Babyn Yar. The Place, the Deed and the Memory
On the 80th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre.
Lecture and presentation of the new OSTEUROPA volume with Dr. Bert Hoppe, historian and journalist, and Dr. Manfred Sapper, Editor-in-Chief of OSTEUROPA.
Event of the Lew Kopelew Forum in cooperation with the Cologne/Bonn branch of the DGO
Date: 1 September 2021 at 19:00 CEST
Description: Babyn Yar was the largest single massacre perpetrated by the Germans in the Second World War. On 29 and 30 September 1941, Einsatzgruppen shot 34,000 people in Kiev. Babyn Jar became a symbol for the mass shootings of Jews. In Germany, these crimes were pushed aside for a long time; the Soviet leadership tried to suppress the information that the victims were Jewish. This made Babyn Yar a contested place of remembrance. Today, there is a dispute in Ukraine about the planned memorial centre.
2021 marks the 80th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre. The OSTEUROPA volume "Babyn Jar. The Place, the Deed and the Memory" reconstructs the crime, analyses the legal reappraisal, the conflicts in remembrance politics and the artistic treatment of the topic in music and literature.
Dr. Bert Hoppe (*1970) is a historian at the Centre for Holocaust Studies of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte). He edited the two Soviet Union volumes of the source edition “The Persecution and Murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933-1945”. His writings include „Auf den Trümmern von Königsberg. Kaliningrad 1946-1970“ and „In Stalins Gefolgschaft. Moskau und die KPD 1928-1933“.
Dr. Manfred Sapper (*1962) studied political science, history and sociology in Frankfurt/Main, Siena and Moscow; he received his doctorate with a thesis on the effects of the Afghanistan war on Soviet society. Since 2002 he has been editor-in-chief of the journal OSTEUROPA, based in Berlin.