Karl Schloegel, one of Germany's most prolific historians and publicists, has spent most of his career explaining for his readers what he has called “the Russian syndrome.” In more than a dozen books and countless essays, he has written about labor opposition in the Soviet Union, St. Petersburg as the laboratory of modernism, the discourses of the Russian intelligentsia, the Russian Berlin of the 1920s, and the Great Terror of 1937 and Moscow, as well as a recent book on geopolitics and civilization. In the past three years alone, Schloegel has been awarded prizes by the Historical College in Munich, the Leipzig Book Fair, and Germany's highest award, Pour le Merite fuer Wissenschaften und Kuenste. But when in early 2014 he was invited to receive the Medal of Pushkin for significant contributions to promoting the study of Russian culture abroad from the President of the Russian Federation, he wrote to the Russian ambassador in Berlin that the annexation of Crimea and Putin's brazen denial that it had taken place made it impossible for him to accept the award (23). For a scholar who had made his first visits to Czechoslovakia (1965) and the USSR (1966) as a high school student, this decision marked an important and unanticipated reevaluation of his prior work.

“For me, and I think for everyone who has studied it, Russia is more than a subject of research; it is deeply woven into our personal lives” (24). Schloegel is married to a (former) Soviet-Jewish writer and publicist from Moscow, Sonja Margolina. Schloegel recalls his early fascination with the Soviet Union and its civilization:

“Yet Russia's policy towards Ukraine—fomenting war against her quintessential ‘sister nation’—threatened to undo everything that had been accomplished in German-Russian relations (23–24).”

For Schloegel and many of his fellow historians and Europeans, “the so-called Ukrainian crisis was a moment of truth, challenging us to reconsider deeply held convictions and how we had arrived at them … . What was cast in doubt was an undertaking to which we had devoted ourselves with heart and soul, an engagement that could not have remained without consequences, that might almost be called an enchantment or entanglement. In short, this was about Russia as an integral part of our biographies; the events in Ukraine called a major part of our life's work into question” (24). He insists that “the so-called Ukraine crisis is a Russian crisis first and foremost, brought on by a government that was never up to the task of a century: modernizing a nation” (38).

The title of the German original of this travelogue through Ukraine suggests this is a more urgent agenda for the author than just informing non-Ukrainian readers about the newly independent state of Ukraine. That title, Entscheidung in Kiew (Decision in Kyiv), refers to nothing less than “the fate of Europe” that hangs on events in Ukraine since 2013–14: the Euromaidan, the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, the outbreak of a Russian-supported separatist war in the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk. The message of the English translation is much the same, namely that Ukraine is and has been a part of Europe since its origins, albeit “a nation on the borderland” between Europe and Russia.

A book about Ukraine was not what he had planned “for this stage in my life.” But events compelled him “to join the fray.” He makes no claim to being especially knowledgeable about Ukraine, “in fact, on the contrary: I realized that I had spent a lifetime studying eastern Europe, Russia, the Soviet Union without ever knowing much about Ukraine—and I was not the only one in my field” (13). In composing this book, Schloegel himself observes that the essays trace a shift of perspective: from a Russian-centric view in which Moscow was the unquestioned vantage point and Ukraine part of the periphery, to a keen appreciation of the ways in which Ukraine is an autonomous and distinctive nation. “This shift did not come easily for a writer whose academic socialization took place in Moscow and Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, but it has certainly been instructive” (8).

This collection of essays, parts of which had been published earlier and which were written between 1987 and 2015, is Schloegel's introduction to Ukraine. He warns that he is not writing a history of Ukraine, but a portrait of its diverse cities, building on the “historical-topographic” approach that he has crafted since his first co-authored book, Moskau Lesen (Reading Moscow)—a book he wrote when he worked as a correspondent for several German newspapers and before returning to academia. He sees cities as texts—indeed palimpsests—that stand ready for historians and other humanists to decipher: “I get to know a country by exploring its historical topographies. My way of familiarizing myself with a nation's or a culture's history and distinctive character is to trace to its places and survey its spaces … . One can ‘read cities,’ decrypt them as textures and palimpsests, uncover their strata in a kind of urban archeology, in order to make the past speak (14).

The essays, which start in the capital of Kyiv and end in the “capital of provincial Europe,” L΄viv, highlight the historic ties of each city under discussion to its several European pasts. His journey makes stops in Odesa, Yalta (now part of Russia-occupied Crimea), Kharkiv, Dnipropetrivsk (since changed to Dnipro), Donetsk (a war-torn territory whose “people's republic” has material support from Russia), and Chernivsti. Schloegel locates Ukraine's cities at the crossroads of civilizational exchange—albeit far too often violent and forced changes—and contributors to a greater European culture. As a German historian, he reminds his fellow citizens of Germany's violent and destructive entanglements with Ukraine during World Wars I and II, but he nonetheless appeals to his fellow Europeans to visit Ukraine, to get to know something about it from the burgeoning German- and English-language literature and thereby to offset the hegemonic Russian imperial narratives that continue to deny Ukraine any historiographical legitimacy or even status as a nation distinct from Russia.

On that last point, this collection of essays was written as an intervention in the increasingly polarized field of Russian and east European studies, not only in Germany but elsewhere in Europe. North American scholars are also experiencing a version of this phenomenon, with longtime friendships ended over disagreements about Russia and Ukraine. Schloegel, together with the other most prominent historian of Russia in the German-speaking world, Andreas Kappeler, have taken up the gauntlet thrown down by what the Germans call Putinversteher (Putin “understanders”). Both Schloegel and Kappeler can certainly not be considered by any serious historian to be Russophobes, but neither do they advocate Ukrainophilism. Schloegel addresses Germans’ complicated feelings about Russia, “a sense of gratitude for Russia's role in making the reunification of Germany possible was part of it, always tinged with the German feeling of guilt towards ‘the Russians’ (35).” As regards Ukraine, he reminds his German readers that together “with Belarus, Ukraine was the main theater of war and the single largest source of forced laborers from eastern Europe; scattered across it are innumerable mass graves from the genocide against the Jews of eastern Europe. It took Germans a long time to acknowledge that Russia was not the only target of the Third Reich's campaign of conquest and annihilation, and to accept the special responsibility for the fate of today's independent Ukraine this history implies (8).”

Schloegel's scholarship is a powerful historical argument that calls for—as a German (and European) citizen—recognizing Ukraine as a European nation, though he acknowledges that just as the number of Ukrainians, in the wake of the Maidan and the war with Russia, who advocate EU and even NATO membership has never been higher, it comes unfortunately at a time when Europe is not certain of its own future, with challenges from other newly-admitted countries in the east, Poland and Hungary in particular, but also with more conventional members, the UK with pending Brexit, and Italy upending EU regulations and budget norms. Ukrainians may want to part of Europe more than most Europeans seem to want them to be at this point. Schloegel declares that “the time is ripe to take a fresh look at the map and review what we think we know” (13) because so far the West has been “out of its Depth: Ukraine” remains “a terra incognita” (38).