The German national poet knew: “You hope to become a nation, you hope so, Germans, in vain: / Educate yourself, you can, but more freely to become people.” So Friedrich Schiller in the “Xenien”. You don’t have to agree with him; perhaps the belated German nationalization succeeded in the end. But what was clear to Schiller was that the nation is not a timeless being: it is something that may or may not be “formed” historically. It is the product of a collective act of will and can disappear again if the will flags.
Was Yugoslavia ever a nation? Is Britain a nation? Could the US cease to be one nation? What about the nations created by the colonial powers in the Arab world and in parts of Africa? With entities like Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo or Catalonia? How about Ukraine?
For the imperial view – from Moscow, Berlin or Vienna – Ukraine did not exist as a nation; and up until the day before yesterday, many German politicians and “experts” still maintained this view. The Ukrainians themselves, with their political revolutions and resistance to Russian aggression, have refuted this view of things. Ukrainian sociologist Tatiana Zhurzhenko wrote: “At the same time, Russian aggression achieves what the Ukrainian presidents from Kravchuk to Yanukovych failed to achieve: it is the catalyst for the formation of a political nation.”
The “political nation” is a product of political actions, it is not always there; it is not based on ethnic, linguistic or cultural homogeneity, but on the decision to want to shape a political future together. Whatever Ukraine was historically, it is a nation today. It is therefore nonsensical for Russian and pro-Russian ideologues to point out that historically there was no independent Ukrainian nation; few contemporary nations can, without forgery, trace their history back more than a few hundred years.
That’s why it’s also annoying when a German author propagates an ahistorical concept of the nation in a book entitled “Understanding Ukraine”. It says about the Ukrainian historian and national activist Mykhailo Hruschewskyj (1866 to 1934): “He knows that a nation defines itself as a community that transcends time and space.” And author Steffen Dobbert tries to explain this timeless “community” to trace back to the time of the Cossacks, whom he stylizes as freedom heroes; such as Hetman Bohdan Chmelmnyckji.
Dobbert writes about the reasons for Chmelmnyckji’s revolt in 1648 that the “Ukrainian population” felt “subjects of the Polish aristocracy and the Jews”. The revolt culminated in massacres, to which many Catholics and “up to 20,000 people of the Jewish religion” fell victim.
“Were the Ukrainian Cossacks freedom fighters, heroes, courageous insurgents in the spirit of Che Guevara?” asks Dobbert, who was born in East Germany in 1982. Beyond the completely ahistorical question: Guevara was a Stalinist, a murderer and a warmonger, neither a hero nor a freedom fighter; and insofar as a worthy successor to Chmelmnyckji, to whom Dobbert apologetically attests that in the mass murders of his people “the bestial, racist inhumanity of their age is recognizable.”
If you have stuck to a hero and martyr tale, in which the “time and space spanning” nation had to defend itself again and again against evil powers, a tale that one often encounters in the late nations of Eastern Europe, then the misdeeds of one’s own end up Nation to the “bird shit”.
About Stepan Bandera, for example, whose OUN-B wanted to set up an independent Ukrainian state under the protectorate of Hitler’s Germany, called for the “cleansing” of Ukraine from Jews, Poles and Russians and participated in the murder of up to 800,000 Jews, Dobbert writes that he supports only “indirectly” responsible for the massacres because he was in German custody most of the time. Dobbert politely conceals the fact that Bandera was an “honorary prisoner” in Germany.
The German author criticizes this: “The Banderists often do not distinguish between innocent people of Jewish faith and Jews who work for the Soviet Union.” As if it had been okay to “Jews who worked for the Soviet Union”, whether as teachers Simply assassinate soldiers or administrators, even as party officials.
The fact that Banderists, like the Nazis, did not murder the Jews because of their “belief” but because of their race, that for them the pair of terms “innocent” and “Jewish” was a contradiction in terms, seems to neither the German author nor his editors at the German publishing house Klett -Cotta to have noticed. So much for our history and the ability to learn from it.
Because that’s what it’s about. Facts are facts, there is nothing wrong with them. But every single person and every nation can choose how to relate to the facts, what to learn from them, and who to worship. A political nation that does not define itself narrowly in terms of ethnicity, language, or religion will look for role models who can be role models for all, or who in a particular way embody the values that the nation aspires to.
As Friedrich Nietzsche said: “When a people advances and grows, it always bursts the girdle that gave it its national prestige: if it stands still, it withers, a new girdle closes around its soul; the ever-hardening crust builds a prison around it, the walls of which keep growing.”
And he added, entirely in the spirit of Schiller: “He who wants the Germans well can see for his part how he grows more and more out of what is German. The turn towards the non-German has therefore always been the hallmark of the able-bodied of our people.”