Offener Brief an S.E. Botschafter Melnyk
Dear Ambassador Melnyk,
Since its founding in February 2015, the German-Ukrainian Historical Commission (DUHK) has been the first and only institutional bridge between German and Ukrainian historiography. It was initiated in summer 2014 by a group of German historians who wanted to show their solidarity with Ukraine and their Ukrainian colleagues in the face of the Russian aggression. It has been and remains an exclusively public initiative that does not depend on funding or support of either German or Ukrainian state institutions. It treasures its academic autonomy.
Even with the limited resources the DUHK has at its disposal, it has been fulfilling its role successfully. Here is a short list of our achievements during these five years:
- In five conferences that took place alternately in Germany and Ukraine, we discussed central questions of Ukrainian history and Ukrainian-German relations not only with historians from Germany and Ukraine, but also eminent colleagues from other European countries and North America.
- The Commission specifically addresses younger scholars: it offers a scholarship program for Ukrainian historians to come to Germany and vice versa. The Commission awards five scholarships per year on average. The enthusiastic reports of the scholarship holders show us that funding through scholarships is an important element of our work.
- Once a year, the Commission organizes a workshop for young historians from Germany and Ukraine on the methods and theories of history. This format was also very well received by our participants.
- The Commission is in the process of developing an online portal on the modern history of Ukraine, which will be aimed at teachers and pupils beyond the academic world. The first module of this portal on the history of the Second World War is expected to be published by the end of this or beginning of next year.
We have recently informed you personally about our work. It is therefore all the more incomprehensible to us that you should publicly attack the work of the Commission. The interview you gave contains a number of factual errors: Ukrainian historians are just as committed to the Commission as their German colleagues. At the Commission's last conferences, more Ukrainians than Germans spoke. Your assertion that the Commission deals with "secondary topics" is incomprehensible. The theme of the 2018 and 2019 Conferences was the history of the Second World War, which certainly was not of secondary importance to Ukraine.
It goes without saying that the theme of the Holodomor has been central to our work. In 2017, the Commission’s international symposium “Empire, Colonialism, and Famine in Comparative Historical Perspective” focused on the Holodomor (Kyiv, 5 to 7 June 2017, in cooperation with the Holodomor Research and Education Center, Canada, and Holodomor Research and Education Centre in Ukraine).
We will continue to examine the Holodomor, which so tragically decimated Ukraine’s population in the 1930s, in our work and discussions. The famine – which took the lives of so many German speakers in Ukraine (Mennonites and others) and for which there are substantial German sources – falls squarely within the mandate of our commission.
We consider it regrettable that you attack us in a way that is unusual for an experienced diplomat. We refuse to accept the claim that the work of the Commission should be restructured by political intervention. We invite you to a discussion and hope to eliminate any misunderstandings you may have about the tasks of a historical commission.
Sincerely yours,
Prof. Dr. Yaroslav Hrytsak Prof. Dr. Martin Schulze Wessel
Spokesman of the Ukrainian section Spokesman of the German section