Learning from Ukraine: Lessons of Resistance

Acceptance Speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade

Of particular importance to me is the opportunity this award gives me to speak at a time when, in light of the new world disorder, we are becoming painfully aware of the limits of our own powers of judgement. The most monstrous thing is underway: before our very eyes, Ukrainian cities are being bombarded day after day, night after night, by Russian missiles, while Europe seems unable or unwilling to protect them. We were shocked to witness the murderous pogrom perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and the transformation of Gaza into a battlefield claiming thousands upon thousands of civilian casualties. The world has hardly taken note of the apocalyptic scenarios of civil war in Sudan. 

But where, if not here in Frankfurt’s Church of St. Paul, is the appropriate place to  speak of ways to end wars and to take Walter Benjamin’s words seriously: “But if you want peace, talk about war,” a spin on the older version: “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” And yet, miracles do seem to happen after all. The miracle of a ceasefire that came overnight in Gaza – an extraordinary and redemptive moment. One can only hope it carries the momentum to bring an end to another war, this time in Ukraine.

A look back at the history of the Peace Prize might render an initial impression that everything has already been said on the subject of war and peace. The speeches read like a chronicle of post-war Germany’s intellectual challenges: in the early years, everything remai-ned overshadowed by the Second World War, which had just come to an end, and the catastrophe that Germany had wrought upon the world; the site of the award ceremony had itself just re-emerged from the rubble. Looking back, it becomes clear that the subsequent decades were by no means a time of idyllic, peaceful coexistence, but rather of Cold War, a time of balanced equilibrium, and the ever- looming spectre of nuclear self-destruction.

The fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War did not spell the end of history in Europe, but rather ushered in a period marked by the cessation of systemic antagonism and the obviation of the reasons for major military conflict between the two superpowers; all the while, astute observers saw in the Yugoslav Wars an early indication of the  end of the post-war period, which terminated with the Russian occupation of Crimea in spring 2014 and – more definitively – with the invasion of Russian troops into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, opening the door to a new pre-war era.

Researching the origins of wars and the complicated paths to peace – silencing the weapons, ending the killing, disempowering the aggressor, perhaps reaching a peace treaty that can then lead to reconciliation – offers infinitely rich and illustrative source material for what diplomacy can and cannot do, but it does not provide applicable recipes for ever more, as history does not repeat itself. And then it becomes clear that, despite all our knowledge, despite all the experience of previous generations, we must start again from scratch, and that our profound haplessness renders us incapable to describe what is going on before our eyes. The terms we use to describe the new circumstances are inadequate. We are at a loss for words to accurately convey what is happening. This is more than just a lack of concepts or writing skills; it is the loss of the horizon of experience that has formed us till now, a reality where everything we have accumulated over the course of a lifetime seems in question, devalued, even in ruins.

I could not imagine that Russia would regress into times that in many respects resembled the practices of Stalinism, which I had dedicated years of my life to researching; I could not imagine an America, which I had come to know as a student, harbouring fears of an authoritarian regime taking hold one day soon. It is completely alien to me that something could begin to slip in the Federal Republic of Germany; and even more remote was the idea that war, which for me was something I knew only from television and documentaries, could  become something real in our immediate vicinity. But this is what has happened. And it seems that it is now our turn, if I may speak in the collective singular: our generation, which is accustomed to, and even spoiled by, times of relative peace, must think everything through again from the beginning – a kind of stocktaking and examination by a generation that has been enormously lucky and is now finding it incredibly difficult to bid farewell to its preconceptions and to adjust to the war in Europe, with all that it entails. 

How liberating it felt to work your way out of the confines of the divided Cold War world and cross over the demarcation line drawn between East and West or under the Iron Curtain. For me, a person with no family ties to Eastern Europe but whose father had been active in the war as of September 1, 1939, most of the time on the Eastern Front and in Ukraine, this was the case very early on. I learned as a young boy that beyond the division of Europe into East and West, into socialism and capitalism, there was another, a third schism that was not commensurate with the first two: the lost centre of Europe. This was the beginning of a voyage of discovery into a region that did not interest post-war West Germans at the time, or only insofar as an opportunity to observe the enemy. As always, biographical coincidence played a decisive role: Russian lessons at a Bavarian boarding school, the atmosphere availed by the thawing of tensions and the relative peaceful coexistence of the 60s – Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Poem Babi Yar and Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, but above all the lasting impressions of early trips to Prague and the former Soviet Union.

These trips helped me realise that understanding Central and Eastern Europe was not just a matter of reading, of  academic training, but also involved the people, landscapes and theatres of history that I was to discover in my studies, long before Milan Kundera’s famous 1983 essay Un Occident kidnappé ou La tragédie de l’Europe centrale: the atmosphere of the Prague Spring, the encounter and friendship with dissidents and emigrants, and the idea that the opposition movements in the East and West would need to find each other across the Wall, perhaps even requiring a bridging of the divide between intellectuals and workers. The mental map of Europe had already shifted before the fall of the mighty barrier. Dissident circles in Budapest, Warsaw, Berlin and the kitchens of Moscow discussed what would soon culminate in revolutions in Eastern Europe. It was an exciting time of cross-border conspiracy, new reading material and the discovery of connections that created a new cultural realm beyond the dichotomy of a divided world. A vastly diverse linguistic, cultural and historical space – a former casualty of war, genocide and expulsion – once again saw the light of day. People had been banished to the dead zone between the empires of Hitler and Stalin, moving about in a world of dual experience where, as they learned, there was no escape, no possibility of flight. It was a place of utter helplessness. 

The exploration of this space and the visualisation of its history were soon followed by the transformation of the political map, which, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, did not stop at the borders of the last multi-ethnic empire. However, there was still a long way to go to achieve complete independence and freedom for Ukraine. It took the Maidan Revolution and a war to finally shake Ukraine loose from the limitations of a narrow west-centred perception. It ceased to be terra incognita, a blank spot on the map. It became present to us via our  screens, through reporting; the refugees who came to us, a large and impressive country, a Europe in miniature, connected to the world by thousands upon thousands of threads: the thousand-year-old Kyiv, Kharkiv, a metropolis of European modernity, Odessa, whose grand staircase descending to the harbour offers a look back on the entire 20th century, Lviv, Leopolis, Lvów, Lvov, Lviv, more than just a ›Little Vienna‹, a cultural headwater for the entire continent. Ukraine as a prism of all European experiences in the ‘century of extremes’: The venue of revolutions, civil war, world wars, the Holodomor and the Holocaust, and finally the stage for independence and freedom after decades of struggle.

But then came Russia’s occupation of Crimea. Over ten years ago, having returned from Kharkiv, Donetsk, Mariupol and Odessa, I wrote: “We do not know how the battle for Ukraine will end; whether it will stand its ground against Russian aggression or it will fall to its knees; whether the Europeans, the West, will defend or abandon it; whether the European Union will hold together or fall apart. Only this much is certain: Ukraine will never disappear from the map in our minds.”

Putin’s Russia is determined to erase an independent and free Ukraine from the map of Europe. Putin has openly declared so and day after day has been proving that he means it. No words can rival the images of destruction. There is no atrocity his troops have not committed. Nothing and no one has been spared as a target for drones and missiles: market squares, residential neighbourhoods, museums, hospitals, harbours, railway stations. Cities that were on the rise – with new airports, transport routes, hotels – are being flattened by bombs. Cities have become zones where drones hunt people. The  direct hit of a missile is followed by a direct hit on the rescue team. The industrial giants of socialist reconstruction are being reduced to rubble, as are churches, monasteries and sanatoriums. What was once the Ukrainian equivalent of Germany’s productive Ruhr area no longer exists. If the country cannot be conquered, it must at least be destroyed, made unliveable. A new term is circulating: urbicide. Abandoned towns of the 21st century, detonated dams and bridges, flooded landscapes, fields of black earth scorched and contaminated for generations, ethnic cleansing and the abduction of tens of thousands of children. The occupied territories are little more than a massive camp under the control of warlords and criminals. The disaster that Putin’s Russia has wrought upon Ukraine goes by many names: imperialism, revisionism, mafia state, fascism, ruscism. Its crimes are documented and stored in real time in an infinite number of images, and the names of the perpetrators – whether at the front, in torture chambers, in propaganda or at command centres – will no doubt one day be identified.

It is astonishing how long it has taken Germany to realise the true nature of Putin’s Russia. No matter the issue – historical path dependence, cultural affinity, nostalgia and sentimentality, economic interests, even corruption – recent German-Russian relations are ripe for historical clarification and a reappraisal from which no one will emerge clean. There have been many ›Russlandversteher‹, that is, individuals who empathise with Russia’s viewpoint, but too few who actually understood anything about Russia itself. If they had been clear-eyed, they would have explained what was in store for us and that the categories employed to make sense of Putin’s empire were in large part the product of wishful thinking and credulity,  instead of ultimately having to admit that we were no match for this figure of evil – or whatever term will emerge for this tyrant. How much easier and more convenient it was to blame NATO or the collective West. Indeed, the search for a deeper meaning to Putin’s policies continues on to this day.

Among the explanations offered: humiliation of the former superpower, fear of encirclement, need for security, struggle for recognition. And there exists a corresponding misconception that misunderstandings can be rectified and deals negotiated through bilateral argumentative discourse. However, the idea that Putin would adhere to arguments or even rules of procedure has been refuted from the outset. He has simply knocked over the table at which negotiations and talks were due to take place according to certain rules and declared with bravura that breaking the rules was part of the system, long before the term ›disruption‹ became more widely used. He was and is a master at escalation dominance, the well-calculated escalation of conflicts, including his calculated breach of the nuclear taboo. Fear is his most important weapon, and his true talent lies in his exploitation of fear. To this day, he considers himself the undisputed master of the proceedings.

But not everything has gone according to his plan – the blitzkrieg in Ukraine, capturing the capital, the victory parade down Khreshchatyk in Kyiv, the encirclement of Kharkiv. Things turned out differently. Despite hundreds of thousands of killed and wounded at the front, he is barely making progress – so he targets Ukraine’s defenceless civilian population. His slogan is simple: we will finish you off wherever you are; you have no hope but to surrender. Diplomacy is just a tool to buy time, which he believes works in his favour. Those in his circle of advisors say it  openly: We will break the backs of you Europeans.

Am I guilty of Russophobia? One tactic in the repertoire of intimidatory rhetoric is to defame criticism of Putin’s regime as slander against Russia. As someone who has been admiring Russian culture since his youth and has spent a lifetime working to promote it, this simply cannot apply to me. It pains me a lot when friends and colleagues are imperilled and driven into exile. Putin’s instrumentalisation of the prestige of Russian culture plays a major role in the implementation of his imperial ambitions – the soft power of ‘Rússkiy mir’, the Russian world that knows no borders.

Another key element of the rhetoric of intimidation and moral blackmail is the defamation of the Ukrainian leadership as Nazis and the placing of Germans under the suspicion of being Nazis. The Bundeswehr is stigmatised as the successor to the Wehrmacht, while the Russian war against Ukraine is misrepresented as a continuation of the Great Patriotic War against fascism. All crimes of which Russia is guilty are summarily blamed on the Ukrainians – from the downing of flight MH17 to the murders on the streets of Bucha.

As absurd as this propaganda seems, it is not without effect, especially in Germany, which continues to suffer from war remorse and is accordingly vulnerable to such allusions to Nazism. In comparison, the propaganda from Soviet times seems outdated and rather harmless. It no longer focuses on the contrast between black and white, on the distinction between truth and lies; it now targets the dissolution of the distinction between truth and falsehood itself. It functions according to the motto: everything is equally true, everything is equally false, hence the erasure of the basis of all judgement. It is aimed at the  domestic public, at creating images of the enemy and fears of encirclement; but it is also intended for public consumption beyond the Russian sphere. Everything is fair game when it comes to undermining the credibility and self-assurance of Western societies. It is not difficult to pinpoint where open societies are most vulnerable and easiest to wound – and where the forces linger that can be utilised to this end. The capacity for self-criticism and self-doubt, this greatest achievement of open societies, is used to undermine stability and self-confidence. Russia then praises itself as the standard-bearer for a unique and in every respect superior civilisation. Europe and the West, or what was understood to be the West, are derided as weak and decadent – their time has passed. This voice is not without echo in a situation where reading Spengler’s Decline of the West is once again in fashion. Taken together, everything is having an effect. The war that Russia has brought back to Europe is being waged not only by military means, but also as a war over hearts and minds, using moods, fears, resentments, nostalgia – and the tempting offer of a return to business as usual.

It is difficult to adjust to our new situation, the regrouping of global forces and alliances. It is like saying goodbye to a world that has begun to disintegrate. Gone is the certainty of being able to rely on the America we have known since Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique and from its great literature – it is a country that I remember since my first visit as a land of free speech and freedom from fear. This America no longer applies. Europe is now confronted not only with the phenomenon of Putinism, but also with a US president who is overturning all notions of the silent functioning of checks and balances and of alliances, and who is forcing us to rethink all the coordinates we  once thought secure. Europe is now alone and fully on its own in a situation where everything is in flux.

Confronted with this situation, I began rereading the old texts in which the most clear-eyed minds of the 1930s tried making sense of the forces that loomed in Central Europe. Once again, I revisited the analyses and works written in exile, whether in Paris, New York or Weimar on the Pacific: Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State, Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, and later, with Stalinism already in mind, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. But however prescient and accurate these analyses were, we must now, at this turning point in history, set out on our own journey to capture the novelty and danger of today’s situation in our own words. Heeding the lessons of Ukraine in this pursuit is helpful, indeed indispensable.

No one is more interested in peace than the Ukrainians. They know that an aggressor with limitless determination cannot be stopped with words. They are realists who can afford no illusions. Their refusal to be victims drives them to fight back. They are prepared for anything. They fight for their children, for their families, for their state – they are prepared even to die for their country. What amounts to television footage for others is firsthand experience for them. Ukraine’s defence at the front would be nothing without the army of volunteers behind it. They have survived the winters and braved the nightly terror of drones and missiles for weeks, even months on end. The IT experts of yesterday are the drone pilots of today. The festive dress women don for the theatre or a concert betrays an attitude that holds firm even in a state of emergency – the club is where young people draw strength to continue the resistance. They  are heroes in a post-heroic world, without making a fuss about it. They keep their transport system running, and with it their country remains whole. The howl of sirens is background noise for their everyday lives, not just a fire drill. They have learnt how drone strikes differ from ballistic missile attacks. They are helping us prepare for the time after this historical turning point. They are teaching us that national defence has nothing to do with militarism. Soldiers, and above all women soldiers, are respected because everyone knows that they are performing their duty and doing that for which they are prepared. The citizens of Ukraine are teaching us that what is happening is not the ‘Ukraine conflict’, but war. They are helping us understand whom we are dealing with: a regime that hates Europe and that seeks to destroy Ukraine as an independent state. They are showing us that accommodating the aggressor only increases its appetite for more, and that appeasement does not lead to peace – it paves the way to war. Because they are on the front line, they know more than we in our still-safe confines of the hinterland. Because they are at the mercy of a superior enemy, they must be faster and more intelligent than their foe. Ukrainians, who are generally suspected of nationalism, are showing us that patriotism has not become obsolete in the 21st century. They are ahead of us in terms of military technology, as they were forced to fight at a time when we could still allow ourselves to ponder questions of eternal peace. They took it on themselves to develop weapons that were withheld from them out of hesitation or fear. They are the mirror into which we peer, reminding us what Europe once stood for and why it is still worth defending. They are calling out to us: do not be afraid – not because they are not afraid, but because they have overcome their fear. Ukraine’s writers do their utmost to express what  those farther away lack the words for. They have taken the Ukrainian language out into the world and performed a literary miracle. Their poets speak with deadly seriousness, while some have even paid for it with their lives. Their president is a man who expects the truth from his compatriots, no matter how bitter he knows it may be. They are well versed in the behavioural tenets of resistance and are teaching the Europeans what to expect if they continue to fail to prepare for the worst-case scenario. They have learnt from experience that when threat levels are high, decisions are made overnight, while in quieter times they are put off until the day after tomorrow, if even then. Stoic aplomb is a luxury they can only afford once the war is over. To endure, to persevere, despite unspeakable exhaustion – this is the revolution of dignity in permanence. They are the ones to whom we owe our peace, while they pay a price both incalculable and unfathomable.

It is first and foremost to them and to all people of good will that we owe our gratitude. And it is to them that the greeting from these grounds should usher forth – from the Church of St. Paul in Frankfurt, a hot spot of the German Movement for Unity and Freedom, and a ground zero of Europe’s Springtime of Nations. It is a greeting to the defenders of a free Ukraine, to the men and women who continue their work despite everything, who take their children to school despite swarms of drones, to the inhabitants of Kyiv who hole up in metro stations, to the engine drivers who navigate their trains on time from Ivano-Frankivsk to Kharkiv.

As unlikely as it may sound, we Europeans would do well to learn from Ukraine: this would mean learning how to be fearless and brave, and perhaps even learning how to triumph. 

Karl Schlögel is a German historian, expert on Russia and Ukraine, and winner of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for 2025.

Translated to English by the Hagedorn Group