Daniel Pruess
Daniel Pruess began his bachelor’s degree in history at the University of Bremen, Germany, in 2022. From October 2023 until November 2023, he worked together with students from Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University, Ukraine, on a research project on the estate of the Ukrainian Soviet-era cultural-dissident Ihor Kostec’kyj. From August 2024 until October 2024, he joined the Center for Urban History in L’viv as an intern.
His main research interest lays in cultural history and the history of everyday life in the (post-)Soviet space(s) and -societies, with his latest researches covering the political and cultural interactions between Ukrainian diaspora movements and their host nations and -societies in the 20th century.
Related sources:
Testimonies of Ihor Kostec’kyj’s fate under Nazi rule
Ihor Kostec’kyj was just one example of several hundred thousand individuals who were taken by the Nazi-Army from occupied eastern European territories and had to work as so-called “Ostarbeiter”, slaves in the Nazis service, in the German war industry. Before the war, Kostec’kyj was an intellectual, who - though born in Kyiv, Ukraine - had little consciousness of his “Ukrainiennes” before the fall of Carpatho-Ukraine in 1938 and was involved in several cultural, artistic and creative projects and initiatives. When he was mobilized to the Soviet Red Army with the start of the German invasion on the Soviet Union in 1941, Kostec’kyj was already in the process of changing his Russian sounding name...
Testimonies on the material situation of the culturally active Ukrainian diaspora in Germany, 1946-1951
The Ukrainian DP-journal CHORS was initially planned to be a quarterly. However, the first CHORS edition in 1946 was also the last. These documents provide an insight into the reasons for the non-publishing of further editions but also deliver indicators for the material situation of the Ukrainian diaspora in the American occupation zone of Germany in general. A second and third edition of CHORS were seemingly planned shortly after publishing the first edition. Indicator for this thesis is the handwritten list of planned content for these two editions. On the back of this very document it is visible that it was initially an old document of the German Air-Force from World War Two....
Principles and future aims of the DP-journal CHORS, 1946-1951
The Ukrainian DP-journal CHORS was first and foremost not a political publication. Published by a small team around the dissident Ihor Kostec’kyj, its focus was on arts, culture and film. In its own statutes, CHORS was not only displayed as a journal. Instead, it should be somewhat of a worldwide movement, where people could join or leave if they wish in the future. The overriding principle: to accept the “primacy of the artistic form”, that art should be created to be art and not for economic, political or popular reasons. If one does accept this very principle, this core principle, “every artist is allowed to belong to [CHORS] - regardless of race, nationality, confessional or...
Reviews of film art as an instrument of independence by the Ukrainian DP-journal CHORS, 1946-1951
The Ukrainian DP journal “CHORS” was planned as a quarterly on arts and culture, written by a group of editors around Ihor Kostec’kyj. Even though a second edition was never published, the editors notes and pre-written articles, ready to be published in a long planned second edition, tell a lot about the potential that was within the project. In the statutes of CHORS, the journal as well as the attaching, desired worldwide idea distanced itself heavily from Communism and the Soviet Union. The reason that was provided for this positioning was the Soviet understanding of art and the fact that art had to serve a purpose under Soviet Realism. Such distancing from Soviet...