Date: 16 October 2026; 6:30–8:00 p.m.

Location: Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, Doktor-Johann-Maier Straße 5, 93049 Regensburg 

Speaker: Susanne Hanus; Moderator: Katrin Boeckh (Denkraum Ukraine; IOS Regensburg; Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)

Organized by: Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie; “Denkraum Ukraine” / “Think Space Ukraine” at the University of Regensburg, financed by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) through the funds from the Federal Foreign Office (AA)

Language: German

•    Free admission

•    You can register by clicking the registration button or by calling 0941 29 714 20 (Tue–Sun, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.)

For Ernestine Hanus (1916–2011), her hometown of Czernowitz/Chernivtsi (now in Ukraine), which she was forced to leave in 1940, was a lost paradise. In secret agreement with the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany brought the population of German descent “back to the Reich.” That marked the beginning of the end for the city’s diverse cultural life, where people spoke Yiddish, German, Ukrainian, Romanian, and Polish.

In 2008, Susanne Hanus invited her grandmother and father on a trip. Traveling in the opposite direction, they retraced, stop by stop, the long journey that had led the young Ernestine and her son (b. 1941) to West Germany. They collected their memories and impressions, creating a collage of texts and images that told the story of their family history, historical events, and current developments in Ukraine. Susanne Hanus added further drawings and comments during a second visit to the city in 2011. After the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, she added reports from the local director of the “Kulturgesellschaft Gedankendach” to the travel journal. War, flight, expulsion - history repeats itself.

Susanne Hanus

Susanne Hanus lives and works as a freelance artist and art teacher in Murnau am Staffelsee. Since 2004, she has organized numerous solo and group exhibitions. She has installed her “Entanglements” at locations throughout Germany as well as in Wrocław (Poland), Tbilisi (Georgia), Nova Iguaçu (Brazil), Glasgow (Scotland), Joshua Tree National Park (California), and Chernivtsi (Ukraine), among other places.

Katrin Boeckh

Prof. Dr. Katrin Boeckh is a historian at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg, where she heads the research unit “Culture and Memory: Displaced Persons and Resettlers in Bavaria.” Within the “Denkraum Ukraine” project, she coordinates the thematic area of flight, migration, and value transfer.

Image credit: Susanne Hanus; Photo: Heribert Riesenhuber