On the Uprooted Existence of the Ukrainian Intellectual in Postwar Germany in the 1940s 

Camp for displaced Ukrainians in Giessen, Germany, 1948

This text is an inquiry into the cultural and corporeal experiences of the displaced Ukrainian intellectuals in Germany during the second half of the 1940s—Viktor Petrov, Yurii Shevelov, Ulas Samchuk, and Oleksa Voropai. It touches upon emigration, temporary shelters, carpet bombings, and their eagerness to continue intellectual and artistic work under these conditions. Through the conceptual lens of «uprootedness» the author explores their memories and other writings to trace the echoes of 1920s and the reverberations of the current experience of Ukrainian intellectuals after the beginning of the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war in 2022.

The text was developed during the “Identities-Borders-Orders: Migration and Belonging” course at the Invisible University for Ukraine, guided by Viktoriya Sereda (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin / Ukrainian Catholic University) and Oksana Mikheieva (Ukrainian Catholic University/ European University Viadrina), and prepared for publication in collaboration with Kateryna Lysenko (Leipzig University). The research was supported by the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). It is also a part of the ongoing dissertation thesis “The Phenomenon of Groundlessness in the writings of Mykola Khvylovyi and Viktor Petrov-Domontovych” under the supervision of Vira Aheyeva (Volodymyr Morenets Literature Department, National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy).

After 24 February 2022, literary scholar Tamara Hundorova came to Munich, one of the crucial cities on the Planeta DP1, and wrote: “I wanted to understand, no, to learn to live in this world of pendency and falling out of existence and time.”2 Viktor Petrov, Ulas Samchuk, Yurii Shevelov, Ihor Kostetskyi, Oleksa Voropai, and other Ukrainian intellectuals lived and contemplated on Ukrainian art and culture in the displaced persons camps (DP camps) in postwar Germany in the second half of the 1940s. Within their community, intellectuals renewed the debates on the aesthetic and ideological thriving of Ukrainian culture and literature. The Soviet government violently stopped such debates by organizing the only legally possible literature group: the USSR’s Union of Writers in 1934. 

Groundlessness, or uprootedness (безґрунтянство), is an accurate and omnipresent metaphor for a postwar émigré existence in essays and fictional texts of these Ukrainian writers and scholars in the 1940s and early 1950s. However, uprootedness is not the specific concept to describe a particular Ukrainian community after the Second World War, but rather it is the situation of a modern person who faces the crisis of positivist thinking and the destructive consequences of technological progress during the First World War. In Ukraine, it has its continuities in the postrevolutionary posttraumatic social fabric and the intensified unfolding of Soviet modernity in the late 1920s that drastically changed the landscape of the Southern Ukrainian territories. First published in Kharkiv in 1942 and then in Regensburg in 1948, the novel Bez Gruntu (Without Soil) by V. Petrov-Domontovych tells the story of Rostyslav Mykhailovych in Katerynoslav (Dnipro) on the edge of modernity, where churches are turning into either museums or storages, and territories of archaeological, ethnographic, and cultural importance are waiting to be submerged under the water reservoir of DniproHES (Dnipro Hydroelectric Station). The character constructs his existence intellectually and aesthetically, being uprooted physically. Thus, uprootedness reflects the environmental and existential, becoming the creative force in literature. This essay is a part of a dissertation research project in which the phenomenon of uprootedness is elaborated as the creative principle in the Ukrainian literature of modernism, which acts from within different layers of writing, which are as follows: psychoanalitical, aesthetical, and ethical implications, power relations, sexuality, gender identifications, intertextuality, and materiality of a sign. Conceptually,  the principle of uprootedness is the ongoing transformation and invention of different ways of interchange between consciousness, matter, and language. In this essay, I will elucidate the environmental and cultural contexts of Ukrainian intellectual émigrés in the postwar 1940s who lived through this uprootedness, as the situation of a modern people and their worldview, determined by technological progress, environmental changes, historical upheavals, and the crisis of rationalistic thinking, and intensified by the conceptualisation of the phenomenon.

Examining the memories, essays, and diaries of Petrov, Voropai, Samchuk, Shevelov, and periodicals, such as Arka, I aim to situate these writings in the cultural and historical contexts of German urban space in the 1940s. Such an inquiry will highlight the interrelations between cultural process and wartime physical experiences, particularly, the carpet bombings and resulting ruins. With this in mind, I refer to the lectures Luftkrieg und Literature by German literary scholar and writer W. G. Sebald. The writer and scholar analyzes the lasting effects of life in ruined cities in literature. First, I will consider the issues of Ukrainian cultural identification during the second half of the 1940s; then I will analyze the written testimonies of postwar urban spaces. This paper will argue that the concept of uprootedness is entangled in the physically tangible wartime and postwar experiences apart from the melancholic nation-building longings. 

Significantly, the cultural life of Ukrainian intelligentsia in postwar Europe and later in the USA had affinities with the 1920s; despite their detachment and uncertainty in physical space, intellectuals nurtured their roots in the Ukrainian past. In 1946, the calmness and confidence is present in Petrov’s argument about the existentialist tendencies in Ukrainian in the 1920s: “The cultural crisis of our days has its roots in the 1920s. Our days restore already known moods and restore already known names.” ((Viktor Petrov, “Vaha i mira sliv (z literaturnoho shchodennyka),” in Rozvidky (Vol. 2) (Kyiv: Tempora, 2013), 834.)) Therefore, in the literary space of Ukraine in the 1920s, the seeds of resistance and understanding of human essence in the conditions of pre-totalitarian society had already been developed; they preceded the evolution of similar intentions in European philosophy after the Second World War. Importantly, reflecting on the elitism of the literary organisation Mystetskyi Ukrainskyi Rukh (MUR, 1945–1948), Shevelov referred to the experience of Vilna akademiia proletarskoii literatury3 (The Free Academy of Proletarian Literature), hoping that an elite organization could exist without the pressure of the Bolsheviks’ government.4 Reflecting on her correspondence with Shevelov, Oksana Zabuzhko insists, “Over the years, he appreciated and accepted the main existential core of Khvylovyi’s culture-creating ambitions as a personal legacy that was the lonely heroism of a consistent bet on ‘high art’ in a cultural ‘desert’ […] Without this precedent, most likely, there would be no MUR, and who knows whether a similar cultural feat of Shevelov himself would have occurred.”5

The monthly Arka. The author of the cover image is Jacques Hnizdovsky; he implicates the contours of Zaborovskyi’s gateway that is the major Baroque landmark in Kyiv through which modern concepts of art, literary experiments, and artistic chronicles pass. Even in the digital version of Arka, the neatness and sophistication of the layout is captivating. Significantly, the attention to this architectural piece of art is consistent with the aesthetic preferences of the 1920s. Kossack’s baroque and the defeat of the famous hetman Ivan Mazepa were pervasive cultural motifs in literature. Vira Aheieva admits that “the gateway is the testimony of organic belonging to the European area, common roots, traditions, and values.”6

The monthly Arka was a crucial publication not only because of its design but also its content. Samchuk quips: “A researcher of Ukrainian literature in the future! If you do not look into the pages of this inspiring enthusiast which was this DP camp collection Arka, you will not understand the missional power of our persecuted word in its action.”7 I can only confirm these words today. One of the principles of the editors was “primacy to the literature and art of the Ukrainian postwar emigration — to all currents from the experiments of Kostetskyi to the traditionalism of Samchuk with a single criterion: a sufficient artistic level.”8 Shevelov also considered the past as the source of a cultural rebirth: “We returned to the ancient flourishing of our culture and Europe.”9

However, there were obstacles in reaching European culture: precisely, Shevelov admits the closed German borders, because “a long purge of Nazism”10 took place after the Second World War and the monetary reform in 1948, after which it was impossible to have relations with foreign publishers.11 Symptomatically, the French affection for the Soviet Union restrained possible intercultural dialogues. Once, Shevelov intended to dedicate an issue of Arka to Jean-Paul Sartre and asked him for texts, but “was not honored with any response,” because the leftist and “middle” intellectuals did not want contact with emigrants who did not have a desire to return to their homeland; in other words, the Soviet Union; the European leftists thought them to be “reactionaries and supporters of fascism.” ((Ibid., 280))

The Ukrainian periodical press borrowed from German texts, which were also quite limited in publishing capacities. Shevelov acted precisely like that: “But we did it, one might say, in a sloppy way. We selected information from the German press and included it without informing anyone from non-Ukrainian circles about it.”12 Personal contacts with non-Ukrainian intellectuals were limited: “Apart from the meeting with Belarusian writers at the Bayreuth conference, I can recall only two episodes of contact with foreign cultural figures. These contacts were accidental, fleeting, and only with the closest neighbors: Russians and Poles.”11 However, aesthetic experiences and meetings with the other occurred, and the Ukrainian emigration yearned for them. One can confirm it while reading The DP Planet by Samchuk: “The names of T. S. Eliot, Francois Mauriac, Graham Greene, Patrice La Tour du Pen, and Sartre are scattered on the pages of camp publications […] We don’t want to get lost, we don’t want to dissolve into emptiness, we don’t want to surrender to conditions.”13 Visiting one of the ruined bookstore in Weimar, Samchuk and his friends found by chance a book by James Joyce that excited them: “Kostetskyi and Barka pounced on Joyce’s book, seen in a half-broken bookstore in Weimar. Joyce, Thorton Walder, Hemingway. Today’s literary process. I admit: it’s nice to see this.”14

Luftkrieg is the shared experience. The topics of destruction and migration resonate with the situation of Ukrainian scholars today. I intend to make an inquiry about the Ukrainian emigrants’ reception of carpet bombings in Germany. The ruins of Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Dresden, and many other cities became a space in which not only Germans rearranged their torn life,15 but also emigrants from Ukraine. In his essays of the 1940s, Petrov overtly claimed the catastrophe of World War II and the ephemerality of humans. He witnessed the ruins after carpet bombings and connected these impressions with the memories of the consequences of the revolution in 1917 and the following years of Ukrainian struggles for liberation in the edited version of Bez gruntu (Without Soil). He also described the ruins of European cities, setting the stage for his historical and philosophical wonderings. 

Destruction rolled through the pages of diaries and memories of everyone who moved to Bavaria in an attempt not to be violently repatriated to the Soviet Union. Shevelov’s path ran from Berlin through Saxony and Thuringia. In Berlin on Friedrichstrasse, he was overtaken by the bombing in one of the most fully described episodes of destruction in his memoirs Ya — meni — mene…(i dovkruhy) (I — to me — me…(and around)): “The street was clogged with loads of fallen buildings. The street was a sea of flames. […] The air was black, rather black and pink from the smoke and dust of the walls that had ceased to be walls. I did not see the dead and wounded, but I could imagine how many were injured. If they screamed, one could not hear them, because of the roar of the flames, the falling of displaced walls, and delayed explosions of bombs.”11

During the heaviest air raid on Dresden on the night of 13 February 1945, Shevelov stayed in Plauen and heard American planes flying over the city. In a few days, Plauen was erased. Shevelov described these events: “The senseless Dresden holocaust about which no one shouts and whose victims do not cry to the heavens.”16 Sebald criticized the silence of the witnesses, which later became a blank slate of memory: “A unique extermination operation in history […], it seems to have left almost no painful trace in the collective consciousness, it was largely removed from the retrospective experience of the victims and did not play any significant role in discussions about the internal state of our country.”17 Shevelov considered the silence with no distance in time and knowledge from the events, sitting in a basement with the locals: “We were silent; it is an admirable feature of the Germans, rather German women: they endured everything without hysterics and shouting, stoically and courageously in some strict and superhuman discipline of silence.”18

In some cases, Shevelov retrospectively perceived the reality while witnessing the change of authorities in Plauen in 1945. Firstly, he compared the events in Plauen to the ones in Kharkiv in 1941, then described “the ritual of surrender of the city: white sheets on intact houses.”19 It reminded him of the other epochs: “in the Middle Ages, it was like that during the Thirty Year War.”11 Furthermore, the interpretations of political motives for carpet bombing differ. Shevelov noted: “Churchill preferred to yield the ruins to the Russians” after the conference in Yalta.20 Admittedly, Sebald referred to 1941 when Churchill thought air bombing to be the only means “to force Hitler back to confrontation.”21 During the first years of the war, Great Britain was not able “to destroy the morale of the civilian population”22 with carpet bombing; however, air raids were persistent and gained devastating power as the defeat of Germany became obvious. Sebald singled out the commander of the British bomber aviation Arthur Harris, who had an “unlimited interest in destruction.” ((Ibid., 32.))

Ukrainian and German identities involuntarily began synchronizing, for they both lived detached lives. Samchuk recalled the following feeling: “Books, archives, paintings, clothes, underwear, and bedding. We have been dragging it with us from Rivne by various means of connections through Lviv, Krakow, Vienna, Lunnenburg, Berlin, Weimar, Hersfeld, and Halsdorf… For almost three years. And where next?”23 Ukrainian emigrants had little opportunity to choose and keep some treasures, struggling to save their belongings or rather their debris in the years of revolution (1917–1921). Conversely, the Germans entered a new “mobile society”24 without the burdensome weight of the past, for the fire of carpet bombings erased it. So, it becomes obvious that apart from the textual dimension of émigré life, one should consider social and physical fabrics of life that affected the aesthetical and intellectual strategies for cultural production. 

To conclude, I would like to refer to Shevelov’s essay “Vid Kotsiubynskoho do Rossellini,” in which he considers a historical rhyme in the European arts. The author focuses on detachment, a foreshadowing of which he finds in the short story Na kameni (On a Stone) (1902) by Mykola Kotsiubynskyi. Comparing this short story to the Stromboli terra di Dio (1950) by Italian director Roberto Rossellini, Shevelov elaborates on the phenomenon of groundlessness out of historical context, highlighting the inner sense: “a longing for groundlessness arose in the human soul.”25 According to Shevelov, a lack of ground does not lead to destruction and death. On the contrary, it is a different mode of existence outside of dogmatic ideas and conventional aesthetics. Shevelov talks about faith in man and the “pastel romance”11 of Kotsiubynskyi that gives one a chance to rediscover or create the ground. In Ukrainian literature, a multifaceted phenomenon of uprootedness, or groundlessness, has constructive sprouts embodied in the art and philosophy of the twice-postwar Europe.

Nowadays, uprootedness has become the lens through which we can reflect the situation of modernity and its environmental, conceptual, and aesthetic interplay with the Ukrainian cultural process in the twentieth century.

Bibliographie

  1. Voropai, Oleksa. V dorozi na Zakhid (Shchodennyk utikacha). London: Ukrainska vydavnycha spilka, 1970.
  2. Hnizdovskyi, Yakiv. “Ukrainskyi grotesk.” In Hnizdovskyi. Maliunky, hrafika, keramika, statti, 61-74. Niu-York: Proloh, 1967.
  3. Hundorova, Tamara. “Koreniamy dohory i strakh mihratsii.” Chytomo (31.01.2023). https://chytomo.com/tamara-hundorova-koreniamy-dohory-i-strakh-mihratsii/
  4. Zebald, V. G. Povitriana viina i literatura. Kharkiv: ist publishing, 2023.
  5. Petrov, Viktor. “Vaha i mira sliv (z literaturnoho shchodennyka).” In Rozvidky (Vol. 2), 833-836. Kyiv: Tempora, 2013.
  6. Samchuk, Ulas. Plianeta Di-Pi: Notatky y lysty. Vinnipeh: Nakladom tovarystva “Volyn,” 1979. 
  7. Shevelov, Yurii. “Vid Kotsiubynskoho do Rossellini, vid Rossellini do Kotsiubynskoho.” In Druha cherha: Literatura. Teatr, Ideolohii, 62-71. Miunkhen: Suchasnist, 1978.
  8. Shevelov, Yurii (Yurii Sherekh). Ya— mene— meni….(i dovkruhy) (Vol. 2). Kharkiv — Niu-York: Vydavets Oleksandr Savchuk, 2021.
  9. Shevelov Yurii; Zabuzhko, Oksana. Vybrane lystuvannia na tli doby: 1992-2002. Kyiv: Komora, 2013. 
  10. Aheieva, Vira. Za lashtunkamy imperii. Kyiv: Vikhola, 2021. 
  1. The reference is to the cognominal text by Ulas Samchuk that documents the life of Ukrainian emigration in postwar Germany, particularly, in displaced persons camps. [↩]
  2. Tamara Hundorova, “Koreniamy dohory i strakh mihratsii,” Chytomo (31.01.2023). https://chytomo.com/tamara-hundorova-koreniamy-dohory-i-strakh-mihratsii/ [↩]
  3. VAPLITE was established in 1926 and existed until 1928. Mykola Khvylovyi was the first president of the organisation. Some of the other members were Mykola Kulish, Mykhailo Yalovii, Oles Dosvitnii, Pavlo Tychyna, Ivan Senchenko, Oleksa Slisarenko, Mykola Bazhan, Yurii Smolych, and Yurii Yanovskii. [↩]
  4. Yurii Shevelov (Yurii Sherekh), Ya— mene— meni….(i dovkruhy) (Vol. 2) (Kharkiv — Niu-York: Vydavets Oleksandr Savchuk, 2021), 95. [↩]
  5. Yurii Shevelov and Oksana Zabuzhko, Vybrane lystuvannia na tli doby: 1992-2002 (Kyiv: Komora, 2013), 205. [↩]
  6. Vira Aheiva, Za lashtunkamy imperii (Kyiv: Vikhola, 2021), 182 [↩]
  7. Yurii Shevelov, “Vid Kotsiubynskoho do Rossellini, vid Rossellini do Kotsiubynskoho,” in Druha cherha: Literatura. Teatr Ideolohii (Miunkhen: Suchasnist, 1978), 318. [↩]
  8. Yakiv Hnizdovskyi, “Ukrainskyi grotesk,” in Hnizdovskyi. Maliunky, hrafika, keramika, statti (Niu-York: Proloh, 1967), 279. [↩]
  9. Ibid., 280. [↩]
  10. Shevelov, Ya— mene— meni….(i dovkruhy) (Vol. 2), 279. [↩]
  11. Ibid. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
  12. Shevelov, Ya— mene— meni….(i dovkruhy) (Vol. 2), 332. [↩]
  13. Ulas Samchuk, Plianeta Di-Pi: Notatky y lysty (Vinnipeh: Nakladom tovarystva “Volyn,”1979), 315. [↩]
  14. Ibid., 35. [↩]
  15. Shevelov, Ya— mene— meni….(i dovkruhy) (Vol. 2), 44. [↩]
  16. Ibid., 52. [↩]
  17. V. G. Zebald, Povitriana viina i literatura (Kharkiv: ist publishing, 2023), 19. [↩]
  18. Shevelov, Ya— mene— meni….(i dovkruhy) (Vol. 2), 52. [↩]
  19. Ibid., 54. [↩]
  20. Ibid., 53. [↩]
  21. V. G. Zebald, Povitriana viina i literatura (Kharkiv: ist publishing, 2023), 29. [↩]
  22. Ibid., 30. [↩]
  23. Samchuk, Plianeta Di-Pi, 68. [↩]
  24. Zebald, Povitriana viina i literatura, 44. [↩]
  25. Shevelov, “Vid Kotsiubynskoho do Rossellini,” 70. [↩]