Event Report: The MHC Annual Conference in Munich, September 2-4, 2026

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In the very first words of his keynote speech, Karl Schlögel set the tone. The historian addressed Germany’s “enlightened, post-national, progressive intelligentsia” which proudly believed it had come to terms with the 20th century’s past, while Ukraine, according to this view, still has to do its homework. Schlögel, last year’s winner of the renowned Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, urged instead that, between Germans and Ukrainians, “all problems, no matter how difficult or painful they may be, must be laid out on the table in order to defuse them”.

Schlögel addressed the 350 listeners at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He analysed in detail how many decades it took for the Germans (including himself, as he said) to become aware of some forgotten facts: the fate of millions of POWs, forced labourers and other Eastern European victims of German Nazi rule, as well as the existence of a Ukrainian nation as such. As Schlögel pointed out, there were, in 1945, six million displaced persons in West Germany alone, most of whom were Soviet citizens, and most of those were Ukrainians – until recently mostly referred to as “Russians”.

By inaugurating the newly established Annual Mykola Haievoi Lecture, the Berlin-based historian opened the 2026 annual conference of the Mykola Haievoi Center (MHC) for Modern History. Founded in 2024, the German-Ukrainian Center adopted the name of PhD candidate Haievoi, one of its prospective staff members, after it turned out that the historian, who volunteered for the Ukrainian army after Russia’s large-scale attack, had fallen in combat.

“Reckoning and Remembrance: Germany, Ukraine, and the Second World War after 1945” was the title of this year’s conference. In his introduction, Martin Schulze Wessel, MHC co-director at LMU Munich, spoke about the “long shadow” of this war and the necessity to shed light on many issues. He addressed, e.g., the heterogeneity of the political and intellectual orientations in Ukraine and the diaspora in the 20th century and warned against “the discursive threat of misuse of anti-fascism” which is being exploited today to justify the full-scale aggression against a democratic state in Europe. The historian also recalled that a KGB agent killed the Ukrainian nationalist party leaders Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera in Munich in 1957 and 1959, respectively. This operation sparked an intensive debate within the West German government how to react. Finally, the Bonn Government sent a diplomatic note to Moscow, warning that such illegal actions should not be repeated – a mild message of protest similar to those issued after Russian actions on German territory today.

Beginning with a panel on some questions of German-Ukrainian relations prior to the Second World War, the conference focused on how the war and the German occupation were remembered in both countries during the post-war decades, in various contexts and through various media.

So, for example, MHC senior researcher Gelinada Grinchenko sketched succinctly how in the Soviet Union and (West) Germany forced labourers were remembered in different periods after the war. Other papers addressed post-war trials. Alexandra Pulvermacher (University of Klagenfurt) discussed trials against former Soviet POWs in Soviet Ukraine and explained what was at stake here: "Red Army soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Germans were automatically suspected of collaboration with the enemy." Whereas some 100,000 Germans were convicted of war crimes across Europe, Soviet courts convicted 320,000 Soviet citizens of treason or collaboration in the period 1943–1953, nearly 94,000 of them in Ukraine. There were thousands of death sentences and hardly any acquittals, and the aim of these non-public trials was clearly political: the stabilisation of Stalin’s rule.

Other participants dealt with the experience of civilians in Ukraine and how they were represented in various media and contexts. So, for example, Polina Barskova (University of California, Berkeley) examined how the German occupation of Kyiv in 1941 appeared in some literary works. Other topics reached from wartime diaries and poetry to post-war films and the museums in independent Ukraine.

In the concluding discussion, Svitlana Pavlenko (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Martin Schulze Wessel, Martin Aust (University of Bonn), and the audience discussed old and new challenges for historiography, “activism” and international dialogue in academia and beyond. They compared the current German-Ukrainian dialogue with earlier precedents: the German-French and German-Polish cases. MHC co-director Yaroslav Hrytsak (UCU Lviv) deplored that, for several months now, “Ukrainian-Polish relations are in an extreme crisis”, and that historians in these cases had rather not been the avant-garde of the debate.