German-Ukrainian Society

German-Ukrainian Society (Deutsch-Ukrainische Gesellschaft). A society for cultivating German-Ukrainian political, economic, and cultural relations, founded in March 1918 in Berlin by Paul Rohrbach (its first president) and Axel Schmidt (its first general secretary). The society’s journal— Die Ukraine (40 issues, 1918–26)—contained valuable information about Ukraine. On Hryhorii Prokopchuk’s initiative the society was revived in Munich in 1948. Since then the following have served as presidents: K. Bensch, Kurt Graebe, F. Roeder, O. Poebing, H. Prohaska, and E. Blauss. In 1960 it merged with the Herder German-Ukrainian Society, which had also been established in Munich in 1948 by such proponents of Ukrainian-German understanding as Hans Koch, E. Mittich, and Ivan Mirchuk. In the years 1952–6 and 1962–8 the society published 44 issues of Ukraine in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (editor: Prokopchuk). It also published a few dozen monographs on Ukrainian émigrés in Germany and organized lectures, art exhibits, and commemorative concerts. Since the 1970s the society has been inactive.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Deutsch-Ukrainische Herder-Gesellschaft. Dem Andenken Paul Rohrbachs: Ein Beitrag zur osteuropäischen Problematik (Munich 1959)

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]