At the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade award ceremony on October 23, 2022, in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, the prominent Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan emphasized the communication challenges between Ukraine and the West. According to Zhadan, Ukrainians—despite extremely limited resources—have risked resistance against a militaristic superpower to defend their country, democracy, and Europe itself, whereas Europe has hesitated to act decisively, revealing an unwillingness to leave its “comfort zone.”
While this view is in line with the majority of Ukrainian intellectuals’ praise for Ukrainian resilience and criticism of Western “vulgar pacifism” and “westsplaining,” it also raises many questions. How does the presumed European unwillingness to endure “discomfort” align with an unprecedented level of solidarity and assistance, especially toward refugees, or with the substantial financial investments in Ukrainian resistance that negatively impact the European economy and stability? How does the steady optimism of Ukrainian state officials and intellectual elites relate to the Ukrainian population’s widespread resistance to forced mobilization? Or should the latter also be seen as a form of grassroots resilience? More fundamentally, how is resilience constructed, and on which cultural and historical models does it rely (and why)? Should resilience be treated as a value in itself, or should it be reflected upon and rationalized? Can resilience justify the romanticization of trauma and violence? Are there limits to resilience, as the images from freezing Ukrainian cities might suggest? Conversely, could Europe’s reluctance to engage in open military conflict be explained not by a lack of resilience but, for example, by the continent’s extensive history of military disasters and defeats, which, according to Aleida Assmann, have become the cornerstone of European memory politics and political culture?
The Greifswalder Ukrainicum 2026 critically and interdisciplinarily engages with these uneasy questions. Its primary goal is to explore the multifaceted, often contradictory nature of resilience and its complex relationship to peacebuilding. At the same time, it also aims to connect Ukrainian suffering and the reactions to it to Europe’s intensive engagement with the traumatic events of the “extreme” twentieth century (Eric Hobsbawm), mapping possible bridges between different concepts of conflict resolution. Alongside (geo)political and large-scale economic perspectives, we are particularly interested in grassroots strategies of resilience, survival, and coping with trauma in society and culture. We aim to uncover how these strategies transcend or even subvert official narratives, compensating for shortcomings and oversimplifications at the state level and shaping everyday practices beyond prescriptive models. In this context, we pay special attention to the potential of scholarship and art to unsettle society’s discursive comfort through critical interrogation, so as to avoid the fate of a new “uncomfortable place” (endroit inconvénient), astutely documented by Jonathan Littell in his eponymous book on Babyn Yar and war-torn Ukraine (2023).
Yevgenia Belorusets, writer and photographer (Kyiv/Berlin), will give the opening lecture at the research group on Monday, 10 August 2026, at 6 p.m.
Weitere Informationen folgen hier in Kürze.