By Olha Haidamachuk. The war forces you to hastily gather your whole life into a small emergency grab bag and urgently leave your home. Only your memories stay fully with you. The headlines in media outlets and their vocabulary set the tone for the perception by the reader and certain kinds of “emergency grab bags” of memories about a war.
Olha Labur is a historian from Kyiv who researches women’s experiences in the 20th century. She works as an associate professor in the Department of History of Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.
By Denys Shatalov. Until recently, when Ukrainians mentioned the ‘pre-war’ or the ‘post-war’ periods or subjects in everyday conversations about the past, no clarification was needed. It was obvious to everyone that this was about World War II, or, rather, a part of it – the German–Soviet War of 1941–1945. War – ‘that war’ – remained one of the main milestones of the past. However, since 24 February 2022, the term ‘pre-war’ refers to another time.
By Viktoriya Sereda. The unprecedented Russian full-scale attack on Ukraine brought the recent conflicts over memory in East Central Europe and in Ukraine to the attention of an international audience. Mass displacement also exposed millions of Ukrainians to new challenges that triggered intensive reinterpretations of the past – both the distant and the very recent – and a reevaluation of their memory through new experiences.
By Andrii Portnov. Ukrainian history and literature in the German higher education system are the disciplines whose institutional weakness is more than obvious. Ukraine itself, in the eyes of a large part of German (including academic) society, still does not have enough cultural and historical agency and remains ‘in the shadow of Russia’.
By Svitlana Pidoprygora. In the autumn of 2013, Euromaidan started in Ukraine as a response to the authorities’ decision to end European integration processes and focus on the Customs Union with the Russian Federation. Thousands of people went to protests in Kyiv and the central squares of other Ukrainian cities, demonstrating society’s support for the European vector of development and protesting against the arbitrariness of the authorities.
From the 15th to the 17th of September 2022, the second EUTIM Annual Conference, “Time Out of Joint: Literary (Re)Visions of Time in Eastern and Central Europe”, will take place at Potsdam University as a hybrid event. We spoke to the conveners, Bohdan Tokarskyi and Alexander Wöll, to learn more about the conference and how it connects to current political and cultural developments.
By Andrii Portnov. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 came as a surprise to many in Western Europe. Perhaps even more surprising was the firm Ukrainian resistance. But why was this unexpected? Apparently, Putin’s worldview and Ukrainian reality were ignored for a long time.
In mid-March of this year, I interviewed Olha Honchar, the head of Territory of Terror Museum in Lviv and the initiator of the Museum Crisis Center. We discussed the Territory of Terror in the context of Ukrainian political events, heritage protection during the war, and how Russian aggression compares to historical events.
By Eckart Woertz. As a region, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is the world’s largest grain importer. Approximately 30 per cent of global exports of wheat and barley, 20 per cent of corn, and a whopping three-quarters of sunflower oil come from Ukraine and Russia.
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research is a platform for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are interested in transregional exchange and research on current issues. TRAFO is the blog of the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) and the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (Bonn).
ISSN: 2199-2134
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