Wenn Geschichte umgeschrieben wird: Ein Blick auf die Ukraine, Belarus und Russland
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 was accompanied by a historical rhetoric with vocabulary drenched in references to World War II. But even prior to February of 2022, there was a visible trend in the countries of the former Soviet Union to fundamentally rewrite historical narratives. This development comes as part of the current political shifts in these countries. Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia experience a national appropriation of history carried by various political and social actors. This shift shapes the respective social self-conception and is also a key to understanding intergovernmental dynamics between the three countries as well as the war in Ukraine. The discussion will explore these aspects on different levels and include perspectives on social, political, and cultural processes.
Participants
- Kateryna Mishchenko is an author, curator, and co-founder of Medusa, an independent Ukrainian publisher. She taught literature at the Kyiv National Linguistic University and worked as a translator in the area of human rights.
- Aliaksei Bratachkin is a historian and head of the program for public history at the European College of Liberal Arts in Belarus. Currently, he is a guest lecturer at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder).
- Félix Krawatzek is a research fellow at the ZOiS where he is head of the research area Youth in Eastern Europe.
- Matthias Schwartz is deputy director of the ZfL and head of the program area World Literature and of the project World Fictions, Post/Socialist. Eastern European Literatures and Cultures.
- Moderation: Nina Weller is a slavic studies and literary scholar. Until early 2022, she was head of the BMBF project Designing the Past. Imagined History, Fiction and Memory in the Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian Cultures at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder).
The event is organized in cooperation between the Centre for Eastern European and International Studies (ZOiS) and the ZfL and is part of the ZOiS Forum series.