ukrainians and Poles, both of whom claimed Galicia for their respective nation-states. Within weeks, Ukrainian legions withdrew from Bukovina, and Romanian forces took control. Wassilko had no choice but to flee again—first to Stanisławów (now Ivano-Frankivsk) in Galicia and later to Paris.
Meanwhile, in the east, the UNR was struggling for survival. In December 1918, Skoropadskyi's Hetmanate collapsed and was replaced by the Directorate of Symon Petliura, which restored the UNR in Kyiv. The Bolsheviks then took advantage of the Central Powers’ withdrawal and invaded Ukraine. On December 1, 1918, representatives of the UNR in the east and the ZUNR in the west signed an act of unification. However, by February, the Red Army had seized Kyiv, and Petliura's government was once again on the run. By July 1919, Polish forces controlled almost all of Eastern Galicia. With Ukraine under siege from both Poland and Soviet Russia, Ukraine's diplomatic missions across Europe and the United States worked tirelessly to garner support for Ukraine's cause. As the head of the UNR's diplomatic mission in Vienna and then Bern, Wassilko operated on the premise that the country's only hope for survival lay in an alliance with Poland and Romania, because the Bolsheviks posed a far greater danger to Ukraine's survival.Footnote 108 He warned that “the Ukrainians must give up everything that hinders their alliance with Poland and Romania, which both have interests similar to those of Ukraine—namely, to prevent the reconstruction of a Great Russia.”Footnote 109 Other Ukrainian politicians remained deeply skeptical of Wassilko's ideas.
By 1920, the UNR had lost most of its territories to the Red Army. Petliura's government had no choice but to ally with Piłsudski—the alliance Wassilko had been urging all along. Together, Polish and Ukrainian forces launched an offensive and briefly recaptured Kyiv. The Red Army, however, quickly reclaimed the city and advanced deep into Poland. In August 1920, Piłsudski's forces miraculously turned the tide at the Battle of Warsaw, repelling the Soviets. That summer, peace negotiations began, with the Soviets offering Poland a border along the Curzon line, which meant millions of Ukrainians would find themselves under Soviet rule. Then head of the Ukrainian Diplomatic Mission in Bern, Wassilko was part of a Ukrainian delegation that immediately petitioned the League of Nations, arguing that abandoning millions of Ukrainians to Soviet rule would not be “in the interest of the Allies’ pacification efforts in Europe,”Footnote 110 as the Ukrainian people, numbering over 40 million, were overwhelmingly anti-Bolshevik “and will never consent of its own volition to be submitted to the Soviet power in Moscow.”Footnote 111 In a second petition, also signed by Wassilko, the delegation denounced the hypocrisy of the Western allies, who had promised military aid but failed to deliver, supporting Poland's territorial gains in their war with Ukrainians over Galicia. In return for having “had faith in the force of right, so solemnly proclaimed by the allies during the World War,” Ukraine had been delivered into the arms of its enemies.Footnote 112
The Polish-Soviet war ended in March 1921 with the Treaty of Riga, which divided Ukraine between Poland and Soviet Russia. Petliura's UNR was excluded from the negotiations. Wassilko continued representing Ukraine as a diplomat in Switzerland, advocating for what had become, in historian Serhii Plokhy's words, “the largest nation in Europe with an unresolved nationality question and no state of its own.”Footnote 113 Meanwhile, Romanian nationalists in Bukovina branded Wassilko a traitor, denouncing him for having “given the Romanian nation, from whose bosom he deserted in exchange for a deputy mandate, its hardest blows.”Footnote 114
By 1921, Ukraine had disappeared from the map. Wassilko added to his list of personal paradoxes a new career as the diplomat of a non-existent state. Despite his best efforts, Ukraine's prospects remained bleak. In 1923, he died, leaving behind a well-ordered office and a hopeless cause.Footnote 115
The Opportunist: Benno Straucher
Like his Progressive Alliance partners Onciul and Wassilko, Benno Straucher was notoriously difficult to pin down politically. Born in 1854 to a traditional Jewish family near Sadagora, Straucher attended the German-language gymnasium in Czernowitz and later studied law in Vienna.Footnote 116 Like Onciul, he entered politics through the back door by climbing the administrative ladder. In 1884, he won a seat on Czernowitz's municipal council (Gemeinderat) and, three years later, a seat in the imperial parliament. By 1904, when he joined the provincial Diet as a member of the Progressive Alliance, he was Bukovina's most powerful Jewish politician,Footnote 117 representing a prosperous community that played a prominent role in the province's urban life, commerce, and the educated professions.Footnote 118 Unlike Romanians and Ruthenians in Bukovina, Jews had a sizable middle class. Urban Jews were largely assimilated into German culture; they were, in Marsha Rozenblit's words, “Germans both by culture and by identification with the Austrian supranational state, but they did not see themselves as Germans in the same way as German nationalists saw themselves as Germans.”Footnote 119 As a cultural and economic elite loyal to the Habsburg state, Jews formed the Austrian Liberals’ key constituency in Bukovina.Footnote 120 Straucher started as an Austrian liberal. Sometime in the 1890s, however, he underwent a political transformation.
Benno Straucher launched his political career at a time when Jewish nationalism was gaining momentum across Austria,Footnote 121 alongside other nationalist movements in the 1880s and 1890.Footnote 122 Zionism was part of this broader movement which encouraged Jews to see themselves as members of a distinct national community rather than solely a religious group. The World Zionist Organization, with branches across Austria-Hungary, believed that the future of Jews in the monarchy “lay outside of Europe” and advocated for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.Footnote 123 However, Zionism remained a minority movement in the Habsburg monarchy, often dismissed as overly utopian. For most Jewish nationalists in Galicia and Bukovina, home to the monarchy's largest Jewish populations, the struggle for Jewish national rights within Europe took precedence over emigration and state-building efforts. These so-called “diaspora nationalists” prioritized securing national rights, cultural autonomy, and political representation in the diaspora, where Jews already lived.Footnote 124 Anti-assimilationist but not separatist, they sought recognition of Jews as a distinct nationality within the empire, prioritizing the Landespolitik of here and now, rather than advocating for a Jewish state in Palestine.Footnote 125
At the time, Austrian law recognized Jews only as a religious group, not a national one. In the Austrian census, Jews were counted as Germans, although in practice, Germans and Jews had already started forming separate associations. In Bukovina, nationalist Jewish students founded the Hasmonea fraternity in 1890. Modeled after German Burschenschaften at the University of Czernowitz, the Hasmonea was a dueling society whose members fought both Christian Germans and German-speaking Jews (who had assimilated into German culture) to defend Jewish national honor.Footnote 126 Meanwhile, Christian German associations embraced a new racial German nationalism that excluded Jews from the German community. Hasmonea's founder and the president of the Bukovinan branch of the World Zionist Organization, the young Mayer Ebner, supported Benno Straucher in establishing Bukovina's first unified Jewish national party in Bukovina: the Jüdischer Volkspartei. Footnote 127 As acculturated, German-speaking Jews, both men felt betrayed by the Germans, whom they had long supported—often at the cost of alienating other nationalities. Straucher voiced his frustration in a speech before the local Diet: “The Jews have made enemies of many other peoples because of the Germans and to some extent are still today loyal party supporters of the Germans, but the Germans only wish to kick the Jews around in return!”Footnote 128
Straucher's Jüdischer Volkspartei included both Zionists and non-Zionists and advocated for Jewish national autonomy on a non-territorial basis. A byproduct of the electoral reform of 1905, the party demanded language rights and separate national representation for Jews in preparation for the elections of 1907, the first conducted under universal male suffrage. In 1907, Straucher joined three other Jewish politicians—Adolf Stand, Heinrich Gabel, and Arthur Mahler—in forming a “Jewish club” in the Austrian parliament.Footnote 129 Together, they lobbied on behalf of Austrian Jews and demanded “their political equality as citizens and national equality as a people.”Footnote 130
In the years leading up to the census of 1910, appeals for granting the Yiddish language official recognition as an Umgangssprache (language of everyday use) intensified.Footnote 131 The vice chairman and co-founder of Straucher's Jüdischer Volksverein, prominent lawyer Max Diamant from Czernowitz, forwarded the authorities in Vienna a petition in Yiddish regarding the founding of a Verein Jüdisches Theater in Czernowitz. When the authorities rejected it because it was not written in one of Austria's Umgangssprachen, Diamant went to court. He complained that the decision violated the Jews’ constitutional right to cultivate their nationality according to Article 19 of the constitution. On Christmas Eve, over 3,000 people gathered in Czernowitz to protest “against the government, which wounds the national honor of the Jewish people by taking away from them the possibility of declaring their belonging to the Jewish nation during the census.”Footnote 132 The authorities were not persuaded by Diamant's appeal, insisting that Jews were not a Volksstamm (ethnic group) as the Austrian constitution of 1867 officially classified different ethnic and linguistic groups, so their national rights had not been violated.Footnote 133
Jews in Bukovina eventually achieved national recognition, albeit informally, through the Bukovinan Compromise of 1909–1910. When the Austrian Ministry of the Interior refused to acknowledge them as a nationality, other nationalists in Bukovina supported Jewish activists’ demand for separate representation in the upcoming elections, offering them especially designated curia and electoral districts to guarantee at least eight Jewish deputies in the provincial Diet.Footnote 134 Straucher was instrumental in making this happen. In the Reichsrat, he made numerous speeches demanding that Yiddish be recognized as a national language, and devoting “his activity to the representation of the Jewish people and Jewish interests.”Footnote 135 In Vienna, he found an ally in the Ukrainian Galician delegate Julian Romanchuk, who concluded that such an arrangement would also be to Ukrainians’ advantage, as it would weaken the Poles (since many Polish-speaking Jews registered as Poles). Of other Jews who “acknowledge their Jewishness only while registering births but are otherwise ashamed of this fact,” Straucher had nothing but scorn. The Jewish nation, he warned, “will shake off these half-Jews, these quarter-Jews, just like a tree which allows its rotten fruit to fall on the ground.”Footnote 136
In Bukovina, too, Straucher found support for his quest for national recognition for Jews, above all among non-Jews.Footnote 137 His colleague Onciul believed non-Jews, especially Romanians, stood to benefit from Jews not being counted among Bukovina's Germans. If this happened, Christian Germans would be more likely to form an all-Christian alliance with the Romanians, the better to end what Onciul saw as a Jewish monopoly on the provincial economy. Some Germans in Bukovina opposed the proposal to grant Jews national representation, fearing this would cost them mandates. Some Jews protested, too, noting that granting Jews representation separately from Germans would undo decades of acculturation and German-Jewish cooperation in Bukovina.Footnote 138 Issak Kohn, the head of the Zionist branch in the Bukovinan town of Seraph, warned that “the central government must look at the question from the perspective of the whole monarchy and see that if the recognition of the Jewish nationality occurs even once then one could claim its validity in all the crown lands represented in the Reichsrat [i.e. Cisleithania] including Galicia. [This will bring about a clash] with the most influential association in the Reichsrat, the Polish Club, which needs the Jewish electorate in Galicia in order to have a numerical majority vis-à-vis the Ruthenians.”Footnote 139 Straucher considered the Austrian ministry's refusal to sign on to the proposal an act of hatred.
On most issues, Straucher found it easier to collaborate with non-Jewish politicians in Bukovina than with other Jewish nationalists. Much like their Romanian and Ukrainian counterparts, Jewish politicians were deeply divided and unable to act as a unified bloc. Although Ebenr had initially supported Straucher, he soon turned against him, accusing him of manipulating Zionist ideology for political gain. As Manfred Reifer put it in his biography of Ebner, Straucher “had a large following, thought and lived in the spirit of the common man, and tolerated no disruption of his political circles by other Jewish personalities.”Footnote 140 Ebner watched as Straucher amassed position after position—delegate to the Reichsrat, member of the Landtag and the provincial committee (Landesausschuss), director of the Bukovina savings bank (Sparkasse), member of the provincial school council (Landesschulrat), and president of the Jewish community. Frustrated by Straucher's monopoly over Jewish politics in Bukovina, Ebner and other young Zionists broke away in 1910, joining the Jewish Volksrat, a new Zionist party founded by the English-language and literature professor Leon Kellner, an old confidant of Theodor Herzl.Footnote 141 By 1911, Straucher's united Jewish party had disintegrated. Nevertheless, he continued calling for national autonomy and equal rights for Jews.
In 1914, Straucher fled the war to Vienna, where he poured all his energy into helping Jewish refugees from Bukovina and Galicia.Footnote 142 Like Onciul and Wassilko, he spent the war years making speeches about the Austrian army's bravery and assuring the authorities of the support and loyalty of Jewish citizens.Footnote 143 The Central Powers’ victory in Galicia and Bukovina, he believed, would “prevent the oppression of Europe by wild, barbaric Cossacks.”Footnote 144 Austrian Jews, he assured the Austrian authorities, were a “state-upholding element … whose patriotism is not broken by any provincialism … We Austrian Jews declare ourselves unconditionally and without any reservations for Austria.”Footnote 145
When the Habsburg army began disintegrating in October 1918, Straucher was still in Vienna.Footnote 146 He remained there until 1920, when he returned to Czernowitz to resume his position as head of Bukovina's Jewish community. By then, the Jewish National Council, formed in 1918, had been disbanded, and Bukovinan Jews were living “under the same roof” with Romanian Jews from the Old Kingdom (Regat), who were represented by their own national organization, the Union of Romanian Jews (UER).Footnote 147 By contrast with their counterparts in the Old Kingdom, Jews in the newly annexed provinces, including Bukovina, had “much more developed national politics.”Footnote 148 Indeed, the Bukovinan Zionist Ebner—Straucher's political adversary—found the UER was insufficiently national because it promoted Romanianization and collaboration with leading Romanian parties.Footnote 149 But Straucher was open to collaborating with the UER and the Romanian National Liberal Party. His strategy helped him secure a seat in the Romanian parliament. When the National Liberals lost their monopoly on government in 1926, Straucher also lost his seat, though not for long.Footnote 150 He resurfaced when the National Liberals returned to power in 1927. More radical and less willing to compromise, Ebner continued waging war on Straucher's politics and character.
Straucher's politics and Ebner's protracted conflict with him kept a unified Jewish nationalist movement from coming together in interwar Bukovina. In 1923, the international Zionist organization Karen Hajessod described Zionist life in Bukovina as “overly focused on the war with Straucher,” akin to a farce where “everything is obscured by political conflicts.”Footnote 151 Though more prosperous than many of their counterparts elsewhere in Romania, Jews in Czernowitz contributed the least to the Zionist fund. Ebner's publication Ostjüdische Zeitung devoted more pages to Straucher than any other topic, calling him a traitor and a morally despicable politician who curried favor with the Romanian authorities.Footnote 152 Yet, as we have seen, Straucher's penchant for compromise was far from unusual in late nineteenth-century Bukovina. It was only after the First World War that nationalists like Ebner began dismissing Straucher's style of nationalist politics as treasonous. Their judgments later shaped historians’ appraisals of Straucher's character and career. David Sha'ari, writing much later about the Jewish community in interwar Bukovina, described Straucher as a “lackey” of the Romanian authorities who used political manipulation to uphold an undemocratic system of privileges and favors.Footnote 153
During the 1930s, Bukovinan Jews lost many rights they had previously enjoyed. In 1937–38, the governing National Christian Party issued an unprecedented number of anti-Semitic measures, including a law limiting the number of Jewish employees who could work in Romanian factories and institutions.Footnote 154 Jews saw their opportunities dwindling and their prospects growing increasingly bleak. Straucher, too, reached a point where he could no longer see a viable path forward. He made plans to emigrate to Palestine but ultimately decided to remain in Bukovina. He died in 1940, narrowly escaping the fate of other Jewish politicians in the province, who were soon arrested and deported to Siberia during the Soviet occupation of Czernowitz.Footnote 155
Conclusion
It is easy to see why the empire's successor states would imprison men like General Eduard Fischer, the head of Bukovina's Austrian gendarmerie, who was jailed in Iaşi in 1918 for persecuting Bukovinan Romanians suspected of treason during the war.Footnote 156 However, alongside him sat Aurel Onciul, Bukovina's leading Romanian nationalist. In a cruel twist of history, a nationalist and a persecutor of nationalists in Bukovina observed the new order from behind prison bars.
Other nationalists fared slightly better. Nikolai von Wassilko, a Romanian who embraced Ukrainian nationalism, now represented a nation that gained statehood only to quickly lose it. He became the diplomat of an imagined state divided out of existence by competing powers. Had Ukraine survived, his trajectory might have been different. Yet as things stood, Wassilko carved out a role for himself by leveraging his old political capital and personal connections on behalf of the Ukrainian cause. He was less obsolete in defeat than Onciul was in victory. Unlike his former allies, Benno Straucher managed to work with the Romanian authorities. His talent for compromise initially served him well. He was opposed less by the Romanian state than by younger Jewish nationalists in Bukovina who fought to retain regional autonomy for their political organization within the Romanian nation-state, viewing his conciliatory approach as outdated and morally suspect.
Unlikely champions of democratization, our three protagonists had helped shift nationalist politics in Bukovina from a conservative, landowner-dominated model to a mass movement based on democratic participation. Wassilko, an aristocrat, had advocated for the political empowerment of Ukrainian peasants and teachers. Onciul, from a lower-middle class Romanian family, had directed his nationalist activity against what he saw as a Jewish monopoly on the Bukovinan economy. Straucher, a product of social mobility through education in the Habsburg system, had fought to ensure that Jews would achieve national recognition.
Unlike former Habsburg bureaucrats and administrators whose career capital smoothed their passage into post-Habsburg state structures, our three protagonists had fought to nationalize politics under imperial rule, forming cross-national alliances in the service of national separation. Compromises had been, in part, a political necessity in Bukovina, where no group held a definite majority. Unlike regions like Bohemia and Moravia, where the national struggle had centered on two dominant groups (Czechs and Germans), Bukovina's complex ethnic landscape had made political pragmatism indispensable. Many historians have since pointed to cross-national alliances such as the Progressive Alliance and the Bukovinan Compromise as evidence of the province's tolerant Habsburg-era political culture. Yet these alliances had never been meant to transcend nationalism, but to serve it.Footnote 157
The three Bukovinan nationalists’ failure to find lasting success after 1918 is therefore all the more striking. As it turned out, there were many ways to be a nationalist, and theirs was no longer acceptable. Benno Straucher's “diaspora nationalism”—once far more popular than Zionism—faded into irrelevance. In the late nineteenth century, Zionists’ plans to relocate Jews from Central Europe to Palestine had appeared utopian. After the First World War, it was Straucher's nationalism that seemed out of touch. To Zionists like Ebner, Straucher's continued attempts to forge alliances with Romanian parties were delusional. With Romanian anti-Semitism on the rise, emigration to Palestine increasingly appeared to be the only viable path forward. Ukrainian and Romanian nationalisms emerged from the First World War similarly transformed. Before 1918, one could be born into a Romanian-speaking family in Bukovina, like Wassilko, and choose to champion not Romanian, but Ukrainian national rights. After the war, national identity was no longer a matter of political strategy or personal choice. Onciul's vision of Romanian nationalism, inextricable from the imperial framework in which it emerged, also seemed like an aberration in a new world where nationalism was, by definition, anti-imperial and state-seeking.
A new generation of Romanian, Ukrainian, and Jewish nationalists, often from more modest socioeconomic backgrounds, now leveled against Onciul, Wassilko, and Straucher the same accusations the three had once brought against Bukovina's landowning elites. To the younger nationalists, these former champions of progressivism appeared conservative, if not reactionary. Their once prized expertise in imperial politics and fluency in the German language were now viewed as markers of elitism and national indifference. The new generation rejected compromise entirely, insisting on absolute victory over their national adversaries. In turn, Onciul, Straucher, and Wassilko felt alienated by a world that rendered their ideas and lifelong work irrelevant. Where postwar nationalists saw new possibilities, they found only closed doors.
Their stories bring nuance to a historiography that, while rightly emphasizing the continuities of imperial institutions and personnel in post-imperial Central Europe, often glosses over the ideological fractures between pre- and post-imperial nationalisms. Like the postwar nationalists who condemned Onciul, Wassilko, and Straucher as traitors, scholars still tend to read Habsburg-era politicians’ willingness to cooperate across ethnic lines as evidence of tolerance.Footnote 158 Yet in Bukovina the compromises once forged by Onciul, Wassilko, and Straucher had been tactical, short-lived, and meant to further national differentiation. What ultimately rendered these three politicians obsolete was the emergence of a postwar nationalism that could no longer imagine compromise as a pathway to nationalization. It was this shift—not just institutional discontinuity or the collapse of empire—that best explains why some prewar nationalists were either ejected from politics or chose exile from a world they helped bring into being but no longer recognized as their own.
Acknowledgements
This article benefited from the thoughtful feedback I received at Cornell University's Comparative History Colloquium. I am especially grateful to Isabel Hull, Maria Cristina Garcia, Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik, Camille Suarez, Kaitlin Findlay, Claudia Verhoeven, and Ruth Lawlor for their generous readings and incisive comments on an earlier draft. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. Research for this article was supported by an ACLS Eastern Europe Fellowship.
Cristina Florea is assistant professor of history at Cornell University. She is currently completing a book titled, ‘Crossroads of Empires: Revolutions and Encounters at Europe’s Eastern Frontiers.’
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