2014/07 Mark Von Hagen: Wartime Historian in Munich (Summer 2014)

Submitted by Redakteur on Sat, 19/07/2014 - 02:48.

June 23. I met my class—on the history of the Ukrainian revolution in the context of the Eastern Front of World War I--today for the first time at the Ukrainian Free University, located since World War II in a quiet residential neighborhood very near Schloss Nymphenburg. (The University was founded in Vienna in 1921, originally as a joint initiative of a broad coalition of Ukrainians who found themselves in the Austrian capital after World War I. It moved almost immediately to Prague, which was the intention of several founders; the founders also had an early quarrel with Myhailo Hrushevs’kyi, who had founded a sociological institute, and who advocated a “free” university with more open access and less rigid structures. His vision lost out to a more conventional European model of a degree-granting liberal arts institution. After the Soviet occupation of Prague in 1945, many of the faculty were arrested and perished; a few of those who had earlier fled to western Europe, refounded the university in Munich, eventually gaining financial and political support from the German federal and Bavarian state governments. In recent years, the University had to sell its more luxurious downtown building and move to the very residential Nymphenburg location.

I planned the course lectures and readings without having a good sense of who the students were going to be, how much preparation they had, and why they were interested in a class on “their” revolution. The university administration had arranged for me to teach 6 “pairs” of three hours each on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday over two weeks. On the first day, ten students appeared, and we added one more on Tuesday. They come from all over Ukraine, with slightly more from western Ukraine; several were graduates of Ivano-Frankivsk University in Lviv, others from Luhansk, Donetsk, and Cherkassy. All are fluent in Ukrainian and Russian, most all know English, and a few knew German, but not English; a couple knew Polish, French and Spanish. Some had arrived recently in Munich; others have been here for several years already, working in various jobs while pursuing their graduate degrees at the UFU. All earned their undergraduate degrees in Ukrainian institutions, mostly universities, but also the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and a pedagogical institute, with specialties ranging from philosophy to social pedagogy, political science and economics, foreign languages, journalism, and, from what I recall from their introductions, only one, Ihor-Iulian from Lviv, completed his degree in history (from the Ukrainian Catholic University there). Also, from what I have been able to observe, most of the students did not know one another before meeting in our classroom. They are mostly in their mid- to late twenties.

On the first day, I introduced myself, the aims of the seminar, the plan for the lectures and a brief survey of the major works that I included in the working bibliography. I also addressed the language question, namely my own language proficiency; I apologized for not having better spoken Ukrainian, but explained that Ukrainian was not only not my first foreign language (which was French, of all things), but not my second (Russian) or third (German) or even fourth (Polish), but that I had never had the opportunity to teach a course in Ukrainian and hoped they would be patient with me and help me improve my spoken Ukrainian over the course of or meetings. I suspect I spoke some pan-Slavic surzhyk of my own making, but—from the students’ expressions and frequent questions and comments—I was reasonably reassured that I was getting something out that made sense to them.

I also explained how important knowing foreign languages is in general for historians, but especially for historians of Ukraine. I pointed to the example of the history of the institution that was our host, the Ukrainian Free University. Founded by emigres from briefly independent Ukraine in Vienna in 1921, where many journalists and politicians from the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR in Ukrainian) had found refuge, including Myhailo Hrushevs’kyi, who had founded a Ukrainian Sociological Institute and was part of the initial planning for the University. His advocacy of a different model of “free” university with more open admission policies and less structured degree programs lost out to another vision of a more traditional degree-granting European university. The University soon moved to Prague, a city already popular with Ukrainian youth, and received support from the new Czechoslovak state (and its foreign ministry) for the interwar years, surviving with trouble under Nazi occupation. When the Soviet Army arrived in Prague in 1945, several of the faculty had already fled further west, but those who remained were arrested and many were executed by the NKVD. Those who had survived in the west refounded the University in Munich, this time with help from both the federal German government and the Bavarian state government, which has traditionally been in the hands of the Christian Social Union party, which was staunchly anti-communist, as were the Ukrainian emigres of the University. (Munich was also host during the Cold War to the large staffs of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, since moved to Prague in a post-Cold War reverse move.) The point of all this institutional history was to acknowledge the role of the Ukrainian diaspora in sustaining historical study of Ukraine outside of the Soviet Union; those diaspora scholars adapted to the national intellectual and academic traditions of their host countries and made thereby important contributions to several countries’ intellectual histories. Many of the best works about Ukraine’s history have been published in English, German, and other languages. And, in some understanding, what we are doing in this class continues those traditions of nation-building and the role of history in those projects. I also confessed that teaching this course for me was not only a challenge, but a rare treat: where, after all, could I spend an entire semester teaching about this brief but momentous period in the history of Ukraine and to an audience who actually might care as much or more about this history as I do?

But beyond this institutional history, I introduced the students to my understanding of “entangled history” and how Ukraine’s history is an example of such a history that is shaped by forces both in and outside Ukraine at key moments in history, such as the First World War and revolutions that are the focus of our seminar. (Finding a Ukrainian equivalent for “entangled” has been a challenge. The original French histoire croisee has been translated in German by Andreas Kappeler and Philipp Ther as verflochtene Geschichte. I have suggested for a Russian variant perepletennaia, and for a Ukrainian variant, perepletiina istoriia.) I proposed to them that the Ukraine that appeared in 1917-1918 was above all the work of Ukrainian national activists, but that those Ukrainian activists were found not only in Kyiv, but also in Lviv, in Vienna and in Berlin, and that Germans, Austrians, French, and other foreign politicians, statesmen, intellectuals, and others also helped to shape the first Ukrainian state. This situation is far from unique to Ukraine’s history; consider Poland and Czechoslovakia, whose “re-emergence” and emergence were spearheaded by nationalist “entrepreneurs” but also sanctioned by several European powers even before the Versailles peace settlements.

I got my first question about fifteen minutes into the class from Borys Drohomyrets’kyi, “How is that you have come to be interested in this period in this country when many specialists in our own country find these years to be so complicated?” Or why was I interested in Ukraine’s history? Not a bad question and a good excuse for me to go back to my first “intervention” in the field, my essay “Does Ukraine Have a History?” and how, due to a variety of historical and historiographical reasons, Ukraine does have a history, but it is one that has been often buried by the historiographies of its powerful neighbors, above all Russia and Poland, but also--with some important adjustments—Germany; all of these powerful historiographical traditions that depict Ukraine as a failed state or a land of chaos and anarchy that periodically called out for intervention from powerful neighbors have been adopted largely uncritically by Anglo-American historians. It is the problem of what Friedrich Engels called the “non-historical” nations, those peoples who found themselves in the modern era under alien rule of one sort or another. Ukrainian nationalism, like nationalism more generally, especially after World War II, was blamed for many of the excesses of the war and also treated as some historical anachronism not appropriate for countries modernizing and thereby, putatively, relinquishing national and ethnic identities to some overcome past.

On Tuesday I began with a discussion of the historiography of the First World War and reported to them about the conference I attended in Vienna in May on the downfall of the Habsburg monarchy. My aim in the lecture was to put the history of Ukraine’s revolution in the larger contexts of the Great War and the very recent debates sparked by, among others, Australian-British historian Christopher Clark in his Sleepwalkers. Herfried Muenkler, a Berlin political scientist, has also written a massive new tome, Der Erste Weltkrieg, in which he, too, from a different angle, seeks to divert the discussion of the origins and conduct of the war from the question of who was guilty and also of the war’s inevitability to a sense of collective sleep-walking and of great contingency. Several recent letters to the editor in Sueddeutsche Zeitung have very critically dubbed this historiographical trend the “ideology of non-guilt.” Clark, and to some extent Muenkler as well, also stress how “modern” the First World War looks today, in the wake of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century global conflicts. I did my best to explain the stakes involved in the German Historikerstreit of the 1960s and the controversy surrounding the publication of Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht and its assertion of clear ties between German war aims declared in July 1914 and the establishment of an Ostimperium, an empire in eastern Europe that led to Hitler’s deadly occupation during World War II. In this context, the history of Ukraine is also tied to the questions of war guilt, whether for those Ukrainians who “chose” the losing side, the Central Powers, in World War I, or, even more painfully and still part of contemporary stereotypes of Ukrainians today (see the Russian accusations that the post-Yanukovych government in Kyiv are fascists) is the “choice” of many Ukrainians during World War II for Nazi Germany against Soviet Russia.

We also discussed how different from the German discussion was the discussion of the meaning of World War I in Vienna, where the focus of a conference in 2014 was already on 1918 and the downfall of the monarchy and the emergence of nationalist movements that shaped that collapse. I also shared with the class my experience with the group of scholars to “restore” the “forgotten” Eastern Front to the history of the war as we observe the hundredth anniversary of its outbreak this summer. The Eastern Front, many of us have argued, has been under-studied and under-represented in general histories of the war until recently, with the trench warfare of the Western Front, in particular, still reigning as one of the central experiences of that bitter conflict. The relative oblivion of the Eastern Front is partly the earlier “inconvenience” of the war for postwar national and revolutionary narratives. For historians writing inside the Soviet Union, the war was at best a prologue or prelude to the truly important event of the twentieth century, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and the Soviet state that was its legacy. Soviet historians shied away from investigating the “imperialist war” that, after all, the Russian empire lost; moreover, many of the generals who led the Russian war effort ended up on the side of the counter-revolutionary White armies and thereby were unacceptable in any pantheon of revolutionary military leaders. For different reasons, the history of World War One in Poland, Czechoslovakia and other new or “reborn” states following the war was occluded by the year 1918, the “birth” of several national states following the collapse of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman dynasties.

Ukraine’s revolution clearly fits into the story of national revolutions in eastern Europe and elsewhere in the world that confronted new opportunities and challenges during the war, but, in contrast to historians of Poland, Czechoslovakia, or other states that survived into the twentieth century, Ukraine was a case of failed independence and integration into a Soviet state that “gathered” many of the old nations of the former Russian empire it had allegedly overturned. In Soviet narratives, the history of a socialist and soviet Ukraine was similarly “integrated” into the all-Russian narrative that tied the Ukrainian revolution closely to the Russian one in Petrograd. And so, the history of Ukraine during World War has been doubly or triply “forgotten” by historians, despite the evidence of the war’s dramatically transformative impacts on all the societies that experienced the Eastern Front.

In these contexts, I discussed the history of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, its activities in Vienna, Berlin, and other wartime capitals, its innovative work among Russian prisoners-of-war in German, Austrian, and Hungarian camps, its publication and journalistic efforts. The ULU was similar to several other such organizations of expatriate nation-builders operating in the capitals of the states fighting their own empires. We also discussed another important set of events affecting Ukraine’s wartime and postwar history, namely, the serial occupations of Ukrainian lands (Galicia, Bukovyna, left-bank Ukraine and more) by Russian, then Austrian, then Russian again, then German and Austrian armies between 1914-1918 (and how those occupations were still not the end of Ukraine’s unfortunate geopolitical fate to be later occupied by White armies, a Polish army, and several times by Bolshevik Russian forces).

On Wednesday I turned to the Ukrainian revolution itself and focused on Pavlo Khrystiuk and how “living” with him and his eyewitness account and history of the Ukrainian revolution sent me back to books I had read earlier about the Russian revolution and rethought them. My first encounter with a Social Revolutionary who was an ethnic Ukrainian came in graduate school at Stanford University, where my advisor, Terence Emmons, introduced me to another Pavel—Pavel Sergeevich Dotsenko, who I knew as a Siberian Social Revolutionary. He had been arrested at the age of 18 in Novorossiisk for conducting revolutionary agitation among the sailors of that port city and sentenced to exile in Siberia. In Siberia, he worked with the local peasant cooperatives that were one of the favored institutions of his peasant-oriented socialist party. He also was also a fervent advocate of the rights of the oppressed peoples of Siberia and for a democratic and federal Russia as a goal of the revolution. When the Bolsheviks came to power in Siberia, he was jailed by them as a counter-revolutionary, stayed in jail only a few weeks before fellow revolutionaries helped him to escape. Once out of prison, he organized the anti-Bolshevik resistance in Enisei province until the Whites overthrew the autonomist Duma there and, like the Bolsheviks before them, began arresting their political enemies, among whom the Social Revolutionaries were a leading target. Rather than face prison or worse for a third time, Pavel Sergeevich fled through China, eventually reaching the US and landing in northern California, where he did research work at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, a major archive and library associated with those topics and started by former President Herbert Hoover during his work with the American Red Cross in wartime Europe.

Pavel Sergeevich, his daughter Galya, and I became good friends. I was often invited to their home for lavish Russian-style dinners with vodka toasts, herring, borshch, and other classic dishes and was asked to bring my accordion for after-dinner entertainment. I had a full repertoire of Russian and other East and Central European folk music, but Pavel Sergeevich laid down one important rule. “No playing either of the Internationale or of `God, Save the Tsar,’” the anthems of two tyrannical regimes that had brought him and Russia so much suffering.” When I taught Soviet history, I always told Pavel Sergeevich’s story as an illustration of the dilemmas of the so-called “third way” in revolutionary Russia, but I also emphasized his Social-Revolutionary politics of peasant revolution and federalism.

When my friend and teacher of Ukrainian history Frank Sysyn asked me to read Khrystiuk’s Zamitky i materialy do istorii ukrains’koi revoliutsii in an old English-language translation, I found myself attracted to several aspects of Khrystiuk and his work. Like Dotsenko and numerous other “losers” in the Bolshevik revolution-- perhaps above all several Mensheviks—Khrystiuk seems never to have abandoned his faith in and commitment to his version of the revolution. Like the authors of the better eyewitness accounts, he too doesn’t deny that the Bolsheviks enjoyed important support and that individual Bolsheviks were also decent human beings as well as committed revolutionaries. His account of the revolution, which he wrote in exile in postwar Vienna in 1921, is widely cited by later historians of the period for his impressive array of contemporary sources to tell the story of the Ukrainian national movement and its struggles for legitimacy and statehood. He knew personally--and in many cases, very well—many of the leading personalities of the revolutionary movement in Ukraine and also many in Petrograd and elsewhere. In Vienna he was an important actor in the Foreign Bureau of the Social Revolutionary Party; he also worked as a journalist and was a founding member of Myhailo Hrushevs’kyi’s Ukrainian Sociological Institute.

Like Hrushevs’kyi and several other exiled Ukrainian leftists, Khrystiuk decided to cast his lot with Soviet Ukraine after the Communist Party announced hits policy of ukrainianization in 1923, which the emigres hoped was a way for them to contribute to the nation-building project that they had fought for all their adult lives, even if within the constraints of a Soviet Ukrainian republic, shorn of it independence. Nearly all of these returnees, after working in various official positions in the economy and culture, were falsely accused of anti-Soviet activity as members of a non-existing “Ukrainian National Center.” They all died in administrative exile, as Hrushevs’kyi, or, more often, in Stalin’s Gulag, like Khrystiuk.

I have argued elsewhere recently that Khrystiuk’s understanding of Ukraine’s history comes very close to a colonialist reading and that he offered the example of Ukraine’s struggle to all those peoples who also suffered from the double oppression of class and nation, as did the largely peasant Ukrainian nation. Not only did Khrystiuk and his fellow revolutionaries suffer defeat at the hands of the emerging Stalinist political system of the late 1920s and 1930s, but even in the diaspora, the leftist founding fathers of the Ukrainian nation have been also dismissed as naïve and misguided in their emphasis on the social and economic aspects of nation-building, rather than that more unambiguously state and political focus of the right-wing, starting with the hetmanites around Viacheslav Lypynskyi, founder of the state (derzhavnytska) school of Ukrainian historiography. So Khrystiuk is a “loser” many times over, and it is partly for that reason that his account of the events he witnessed and took part is so poignant and so often insightful. Nearly all subsequent historians have relied heavily on his judgments and on his chronology of the major episodes in the history of the Ukrainian revolution. I also urged the students to enjoy Khrystiuk’s pre-Soviet Ukrainian language.

I took advantage of file saved on my computer of a 100-plus page analysis of Khrystiuk’s views on the Ukrainian revolution by two scholars at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, V. Kucher and D. Mukha, to quote extensively from Khrystiuk himself for a change, so the students’ ears wouldn’t be so disturbed by my ungrammatical spoken Ukrainian. As a result, I spoke more Ukrainian this session than ever—with the patient help of the students who helped me find the right words for what I wanted to say—and was so exhausted by the intense concentration that when I got into the tram to go home and heard German, it felt like my native language!

That morning I had been contacted by email by Timofei Neshitov from the Sueddeutsche Zeitung to write an op-ed after he saw the announcement for my upcoming talk at the Ludwig Maximilian University on Tuesday. After a few more email exchanges and a phone call, I began trying to adapt that talk to a 1300-word piece with more direct contemporary connections. Tim is a Russian from St. Petersburg who came to Germany to study and decided to stay a while, but maintains his Russian citizenship. He says it came in handy when he could travel to Crimea without a visa and can visit his parents, who still live in St. Petersburg. He thought I was just in Munich to give the talk, so when I told him I was teaching at the Ukrainian Free University for two weeks and that we had just been informed that new Kyiv mayor and world boxing champion Vitaliy Klychko was visiting the University on the following Monday, he decided to join us for that and write up a feature story about the UFU.

Thursday evening Johnny and I took part in a German national celebration, the World Cup soccer match between Team USA and the German national team. Our German friend Gunnar Lueders and his sister joined us at our local Gaststaette Atzinger for a communal viewing of the match, which was understood here as a clash of two Germans, the US coach Juergen Klinsmann and the German coach Joachim (alias Jochi) Loew. Klinsmann left Germany a few years back to build the American team into an international powerhouse, so much of the German coverage was about his successes and failures at that project. Around Loew, on the other hand, there is something close to a cult of personality with television segments about his history and greatness with “power” music. The national slogan is “Jochi, we are behind you.” After Germany beat the US 1-0 the party just began; late into the night we heard horns honking and cheers from the street.

Friday. Off for a weekend in Vienna to recover the “lost trip” from May. Used the four-hour train ride to finish Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, memoirs recommended to me by several people, but most recently by Regine Kappeler in Vienna during my May visit. Zweig is enjoying a renewed interest with the publication of English-language translations of his several novels and the release of the film The Grand Budapest Hotel. He describes the change of life from the comfort of his prewar bourgeois Jewish family in Vienna through his time in Berlin, Paris, Salzburg, and eventually choosing self-exile from Nazi-occupied Austria, the country he considered the first victim of Hitler and a warning to Europe of the horrors that would follow elsewhere. In London he found other Viennese exiles, notably Sigmund Freud, and committed suicide there with his second wife in 1942. The World is a lament for a lost European civilization of cosmopolitanism, in particular one based on prewar Vienna and the multinational empire over which it reigned.

We spent nearly 48 hours in Vienna, arriving on the even of the 100th anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife. We reunited with my “cousin” Christa Schmidt, who had reserved for us a room in a relatively new Motel One at Vienna’s West train station. We spent most of Saturday and Sunday morning with Christa, who organized a wonderful tourist program for us. This was much appreciated, since lately we’ve noticed when we travel to Europe, it’s mostly for conferences with little opportunity to do anything that ordinary tourists do. We made up for that in the last 36 hours. We started with Belvedere Palace, Empress Maria Theresa’s gift to her victorious commander, Prince Eugen of Savoy, and took in the beautiful views of downtown Vienna. We entered from Prinz-Eugen Strasse, the former address of my mother and grandmother during and after World War II. We exited Lower Belvedere and paused for a Russian accordionist playing Katiusha in front of the Soviet war memorial on Schwarzenberg Platz. Putin had visited the monument on Wednesday, two days before our arrival, and had left a wreath to honor those fallen in the Battle of Vienna. Next we walked to the Karlsplatz and eventually took the elevator to the top of the Karlskirche for another wonderful view and lighting candles in one of the small chapels dedicated to those officers and soldiers of the Dragoon Regiment who fell from 1914-1918. Another chapel was dedicated to the last emperor of Austria-Hungary, Karl, who assumed the throne after Franz-Josef’s death (and the still mysterious death of Crown Prince Rudolf and then the assassination of Francis Ferdinand in June 1914).

After a sumptuous lunch of Wiener Schnitzel and Erdaepfelsalat in a Café zur Oper, we made our next stop at the Third Man Museum (my request), a relative newcomer to the Vienna museums scene, a private museum (and open only Saturday afternoons from 2-6 pm). The exhibits were, according to the museum catalogue, among the first to treat the history of the allied occupation period. I introduced myself to a very sympatischer Gerhard Strassgschwandtner, founding director and guide, and told him the story of my mother and father. He was very interested to hear the story, and we ended up exchanging email addresses and promises to stay in touch. I told him that my nephew and I recorded an oral history of my father last summer and how my father acknowledged that his time in Vienna as an American officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps was the best time of his life. We also learned from the exhibit that Schwarzenberg Platz had been renamed Stalinplatz during the occupation; talk about historic revenge! Following a full day in a very hot summertime Vienna, we fled the city for a few hours to the Vienna Woods, starting with Eiskaffee at the Heiligenkreuz (Holy Cross) monastery and then a brief visit to Mayerling, the onetime hunting palace where the Crown Prince Rudolf and his 17-year-old lover were found shot in their beds. Rudolf’s father, the Emperor Franz Josef, ordered the hunting palace transformed into a convent and donated it to the Order of Carmelite nuns. We returned home thoroughly exhausted but very fulfilled to turn in early for our last morning in Vienna.

After breakfast at our Motel One, Christa picked us up for a trip to Steinhof and the magnificent Otto-Wagner-Spital and its gold-domed church that is under consideration for protection as a world heritage site under UNESCO. Otto Wagner was the architecture and design counterpart to Gustav Klimt in painting and Gustav Maher in music (and many others), a master of Jugendstil and the Vienna Sezession. We visited a couple other Otto Wagner villas on Huetteldorferstrasse and ended up back in town for a last lunch of Hungarian Gulasch with Servilletenknoederl (my favorite childhood food) in a restaurant in Christa’s neighborhood. Despite it being a hot day, the restaurant was full of families celebrating their Sunday with delicious food and drink and conversation around a table.

Christa left us with a final gift; she had read all the morning newspapers and save for me all the sections dealing with World War I and Ukraine, sometimes in the same articles. The big news was a concert in Sarajevo by the Vienna Philharmonic following on the scholarly conference that was boycotted by both France and Serbia. A parallel ceremony was conducted—this one with the participation of both the Serbian president and prime minister—at Vyshegrad in Bosnian Serbia in honor of the “hero” and “liberator” of the Serbs, the “ assassin-terrorist” Gavrilo Princip. Elsewhere a reviewer commented on a new three-volume, 3000-plus-page biography of Franz Ferdinand by one Wladimir Aichelburg, himself a Czech count among whose ancestors was one of the Archduke’s educators. The Berlin political scientist Herfried Muenkler, who I hope to meet later this summer, offered us “a new view of the First World War” in Der Standard. The Sunday edition also published excerpts from Christopher Clark’s Sleepwalkers, as well as the hostile reaction in Belgrade to Clark’s book, also a passage from the leading Austrian historian of the war, Manfried Rauchensteiner, and German historians, including Gerd Krumreich and Joern Leonhard (whose co-edited book on empires I recently reviewed for Slavic Review). One publicist noted another important anniversary, 25 years since 1989 and how the fates of Russia and eastern Europe took such different paths. Overall, I can’t say any of this showed evidence of the Russlandversteher who Andreas Kappeler and I discussed a couple months ago during his visit to Arizona.

We returned to Munich and Germany, where I found the Saturday-Sunday issue of SZ to try to capture a German version of the weekend’s events. In that issue and in more detail in Monday’s issue the focus was on the German President’s own World War I conference at his Schloss Belvedere in Berlin. The title was “Europe talks about the First World War: Divided Memories, Common Experiences.” The author, Kurt Kister, proposed a third undeclared question for the gathering of historians: “what do we learn from history?” and comes to the answer he takes from Christopher Clark’s recent bestseller, “nothing.” Joachim Gauck summoned historians “from all over the world” and also delivered his own oration in which he tied the war that broke out in 1914 to World War II, 1989, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, and finally a word of concern over a revival of “old thinking in power and spheres of influence” that involves “destabilizing of foreign states and the annexation of foreign territories”—this a clear reference to Putin’s Russia. Eight historians were featured speakers, including: Selim Deringil from Istanbul who traced the evolution of the myth of the battle of Gallipoli from Kemal’s Turkey to the Islamist narrative of current President Erdogan. David Reynolds of Cambridge discussed why the Great War maintains it hold over British memory when compared with World War II. Britain lost twice as many victims in World War I as during the next war; the reasons for fighting the Second World War were clear, whereas the First Word had no such clarity. Reynolds went on to speculate that Germany and France were able to get over their own West Front obsession through the process of European integration, whereas Britain had no such “exit strategy” and remains a belated, often unwilling, European power. Joern Leonhard from Freiburg argued that nowhere in Europe did the question of war guilt play so great a role as in Germany; he reminded the audience of the Fischer controversy of the 1960s as one next eruption of this issue, with the recent reception of Clark’s Sleepwalkers as a further echo of that debate. The First World War thereby fits quite well into the larger story of the “catastrophic history of the German nation-state in the first half of the 20th century.” French historian Elise Julien argued that la Grande Guerre is viewed not only as the prehistory of the other great war, but--not in the sense as in Britain--the World War II was the “good war.” A united France fought eventually to victory over Germany, whereas in the Second World War, France was not united, suffered a catastrophic defeat and lived for years under German occupation with resistance fighters, collaborators and undecided. One final paragraph in the SZ feuilleton noted how many of the historians who presented had heard the stories of their grandparents about the First World War and how those stories had shaped their own teaching. This was the sole occasion for a very brief mention of two other participants, my friend Boris Kolonitskii from St. Petersburg and Maciej Gorny from Warsaw. But two historians were not mentioned at all of the announced eight. Apparently the history of the Eastern Front has not yet attained the status of the former great powers, though no mention was made of any participant from Austria-Hungary either, or its successor states, other than Poland (partly). In the “real” world of international relations, the European Union, backed by the United States, gave Putin till Monday night to show serious evidence of contributing to the de-escalation of the conflict with Ukraine or face new sanctions.

Monday. Today was the day we were meant to receive Mayor Klychko halfway through my class, so I prepared for an abbreviated session, but one that I knew was going to be difficult, namely, the first—and also relatively “forgotten”--Russo-Ukrainian war of the putative “peace” around Brest-Litovsk, a war that started with a manifesto in December 1917 from the Petrograd Council of People’s Commissars to the “Ukrainian people with demands in the form of an ultimatum to the Ukrainian Rada,” in characteristic Bolshevik form casting serious doubts on the legitimacy of the Rada government. Tim Neshitov from SZ had asked if he might attend my discussion that afternoon, so I welcomed yet another challenging audience for this very sensitive and, frankly, tragic few weeks in Russian-Ukrainian relations. Reading this manifesto is an amazing experience in itself; while recognizing the right of the Ukrainian people to national self-determination up to and including separation from Russia, the manifesto goes on to accuse the Rada government of counterrevolutionary activity and demanding an end to such activity within 48 hours or to consider themselves to be in a state of war! And so began several weeks of what Khrystiuk understood as the first war between two genuinely revolutionary states and their workers, peasants, and soldiers, a tragedy for both revolutions. We have remarkably candid accounts of the brutal occupation of Kyiv and Ukraine from Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko in his memoirs published in 1930 in Moscow, and in the memoirs of Ukrainian Bolsheviks published in the 1920s in Litopys revoliutsii. In this first war of Bolshevik armed terror, a former Left Social Revolutionary, Mikhail Murav’ev, stood out for his brutality toward Russian officers, clergy, and bourgeoisie, but also anyone speaking Ukrainian or “looking like” a Ukrainian.

I shared with the students the reactions to these violent events of several contemporaries and eyewitnesses.

We broke for the Klychko event, which was something of a disappointment. I’m not sure we ever learned the real reason for his inability to join us in person, but one version was that his staff realized late that he needed to be in Kyiv for Constitution Day. Instead, he was Skyped in from Kyiv for about fifteen minutes. He spoke of his pride in the students and his hopes for them and Ukraine and of “our common fight” for Ukraine. A deputy, Oleksiy Reznikov, introduced himself as a lawyer who had been persuaded by Klychko’s own sacrifice to leave his business practice and join him on the city council. He declared that he was not a member of Klychko’s UDAR party but supported his efforts combat corruption and realize the European values that they were elected to bring to life. He also offered his own opinions about the constitutional process that has been promised by the newly elected government. The rector, Yaroslava Melnyk, welcomed all the guests and read the text of the University proclamation of Mayor Klychko as honorary senator of the University for his contributions to democracy in Ukraine. After the mayor’s office announced the cancellation, our rector made a very forceful appeal for at least a Skype appearance, and was successful in that appeal.

On Tuesday I was scheduled for two performances, a morning session with the students and then my lecture for the graduate colloquium for East and Southeast Europe at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in the evening. I also had some rare visuals for the two lectures, historic photos and postcards of members of the Ukrainian Central Rada in 1917 (including Khrystiuk) of the various negotiators at the Brest-Litovsk treaty talks in 1918 (including a wonderful German postcard of the Ukrainian delegation with several German generals on the eve of the signing of the treaty with Ukraine on February 9). My main argument in both the Ukrainian-language dress rehearsal and the English-language evening talk was about how the first Ukrainian state of the twentieth century was “made” by Ukrainian national politicians and statesmen (and not only in Kyiv, but also in Vienna, Berlin, Lviv and elsewhere) and also, importantly, with diplomats, military men, and politicians from Germany, Austria-Hungary, and even France and Great Britain, as well as other powers over a period of several weeks in December 1917 to February 1918.

I borrowed from Clark’s question of how war started to ask how peace was made out of the desperate straits of all the states represented in Brest. Major cities in Germany and Austria-Hungary were starving, unsettled by labor and antiwar protests; the Reichstag and Reichsrat were dominated by Social-Democratic majorities that demanded a just and democratic peace. The revolutionary Bolshevik dictatorship in Petrograd had seized power only in November 1917 and faced economic collapse and the beginnings of “counterrevolution” throughout the country. The Ukrainian state fought during 1917 with Russian authorities in the Petrograd Provisional Government and Soviet, and later with the Bolshevik government for recognition as the legitimate authority over the region without success. Ukraine had been the location of the Southwestern Front of the Russian Army, was home to large populations of prisoners-of-war and refugees from previous campaigns, and also operating from considerable weakness. A determined, united Ukrainian delegation however, was able to navigate among all these weaknesses and get its state recognized first by France in December 1917, then Britain, and in February, all the Central Powers.

I returned to the theme of forgotten history and squandered opportunities and alternatives in history. This first peace of the war has been almost universally ignored in general surveys of the war, and when it is mentioned it most often is lumped together with a very different treaty signed a month later by the Central Powers with Soviet Russia. I return to the few revisionist evaluations of this treaty and hope I have developed their arguments as well: Khrystiuk himself inspired two diaspora historians, Oleh Fedyshyn (with a Columbia history doctoral dissertation on the subject and a wonderfully balanced book, Germany’s Drive to the East and the Ukrainian Revolution); and a much lesser known but also very helpful book by Oleh Pidhainy, The Formation of the Ukrainian State. The leading Austrian historian of the treaty, Wolfdieter Bihl, likewise views this first treaty as the more important one of the two signed at Brest and a very important one in general. Most recently, Eric Lohr, who has spent a couple weeks in Munich working on his survey of Russia in World War I (writing together with another friend Josh Sanborn), informed about one of his recent doctoral students who has written a dissertation on the interactions of the Austro-Hungarian authorities with Ukrainians and also comes to similar conclusions.

Among the “makers” of Ukraine, an indispensable role was played by the Ukrainian delegation (Oleksandr Sevriuk, Mykola Liubyns’kyi, Mykola Levyts’kyi), all of them of the same “generation of 1917” that included Khrystiuk; they were under 30 years and served in the Ukrainian government since spring 1917, having come to politics via the Ukrainian student and soldiers’ movements. The next most important makers of Ukraine were the Germans, above all General Max Hofmann, the General Staff expert on Russia and with considerable experience in prewar Russia and Ukraine; the State Secretary (German Foreign Minister) Richard von Kuehlmann, both in Brest and later in his defense of the treaty to the German Reichstag, also was key. Even Bavaria had two important representatives at the Brest talks, Prince Leopold of Bavaria, the commander-in-chief of the Eastern Front troops, and the Bavarian State Secretary. Almost in spite of himself, Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Ottokar Czernin, also agreed to concessions at Brest that won him the lasting hatred of the empire’s Polis elites and a death knell for the so-called “Austro-Polish” solution to Vienna’s relations with its Poles. Other important players were Austrian Ruthenians, including the Reichsrat deputy from Bukovyna (and a friend of Czernin) and Mykola Zalizniak, a founding member of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine who had spent much of the war in Berlin trying to influence German circles in favor of Ukraine.

Even the Bolsheviks, who would later turn out to be the ultimate “un-makers” of the Ukrainian state, recognized the Ukrainian state under pressure from the Central Powers though it became clear quite early that the Bolsheviks had a very different understanding of the right of nations to self-determination than did the Ukrainian national forces. The French Republic was the first state to recognize the Ukrainian People’s Republic; here, the key player was General Georges Tabouis, who had been assigned as military liaison to the Russian Southwest Front and over the course of 1917 developed an understanding and appreciation of the Ukrainian national movement. Tabouis led the British to recognize Ukraine; even the United States, having only recently entered the war, sent its consult from Riga to open a consulate in Kyiv, but stopped short of recognizing the new state.

Because Frank Sysyn was scheduled to give a book presentation the following evening at UVU--one of the volumes of the writings of a populist Ruthenian priest, Myhailo Zubryst’kyi (who was active in the villages of Frank’s own Galician ancestors)—and because Zubryts’kyi was also active during World War I, I asked him to come to the class so I could introduce him. I also asked him if he might talk more about the history of the UVU and of its place in the intellectual, cultural and political history of the Ukrainian diaspora in Europe. Frank has a remarkable encyclopedic and prosopographical knowledge of the diaspora, and the more I listened to him, the more I realized that we had an amazing teaching and research opportunity. Later I drafted an outline for research/teaching project provisionally titled “Ukrainians in Munich; Bavaria and Ukraine;” the project envisions excursions for our students to Munich sites associated with Ukrainians and their lives, from the various churches, dormitories, language schools, cemeteries, and other institutions. The excursions would also introduce students to major archival and library holdings in Munich chronicling Ukrainians’ lives and their interactions with their adopted homes and German hosts, including the Radio Liberty archives, the records of the camps for displaced persons after World War II, similar archives for camps of refugees after World War I, Munich and Bavarian archives related to Ukrainians’ lives. (The archives of the UVU from its Prague period are almost all currently stored in Kyiv repositories after their seizure by the NKVD that followed on the Red Army entry into Prague in 1945.) Another and an important layer to this project would be to organize oral histories by the current generation of UVU students with members of the older generations of Ukrainian emigres still living in and around Munich. And to have the new generation of students conduct oral histories of their own experiences and how they are choosing to adapt to German society and culture and what they are trying to preserve of their Ukrainian identities and loyalties. From the other side of the Ukrainian-German connections, students could survey the Bavarian archives for those Bavarian participants at Brest in 1918, but also the Bavarian regiment that helped to staff the 1918 occupation in Ukraine. For later periods, following World War II, students might explore Bavarian, German (and American) treatment of Ukrainian displaced persons, support for Ukrainian institutions, including the UVU itself. The UVU is an ideal organization to take on this interactive study and recording of the history of Ukrainian-German relations as a scholarly and teaching institution and as an important repository of books, journals, archives, and photo and video materials.

For the evening lecture, I outlined how the decision of the Germans and the Austrians--belatedly and only after initially hesitating to join their German allies—to restore the Ukrainian state that had been overthrown by the Bolsheviks and to occupy Ukraine, in large measure to “allow” Ukraine to deliver the promised grain to the Central Powers. That occupation experience provided an early illustration of the dilemmas of treating what quickly became a German client state while trying to adhere to international law (including the treaty with Ukraine recognizing it as an independent and sovereign state) and mindful of parliamentary critics (in Vienna and Berlin) who kept watchful eyes on the developments in the East. Despite the efforts of the most responsible German officer in Kyiv, General Wilhelm Groener, and the German Ambassador, Philip Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein, nonetheless, the priorities and dynamics of the occupation quickly forced on the occupiers a coup d’etat against the government with which they signed the treaty and a “regime change” that replaced the leftist Ukrainian nationalists with a former tsarist general who proclaimed himself “hetman” of Ukraine. The German-Austrian-Ukrainian dictatorship that took shape produced a nationwide peasant insurgency in protest against the grain collections and labor unrest in the cities.

The evening audience at LMU was large and friendly. Several good questions were posed. Frank challenged my revisionism from the vantage point of a more conventional historiography identified with the hetmanite school (or state school) and Viacheslav Lypyns’kyi, but also captured in another very important memoir of the period, that of Dmytro Doroshenko. I replied that the hetmanites can claim that they were the only serious state-builders among the Ukrainian political elites, but it was the Rada negotiators who were the ones that delivered a state to the later monarchists, and the hetman himself had very conflicted attitudes about the future of an independent Ukraine, most dramatically illustrated by his appeal to the forces of a reunited Russia to unite Ukraine with such a Russia. Moreover, the hetmanite school has overlooked the very juridico-constitutional approach that Khrystiuk took to writing the history of the Ukrainian revolution. His was not just some socio-economic or class history, as his conservative critics have maintained.

Guido Hausmann, an LMU colleague and former student of Andreas Kappeler from his Cologne period, challenged me on the character of the 1918 occupation of Ukraine and its very bad outcome. There is no disagreement that the occupation ended badly, but I argued that it was not meant to be that way and that, judging by subsequent occupations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (I have in mind the recent US adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq where our intentions were not clearly as noble as the Germans’ in 1918), even with relatively good intentions of doing the “right” thing by the country you are occupying, the conditions of the occupation itself doomed those good intentions (on both sides) to failure. Both Groener and Hofmann in their diaries and memoirs lamented abandoning Ukraine to the Bolsheviks and claimed that they made cases for staying after November 1918, but to no avail.

July 2. The next day was my final day with the students, and I gave the Ukrainian-language version of the occupation portion of the evening talk. By Wednesday morning, my feuilleton in the SZ had appeared, together with Timofei’s story about the UVU; I felt like I had vindicated my invitation to teach and perhaps my deanship by getting the university some good exposure. It was sad to say goodbye to the students, many of whom had shared some of their personal stories with me during breaks. They all promised to stay in touch in the future, and I am to expect their papers for the course between July 20-25, when my grades are due. Even though all of them had voted to stay in Germany for the foreseeable future, they all asked me when I was last in Ukraine (and their home towns) and when I was planning my next visit. I was happy to be able to answer that I have been invited to Lviv in September for yet another World War I conference, this one hosted by my friend Yaroslav Hrytsak and supported by a US State Department grant.

July 4. Opening my email reminded me it was Independence Day in the US, but here the most important upcoming events are two soccer matches: Germany against France and Brazil against Colombia. (Germany and Brazil won.) But insofar as the United States is in the news today, it is against the backdrop of the NSA “scandal.” A story about the US consul-general hosting a party to celebrate American independence and freedom recorded his indirect allusion to the recent troubles between Germany and the US by quoting Winston Churchill that “one can always count on the US do the right thing. . .after they’ve tried everything else.” But the article reported a lower-level official representation from the Bavarian government and a feuilleton described the fate of a 27-year-old German who had been tracked by the NSA for trying to protect his anonymity. A sub-heading read “with the extension of the Patriot Act Obama cemented the culture of fear in law.” The back page of the section announces a public discussion on “Edward Snowden and the Secret War of the USA” upcoming in Munich and led by NDR editor John Goetz (described as having visited the whistleblower in Moscow) and SZ editor Frederik Obermaier, both of whom are described as having conducted worldwide research and to have revealed the lies of German authorities.

We also learned that Germany and France cornered Ukraine into a meeting with Russia in Berlin—notably with the USA but even any EU representation as such excluded—and extracted more concessions out of Poroshenko and virtually none out of Russia. I have to say that the Germans behaved far better in 1918—and the French in 1917—than they are doing today. And I’m thinking that the United States can for the time being only try to rally Ukraine’s neighbors—Poland, Moldova, Romania, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania—and help them formulate a strong and united response to the threats from Putin’s Russia and hope to persuade the all-too-conciliationist west Europeans (Germany, France, Britain, and Austria) to stand up for the “European” values that the Ukrainians appear to hold more dearly than they do.

War and World War One continue to feature in the news. In the culture section, Sabine Reithmaier reflects on a few openings in and around the city. The Bernrieder Buchheim-Museum will open an exhibit of the artwork of George Grosz (Krieg Grotesk) with some work by contemporaries and fellow antiwar artists Max Beckmann and Otto Dix (whose work is already featured at the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung). “For all three the First World War was the initial experience that markedly changed their life and work.” Grosz volunteered at the end of 1914 for the infantry but half a year later was released from the military as unfit for combat and began to work out his traumatic experiences in sketches of corpses, skeletons, dead trees and more images of death and violence. The Bavarian Army Museum is described as having the largest permanent exhibition in Europe about the First World War and featuring an exhibit about the outbreak of war in Bavaria. Reithmaier notes that there are also artists who want to enter into history from a more modern perspective. Suzanne Wagner conceived “A Living Monument” (Lebendes Mahnmal) for the victims of sexual violence in war and invite the audience to consider other heroes at the Feldherrenhalle on Odeonsplatz. Anna alerted me to an exhibit opening next week at the Jewish Museum, “Jews: Between Two Fronts, 1914-1918.”

July 5. German television news began with reports of the summoning of the US Ambassador in Berlin to register their concern after German authorities arrested a German man on suspicion of spying for the United States. Further commentary suggested that these latest clashes between the two allies will make US efforts to get German support for further sanctions against Russia over violations of Ukraine’s sovereignty, not the Germans seem to need an excuse to make nice with the Russians. News from Ukraine itself continues to be bad; more violence between government and anti-government forces in eastern Ukraine, but government forces have recaptured two recent separatist strongholds in Kramatorsk and Slaviansk.

Today was my first participation in the governing of the UVU in two sets of meetings, largely repetitive, first of the council of the faculties (of which there are three) followed by the council of the professors (profesors’ka rada). Each of these involved an elaborate counting ritual for the number of “mandates” (votes entrusted to those present by those not present) to ensure that we had a quorum to conduct business. We heard reports about the faculties, their students, about the university’s ties with other institutions, about publications, and other activities. The meetings started at 9.30 am and broke for a Vietnamese-Thai ordered-in lunch around 3 pm. In addition to the rector, chancellor, and others, several others arrived, including Tamara Hundorova from Kyiv, a literary historian at the Academy of Sciences (and a former vice-president of the International Association for Ukrainian Studies during my term as president), Osyp Nazaruk, Ukrainian literature specialist from the University of Warsaw, and Michael Moser, Slavic linguist at the University of Vienna and my predecessor as dean of the philosophy faculty at UVU and now my successor as president of the International Association for Ukrainian Studies (and the second non-Ukrainian and non-diaspora president after myself). The meetings were relatively ritualistic with some tension directed at the administration for the slow pace of the reports. The meetings went on for another couple hours and apparently got very heated and emotional, so I was doubly glad to have left after lunch and reconnected with Frank for a final Munich dinner at the Augustiner Keller Biergarten. Johnny and Frank ordered Schnitzels and I for some reason wanted a last portion of Leberkaes and a pretzel with our alcohol-free Weissbier!

July 6. Departure for home. The news continues to be dominated by the arrest of a German intelligence agent suspected of working for the US and the related reporting about the recent rejection by Germany of further contracts with Verizon due to concerns about violations of Germans’ privacy thanks to the revelations about the extent of NSA surveillance. We took a leisurely taxi ride to the airport and checked in without any trouble. But the closer we got to our United Airlines flight check-in, the more the outlines of that great American police state came into relief. For the first time, the multiple checkpoints and document checks and questions seemed to me to resemble a large occupation zone and all of us passengers treated as suspects, if not criminals with very few rights remaining. As a historian of the Soviet Union, it continues to amaze me that in “winning” the Cold War, we have now erected a surveillance system so comprehensive and intrusive that Comrade Stalin could not have dreamed of such “advances.” And that it is the Germans who are reminding us Americans of what freedom and privacy mean.