"Don't forget! Kharkiv" is a multimedia platform on memory of the Second World War. It is designed, on the example of the city of Kharkiv, to present the politics and culture of remembrance of the Second World War in Ukraine in its dynamics. In the upcoming weeks, the Foundation of Hamburg Memorials and Learning Centres will be handing over its Instagram channel to "Don't forget! Kharkiv".

A team of progressive historians Svitlana Telukha, Ihor Dvorkin and Volodymyr Kramskyi developed "Don't forget! Kharkiv" in 2020. 

The platform provides educational resources for scholars, educators, pupils and students researching and studying the culture of World War II remembrance, including modern memory politics and current memorial practices. Via an interactive map of Kharkiv, users can find marks of objects with general information about a specific monument and its history. Monuments and murals of the Soviet and contemporary periods can be found already and will be added to the platform in future. During the Russian-Ukrainian war, because of the shelling of Kharkiv by Russian troops, some of these monuments were damaged.

Currently, the platform exists only in Ukrainian. Due to the Instagram takeover, the shared posts dedicated to these monuments will be in English and German available, too and therefore more accessible for a broader public beyond Ukraine. Go to Instagram.

We, the Foundation of Hamburg Memorials and Learning Centers, are very happy to bring our common aim together: education on history of the Second World War as well as visualization of memorials and places of remembrance in urban space. We are thrilled to bring our audience closer to Kharkiv and thus to Ukrainian history. At the same time, we are very pleased to make the work of the Foundation of Hamburg Memorials and Learning Centres in Ukraine better known.

Material will be offered by the authors of the project:

Svitlana Telukha, Candidate of Historical Sciences (Ph.D.), teaches at the Department of Ukrainian Studies, Cultural Studies and History of Science at the National Technical University "Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute" (Kharkiv, Ukraine). She studies the culture of memory and remembrance of the Second World War, social history, microhistory, everyday history and uses the method of oral history to research various aspects of Ukrainian history.

Ihor Dvorkin, Candidate of Historical Sciences (Ph.D.), teaches at the Department of Ukrainian Studies, Cultural Studies and History of Science, National Technical University "Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute" (Kharkiv, Ukraine). Research interests: politics of memory, World War II in contemporary Ukrainian discourse, history of museum affairs, processes of nation-building, interethnic relations, teaching the history of Ukraine in universities.

To the website

To Neuengamme Instagram

Ihor Dvorkin / Sarah Grandke / Svitlana Telukha