XXIX. Greifswalder Ukrainicum – Greifswald Ukrainian Summer School under the scientific direction of Professor Dr. Roman Dubasevych (Greifswald)

The stunning resilience and mobilization of Ukrainian society in the fight against the Russian
aggression, often may one overlook the feelings of nostalgia and mourning accompanying the war from its first day. Though these feelings most visibly center around the sorrow about the human losses and destruction of cities and landscapes, inflicted by the war, its deeper level seem to reflect the dooming consciousness about the irreversible changes Ukrainian society is more generally going through after a long period of peace and evolution after the end of the World War II. Despite the promises of decolonization, decommunization, and de-russification to inaugurate a birth of a new European and World leading nation, Ukrainian society appears now as wounded as rarely in its history. Moreover, 2025 it is hard to imagine that some ten years ago, after the victory of the Euromaidan, Ukrainian culture was celebrating its inclusivity, discovering, for instance, its Russophone-Jewish poets and artists like Boris Khersonskii, Aleksander Roitburd, or Ievgenia Bilorusets’, or historians could conduct critical debates about natiocentric approach to Ukraine’s history.

Yet, the re-legitimization of nationalism and monoculturalism as the single survival strategies during the war against authoritarian Russia, is paradoxically accompanied by the feelings of nostalgia going further back in the past – from the time before the war in Donbas 2014 till paradox (and often encoded) flashes of the deeper Soviet nostalgia. For example, watching the Ukrainian TV-shows from the early 2000s or 1990s, it is hard not to envy Ukraine’s own past –its bewildering post-Soviet openness, diversity, naivete and peacefulness, in spite all the political and economical turmoil. Did we possess a paradise which seems irredeemably lost in the war and post-Soviet transition? It is as hard to suppress the tears thinking about the efforts the Soviet Ukrainian society put into overcoming the authoritarian Soviet rule, and to build a new country, driven by deeply rooted dreams for better – freer, just, and prosperous – future.

Anyway, the successful release of the documentaries like Iaremchuk: Nezrivniannyi svit krasy
(Yaremchuk: An Unmatched World of Beauty, 2024) about the Ukrainian Karel Gott, the pop-star Nazarii Iaremchuk, the re-canonization of the movies like The Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Serhii Paradzhanov along with historical dramas about the poet Vasyl Stus (Zaboronenyi, engl. The Forbiden 2019), the hipsterian demand for Soviet memorabilia in the midst of the fierce fight against its spirits, signals important contradictions within the current societal and political metanarratives. What does the agenda of the anti-imperial or anti-Soviet (Ukrainian) struggle mean if the “golden archive” of contemporary Ukrainian culture was so deeply shaped by these periods of history and common cultural space?

This year Ukrainicum sets out to explore these contradictions and their impact on the current cultural and political situation. What do they say about the Ukrainian society? Are they a “natural” psychological reaction and compensatory mechanism to the ongoing destruction? Do they reveal cultural heritage that to be protected against the mindless banning and cancelling? Are these moments of longing for a “lost paradise” a decadent, “restorative” (Svetlana Boym) impulse or do they represent the “reflective” search for answers for the most pressing issues of the present day – a insight into the causes of the war or even the way out of it? Can these structures of feelings and sensibilities create new solidarities and envisage the communities of the future? And finally: how do they relate to the general feeling of uncertainty, insecurity, competition, rearmament, and alienation the global world is entering after the post-war peace?

The language of instruction is English. Successful participation requires language proficiency at the B2/C1 level or higher.
An application is required. The application deadline is 30 May.