Dealing with history responsibly and, if need be, arguing over the accurate assessment of the past are two crucial processes for the cohesion and sustainability of a society. In Ukraine, just as in Germany and other countries, the history of dictatorship, especially more recent experiences of it, continues to be a source of conflict for cultures of memory. Differences can, however, be reconciled through a collective endeavor to work through the past on the basis of historical knowledge.

Dictatorships aim to produce societies that are uniform. Social, economic, cultural, religious, and even political fault lines and disputes tend to be forcibly suppressed by an overarching ideology and limits on freedom of expression. When a dictatorship collapses, this fiction of a homogeneous society also breaks down. A comparative view of how dictatorships end and states and societies are revived in the modern period reveals the extreme tensions that tend to characterize such transitions. Traditional conflicts – even those that seem to have been surmounted long ago – between regions, ethnic groups, social classes or milieus, denominations and religions, and between disparate cultures of memory, can be reactivated abruptly in such situations and resumed with even greater virulence. At the same time, the dictatorship itself is a source of new conflicts, such as the opposition between the outgoing regime’s supporters and its opponents.

Democratic societies have no other choice than to resolve these conflicts by way of extended discursive processes. The historical experiences involved in these have been quite varied. South Africa took an unusual approach to memory work after the end of Apartheid by inviting both perpetrators and victims to speak freely about their experiences, without fear of judicial consequences, before its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The country nonetheless continues to be deeply divided. The way Germany has worked through National Socialism is widely considered exemplary; its handling of the injustices of the communist regime in the GDR, in particular by opening the state security services archives, has been of interest to other post-dictatorship societies around the world, from Peru to Brazil to Tunisia. Nevertheless, in West Germany, the first few decades following liberation from National Socialism were characterized by repression, collective silence, and calls for “wiping the slate clean.” Similar tendencies have sometimes presented themselves in working through East Germany’s history as well. On the other hand, a whole flourishing field of civil society initiatives for the remembrance of and research into the past as well as for future-oriented commemoration has come into being. Reconciling disparate narratives of the past takes time, as the process of dealing with Franco’s legacy in Spain has demonstrated. Until recently, crimes perpetrated by the fascist regime were rarely discussed in public. Often there was no way to reconcile the memories its opponents had with those of its supporters. A similar process can be seen in the western Balkans, where following the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Serbs, Bosniaks, and Croats have each cultivated their own cultures of memory, with little interaction between them. It is with this background in mind that we turn our attention to the current situation in Ukraine, where dealing with history responsible is a key issue in the development of a civil society. The complexity of the situation there not only involves opposition between adherents and adversaries of the pre-Euromaidan governments and between agents and victims of the older Soviet regime; differences between language groups, regional identities, and cultures of memory, which had been repressed during the Soviet period, also play a significant role. Memories of the Second World War, German occupation, the Holocaust, forced resettlements and expulsions, and of the Holodomor and Soviet dictatorship are in many cases incompatible. Another particularity of the Ukrainian case is that although Soviet rule there ended twenty-five years ago, the post-Soviet regimes have yet to bring about social reconciliation in the country. Ukrainian society thus lingers in a post-Soviet phase. For this reason, Ukraine currently faces the fundamental question as to whether it will now take the path of reconciliation and if so what instruments (criminal justice, historical research, education, truth commissions, etc.) and historical models it will use along the way.

Reconciliation is not a state to be achieved once and for all, but a long-term, complex, and open-ended discursive process that must satisfy specific conditions relevant to the society and memory of culture it takes place in. There simply is no ideal, universally applicable solution. This conference nonetheless aims to provide an orientation in the form of comparative discussions of reconciliation’s treatment in cultures of memory in Germany, Ukraine, and other post-dictatorship societies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And it is in this context that we will investigate the social and political requirements of coming to terms with and remembering the past in today’s Ukraine.

The conference is planned as a scientific symposium for fostering academic exchange between Ukrainian, German, and others historians and researchers from around the world. The discussion will also be available to a wider public, both during the conference itself and in the proceedings to be published afterwards. German and Ukrainian legislators will also be invited to attend.