Thomas Kreutzmann/ Werner Sonne: Guild and Suffering. The Trauma of Displacement and Expulsion 1945-2022. Book premiere and panel discussion

Thomas Kreutzmann/ Werner Sonne: Guilt and Suffering. The Trauma of Displacement and Expulsion 1945–2022. Book premiere and panel discussion

Towards the end of World War II, a large flight movement from the German eastern territories began, caused by the advance of the Red Army against National Socialist Germany. The trauma of war, guilt and suffering returned with force in the spring of 2022: many people from Ukraine fled to Germany from Russia's war of aggression. Since the end of the 1990s, there had been years of struggle in politics and society to create a place of remembrance in Berlin where displacement and expulsion would be appropriately documented. Now the war in Ukraine is once again putting the way we deal with the burdened past to the test and causing controversy. Does Putin's war change the view of the suffering of German expellees in 1945? Does this war even relativise German guilt and the assessment of events at the end of World War II? The former ARD correspondents Thomas Kreutzmann and Werner Sonne put these questions up for discussion in their new, highly topical book.

Free Admission

Welcome Dr. Gundula Bavendamm (Director, Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation) Peter Tamm (Publisher, Mittler Verlag)

Podium Dr. Gundula Bavendamm Werner Sonne (author and journalist) Thomas Kreutzmann (author and journalist) H.E. Dr. Andrij Melnyk LL.M. (Ambassador of Ukraine in Germany) Stephan Mayer (Member of the Bundestag and Vice-President of the Federation of Expellees) Markus Meckel (Civil Rights Activist, Former Foreign Minister of the GDR and former Member of the Bundestag)

Moderation: Marion von Haaren (journalist) An event in cooperation with Mittler Publishing House.

The event is sold out, but will be livestreamed on our YouTube channel Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung.