Ukraine on Europeans’ “mental map”

The traveling exhibition “Why Are You Still Alive?”, presented by the Mykola Haievoi Center, is currently on display at the University of Potsdam. It addresses the Holodomor, the famine in Ukraine triggered by dictator Joseph Stalin in 1932–33, which claimed some four million lives. To accompany the exhibition, the Film University in the Babelsberg district screened the new documentary “Family Album”. It links the famine of that time with Russia’s current war against its neighbor. Director Maryna Tkachuk traveled from Kyiv to Potsdam for the discussion that followed.

The film also tells a family story. It begins when British photographer Samara Pearce, the protagonist, inherits the old Leica belonging to her Austrian-Jewish great-grandfather Alexander Wienerberger, along with two albums containing his secretly taken photographs of the Holodomor. The Ukrainian director uses this as the starting point for her moving documentary. Samara discovers her life’s theme in her family history, for her great-grandfather—an engineer in Soviet service in Kharkiv—became, by chance, a witness to and the most important photographic chronicler of the famine. Since 2022, the photographer has traveled every year to the regions where her great-grandfather took his pictures. Maryna Tkachuk accompanied her with a film camera.

Professor Marion Jenke of the KONRAD WOLF Film University Babelsberg, to give her full name, began by highlighting initiatives at her university in support of Ukrainian filmmakers. The discussion about the film centered on the dramatic events in Ukraine both then and now, as well as on the significance, perspectives, and emotions of outside observers. The role of Wienerberger and the most important writing eyewitness, the British journalist Gareth Jones, was highlighted. While Wienerberger was able to smuggle hundreds of his Holodomor photos to Austria via diplomatic mail, surprisingly only a single relevant image has survived from Jones, who also took many photographs while traveling. Gerhard Gnauck, who works at the MHZ, cited the Polish author Mirosław Wlekły, whose biography “Gareth Jones – Chronicler of the Famine in Ukraine 1932/33” was published in translation by Hamburg’s Osburg Verlag in 2022.

Maryna Tkachuk reported that during screenings of her film in Europe, alongside applause, some people claimed that the Holodomor was a “fake” or a “fairy tale.” The director, whose apartment in Kyiv was devastated by a Russian missile strike in 2025, lamented the current prevalence of hunger in the Russian-occupied territory of Ukraine. She cited reports from the Kherson region: According to these reports, the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky is currently experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe. Residents have been cut off for weeks not only from electricity and water, but also from food. Her next film, set to begin production in 2026, the director said, deals with nuclear weapons and previously unknown nuclear incidents in Ukraine under Soviet rule.

Two weeks earlier, the exhibition had opened at the University of Potsdam with a discussion (“The Holodomor and German Memory”). Members of the Potsdam-based NGO Push-UA.de presented so-called survival food and its ingredients on small plates, prepared as they were in 1933. With their help—by processing pine cones, tree bark, chestnuts and acorns, mushrooms, grasses, and even leather—many people in Ukraine had tried to survive at that time.

Host Professor Dominik Geppert, historian Franziska Davies, and Slavicist Professor Alexander Wöll discussed before an audience of about 50 people why the Soviet state crime with the highest death toll had been so overlooked by the German public and academia for decades. Davies criticized the fact that many Western historians had been fascinated by empires and, in particular, by the “Russian colonial master narrative.” The “anti-colonial dimension of non-Russian national movements” in the Tsarist and Soviet states, by contrast, had been overlooked. Wöll recalled how, after 2004—following the peaceful, pro-European “Orange” Revolution in Kyiv—Ukraine was able to enter the “mental map” of Germans thanks to its writers and artists.

A text by the East German historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk provoked controversy. He had recently written about the German "Historikerstreit" (“historians’ dispute”) of the 1980s and, in particular, the contributions made by Jürgen Habermas at the time: “This debate was necessary to forcefully establish National Socialism as a central part of the Federal Republic’s historical and political memory, and it was harmful because it forcefully (…) relegated Soviet-style communism to a historically secondary position—a move that has remained highly successful in Germany to this day.” It was also mentioned that approximately 110 documentaries and feature films have been made worldwide about the Nazi perpetrator Adolf Eichmann (several were recently shown at the Film Museum in Potsdam), whereas only three have been made to date about the greatest Soviet crime.

The event was co-hosted by the Civic Education Forum Brandenburg of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

The Holodomor exhibition will be on view through July 2, 2026, at the University of Potsdam, Campus Am Neuen Palais 10, Haus 11, Säulenhalle.