After a day of mainly arriving, acclimatizing and organizing our stay and project, we started with the contents of the meeting on Saturday. The first half of the day was filled with the lectures giving an overview of the respective countries. While it would be of little use to renarrate the details of the presentations, there were some differences and particularities I noted: The german lecture – held by Lars and me - only covered the history beginning with the foundation of the German Empire in 1871, whereas the ukrainian talk also concentrated on the 20th century, but nevertheless traced the roots all the way back to the Kievan Rus’. One could argue that this is just an individual decision on priorities, but from my point of view, this might also reflect the differences in histoical thinking and consciousness. What are the events and stages considered to have significally influenced the society, political and communicational culture of the country? Maybe this question is anwered differently. What was also noticeable was a rather linguistical but nonetheless remarkable aspect: The ukrainian group quite often used the expression „we“ referring to the history and current situation of Ukraine, while the german participants rather tended to utilize abstract and official terms not reflecting any personal involvement in the issue. This might indicate an aspect which was visible on other occasions: The relationship of people to their home country, their way of relating to it, to identify with it, seem to differ. This might sound like a trivial thing to note at first, but should be kept in mind, since, altough living in a world growing smaller and getting connected more and more continiously, we too easily forget that sozialization and views still might vary from each other a lot. This is true between individuals in one society, and naturally between different societies, influenced by the respective, diverging history and current political situation. One might have a rather emotional and involved relationship to the country they where born and brought ab, where they life. Another might hold rather abstract, distant and critical views. Altough this might be too easy and instinctive, it would be rather counter-productive to see your own point of view in this matter as the per se more reasonable and helpfull one. Instead, in my opinion, ideally, people should always try to empathically understand the similarities and differences between themselves and the ones they meet. Usually, people have good reasons to think the way they do.
In the afternoon, the time for rather classical sight-seeing had come. Renata offered a tour of the Lviv city centre. I was quite amazed by the contrast of the often grey, unkempt outskirts where our hostel is situated, and the touristic and newly renovated old town. Shopping malls of a size not easy to be found in Germany here, pseudo-old restaurants and theme cafés seemingly mainly designed for tourists and their respective full purses there. Rusty Maschrutkas and heavy traffic here, a idyllic and historic pedestrian area there. This, for me, brought up the question what actually can be considered „authentic“ and where you really experience the face and character of a city. Or is there even something like that, or rather countless of them?
What seems to be a speciality of Lviv are the theme cafés, centered around one topic or decoration. One of them decided to adopt the writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch as a patron and commemorate him with a bronze statue on front of the door. He was born in the city in 1836 when it still was a part of Austria-Hungary. Certainly knowing this eccentric exponent of 19th century culture, I just learned that this was is home-town during the tour. Some of Sacher-Masoch's works are now considered classics of erotic literature, dealing what nowadays would be called BDSM – in fact, even Masochism was named after him. Although his writings are quite subtle and hardly graphic relating to this fetish or even innocent for today's standards, they were quite scandalous at the time of publishing. This also shines a light on how different the public opinion can be, depending on place and time, and how much a genre of media (in this case a recreational one) can change.
