Oberstdorf, ca. 1917
ANNUAL MYKOLA HAIEVOI LECTURE 2026
"Die ukrainische Spur oder: die verlorene Unschuld der deutschen Provinz"
The Annual Mykola Haievoi Lecture is a new annual lecture series organized by the Mykola Haievoi Center for Modern History, in which the Center invites an outstanding figure from academia or the public sphere to deliver a public lecture once a year. Prof. Karl Schlögel will open the series with his lecture „Die ukrainische Spur oder: die verlorene Unschuld der deutschen Provinz“, organized in cooperation with the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The Center’s annual conference, “Reckoning and Remembrance: Germany, Ukraine, and the Second World War after 1945,” will take place on the following two days.
Language: German
PROGRAM
Opening Remarks
Prof. Dr. Martin Schulze Wessel, Chair of the History of Eastern and Southeastern Europe at LMU Munich and Director of the Mykola Haievoi Center for Modern History
Lecture by Prof. Dr. Karl Schlögel
Millions of Germans were on the move throughout occupied Europe, including in Ukraine: as members of the Wehrmacht, administrative officials, logistics and cultural experts, and members of special operations units. What they had seen and experienced found its way back to the German provinces from which they had come—for example, to Bavaria, Swabia, or the Allgäu—and there it, as it were, faded away: a Ukrainian trace that had long since become invisible.
Commentary by Prof. Dr. Yuri Shapoval, followed by a discussion
Karl Schlögel is one of the most distinguished experts on Eastern Europe; from 1990 to 1994, he was a professor of Eastern European history at the University of Konstanz, and from 1994 until his retirement in 2013, he was a professor at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). He has received numerous awards, including the 2024 Gerda Henkel Prize and the 2025 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
Yuri Shapoval is one of the most renowned historians of 20th-century Ukrainian history, particularly the Soviet era. He is a professor at the Institute for Political and Ethnonational Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a senior researcher at the Mykola Haievoi Center for Modern History.
Moderated by
Franziska Kokorsch, Coordinator at the Mykola Haievoi Center for Modern History
The Mykola Haievoi Center for Modern History is a joint research center of the LMU Munich and the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv under the direction of Prof. Dr. Martin Schulze Wessel and Prof. Dr. Yaroslav Hrytsak. The research investigates Ukraine's experience under the rule of the two most violent regimes of twentieth-century Europe, National Socialist Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, and the contested memory of the mass crimes they committed. The Center is named after UCU PhD student Mykola Haievoi, who had been due to join the Center as a doctoral researcher, volunteered to defend his homeland, and was killed on August 27, 2024, just weeks before the Center's opening.