When heads “rolled like melons” – over 100 years ago, Ukraine became a terror and death zone

The Mariupol of the early 20th century was called Perekop. The city at the northern tip of Crimea was completely wiped out in 1920 when the Red Army stormed the fortress held by White troops, and the civilian population was massacred. The Ukrainian modernist Maik Johansen, a descendant of immigrant Scandinavians, heroized the Bolshevik struggle "on the killing fields of Perekop" four years later in verse: "The horror echoes in copper and ore / They live on in the workers' hearts." Johansen was liquidated under Stalin in 1937. The poet and novelist is one of two dozen authors little known outside of Ukraine who are presented in German for the first time in the anthology on the First World War, "A Touch of Horror and Hidden Hope."

The World War battles in Russia had escalated into civil war after the revolutions of 1917. On Ukrainian territory, supporters of the overthrown tsarist regime, revolutionary Bolsheviks, and the "Black Army" of the anarchist Nestor Makhno fought each other, making it difficult for the partisans of an independent and democratic Ukraine to compete. These competing loyalties also had a painful impact on literature. A universally relatable war or anti-war epic comparable to Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" does not exist in Ukraine.

When the First World War began on July 28, 1914, with Austria-Hungary's declaration of war on Serbia, no Ukrainian state existed. Most Ukrainians were citizens of the Habsburg Monarchy or the Tsarist Empire—and often found themselves directly opposed to each other on the front lines. The collapse of the two empires led to the re-establishment or re-establishment of several nations after the war, such as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic states.

The Ukrainians' efforts for autonomy were less successful. Although the Centralna Rada in Kyiv declared full independence of the new Ukrainian People's Republic in January 1918 after a lengthy period of preparation, Germany and Austria, who had an interest in the "breadbasket" of Ukraine, even supported the young Kyiv Republic with troops. But when the bourgeois government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks after less than a year, the Central Powers withdrew their last troops in early 1919.

In 1922, after years of further government changes and mutual reconquests, foreign interference, peasant uprisings, and pogroms, Ukraine was finally incorporated into the Soviet Union as the "Ukrainian Socialist SSR." Some peripheral territories were transferred to other states. Romania invaded Northern Bukovina in 1918. Transcarpathia around Uzhhorod, which had been Hungarian until 1918, was annexed to Czechoslovakia, and the re-established Poland succeeded in conquering the formerly Austrian Eastern Galicia, including Lviv (then Lemberg), in the Ukrainian-Polish War of 1919.

The material battles of the First World War had already worn down the Ukrainians. But Osip Makowei, a soldier in the Austrian army, recounts in "The Quiet Hour" (1921) a glimmer of hope, a Lili Marleen moment on the Dniester front in 1915. The soldiers are deeply moved when a flute suddenly sounds: "It is unclear where the musician is sitting. (. . .) Some Dniester gorges have such good acoustics that one can hear a normal conversation hundreds of paces away, and the flute several kilometers away. (. . .) Apparently, one can hear it even in the distant trenches and forget about the shooting."

Using literary means other than Makowei, the German-born author Olha Kobiljanska captures the collective experience of war in her "war sketch" "A Bad Dream" (1917). Her expressionistic prose piece transforms the pain of the families left behind in the villages and the horror in the trenches, the "evil glances" and the "mushy mass" of corpses, into a theatrical chorus. The fragmented syntax is reminiscent of her German contemporary August Stramm.

The dissolution of form can also be found in Mikhail Semenko, the founder of Ukrainian Futurism. Semenko, who was stationed in Vladivostok during the World War, wrote in 1917: "Screws foam in whirlpools. / The bay surges angrily and blindly. / Immediately / axes are raised over the roadstead." The poets Mikhailo Lebedinets, Leonid Simni, and Mykola Tereshchenko also experimented in the search for technological enthusiasm, elemental metaphors, and a passion for violence.

As the distance from the war grows, the rift in society becomes a key theme. In Mikola Khvilowi's disturbing story "The Mother" (1927), the brothers Ostap and Andri fight against each other in the White and Red Armies, respectively, while their mother despairs. When the civil war finally reaches the family's hometown, political commissar Andri kills the mother in the family home at night, believing he is killing his brother.

Brotherly strife also dominates Yuri Yanovsky's steppe novella "The Double Circle" (1935), which has "socialist" elements. During the civil war in August 1919, five brothers belonging to different warring parties clash in a battle. The victor of the massacre, in which heads "fly like melons from the neck," is the communist Ivan. The fratricide is concludingly described as follows: "Ivan Polovts lost three brothers – 'of one family, (. . .) but not of one class.'" Death is certain for all the fighters defeated in battle: "Some stretched out their arms in supplication, and their arms were cut off; some raised their faces, smeared with dust and sweat, to heaven; their faces were sawed off; they fell to the ground and, yearning for death, ate dusty earth; they were dismembered and trampled to a pulp by the horses."

The writers gathered here represent a flowering of Ukrainian culture – until 1905, the Ukrainian language had been banned in the Tsarist Empire. This was made possible in part by Lenin's promotion of national cultures, the "korenizatsiya" ("rooting"). This policy pursued the intention of anchoring ideological ties even more deeply through the respective native languages ​​and ultimately advancing Sovietization.

However, because this resulted in an undesirable re-Ukrainization, Stalin induced an artificial famine in Ukraine in 1932/33, now known as the Holodomor, and massacred Ukrainian intellectuals. One of the largest single massacres of Ukrainian cultural figures is considered the shooting of over 1,000 people around the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution on November 3, 1937, in Karelia. Mykola Khvilovi, the most famous author whom Stalin particularly hated, committed a demonstrative suicide in 1933 in the Slovo artists' house in Kharkiv, a place that Stalin had only had built for the Soviet Ukrainian cultural elite in 1929.

The volume brings together a diverse range of Ukrainian-speaking voices from the interwar period, including those who suddenly found themselves a minority "abroad," for example, in what had become Polish Eastern Galicia. Jewish authors, despite at least 30,000 victims in the civil war alone, unfortunately aren't given a voice, although some also wrote in Ukrainian. The Jewish fate is represented only indirectly, for example, in Ivan Lipa's story "The Long-Distance Scout" (1935). In it, a Ukrainian nationalist skillfully fights his way through enemy lines during the civil war and, in the process, saves a Jewish family from the "spontaneous popular anger."

A second anthology, "Poetry of the Damned," also presents Ukrainian writers of the interwar period who are now part of the country's literary canon: the five-member Kyiv group of "neoclassics." Three of the poets, Mikhailo Drai-Khmara, Pavlo Filipovich, and Mikola Serov, were deported to the infamous Solovki Islands in the 1930s. A fourth, Maksim Rilsky, survived by producing only tendentious poetry. The fifth, the German-Ukrainian Oswald Burghardt, escaped to Germany in 1931 and compiled this anthology, including translations. The "crime" of the neoclassics was that they were committed to an aesthetic ideal that drew on ancient and European traditions rather than celebrating collectivization.

Roughly one hundred years after the world war and civil war, expulsions and rape, torture and massacres are once again commonplace in Ukraine. Ukrainian writers once again fear for their lives and struggle to preserve their language after the war "pushed itself into space like a breakwater." As Serhij Zhadan puts it in a 2017 essay that concludes the anthology "A Touch of Horror and Hidden Hope": "The air changed. And it also changed the language."

Brunner/Dathe/Kersten/Kratochvil/Nagel (editors and translators): A Touch of Horror and Hidden Hope. An Anthology of Ukrainian Literature of the First World War. Arco-Verlag, Wuppertal 2025. 554 pp., CHF 30.–.

Oswald Burghardt: Poetry of the Damned. An anthology of Ukrainian poetry, selected and translated by Oswald Burghardt (Yuri Klen). Edited by Nataliia Kotenko-Vusatyuk and Andrii Portnov. Arco-Verlag, Wuppertal 2025. 176 pp., CHF 20.–.