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Ukraine Since achieving independence in 1991 the Ukraine has endeavoured to develop a counter-discourse to the Soviet narrative of history. Different interpretations of history run parallel to one another. History is appropriated in the eastern Ukraine quite differently than in the western Ukraine. Kiev's "Memorial to the Motherland" is still an expression of the Soviet cult of the hero. In the War Museum, on the other hand, there appears to be a break with such heroization, at least in some of the exhibition rooms. Here, since the 1990s, they have begun to deconstruct the myth which let widows and orphans believe that their husband or father died as heros. A discussion arose in the independent Ukraine about whether to deal with the soldiers in the "Galicia Division" of the Waffen-SS as patriots or as traitors and criminals. The debate made its way up to the highest circles of government and was continued on the Internet, where the innocence of the division was propagated. Deputies from Ivano-Frankivsk, in the western region of the Ukraine, drafted a bill that would place the soldiers of the Ukrainian division of the Waffen-SS "Galizien" on an equal basis with other veterans of the Second World War and allow them to receive the same benefits as other war veterans. However, the bill was not passed. |
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The gradual changes can be seen in a brochure published by the museum. The photographs were all taken in the top floor of the building. They show the museum after it has been rearranged. Great importance has been attached to presenting the Second World War as an experience of agony in the memory of all peoples. They show that Ukrainians and Germans suffered alike. In order to establish a link to the present, they set up a long table: symbolically, the dead are seated on the one side and opposite them the living, without separating them into friend and foe. |
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"Actually people don't see the Galicia Division as a pro-Fascist organization, but rather as a ‘national independence movement'," recapitulated a young Ukrainian during the debate about the SS Division. In 1993, fifty years after the formation of the Galicia Division, its veterans founded a "Memorial Cemetery" in the vicinity of Lviv for the soldiers who were surrounded and killed at the Battle of Brody in July 1944. |
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