Darius von Güttner: ‘Reaching Out to the Past and Choosing What They Want to Be’ The Ukraine Conflict and the Importance of History

In this week's episode of the Afternoon Light podcast, Robert Menzies Institute CEO Georgina Downer talks to Dr Darius von Güttner, a historian of Eastern Central Europe from the University of Melbourne, about the ‘deep history’ that underpins the current conflict in the Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin’s flagrant invasion of the Ukraine has famously been justified on the pretext of NATO expansionism, but it is also based on a historical fiction which seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the sovereign nation which is currently under attack. Putin has claimed that Ukraine ‘never had a tradition of genuine statehood’, deliberately trying to erase a national story that stretches back over one thousand years. Such is often the case with global conflicts; they almost invariably have historical underpinnings and they serve to demonstrate that historical memory is a contested domain with real world consequences. This issue is closely related to the purpose of the Robert Menzies Institute, which is part of a network of prime ministerial libraries dedicated to keeping alive Australia’s national story, a tale of peaceful liberal democracy that we hope will long continue.

Dr Darius von Güttner is a Principal Research Fellow with the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is a historian of East Central Europe with broad interest in cultural aspects of the transmission of ideas across time and space. He is interested in global history and pursues interdisciplinary research and teaching subjects which examine history from a global perspective. Darius is the General Editor of Brepols publishing’s book series on “East Central Europe”. His publications cover diverse aspects of history from the Middle Ages to early modern and the modern eras.