TEACHING UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE IN INTER-WAR BERLIN

Abstract

Inter-war Berlin was one of the centers of Ukrainian emigration. The institution that united practically all Ukrainian intelligentsia in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s was the Ukrainian Scientific Institute (UNI), founded in 1926 on the initiative of Pavlo Skoropadsky. The main directions of the UNI’s activities (which included four research chairs) were, on the one hand, financial aid for Ukrainian students at German universities, and, on the other hand, the development of Ukrainian studies in Germany. Since 1931, the UNI was transferred to the budget of the German Ministry of Education and became a public institution at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin. An important part of the rich educational, publishing and research activity of the UNI were the courses (at three levels of language training) of the Ukrainian language for the students of Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin, led by the linguist Dr. Zenon Kuzelia. In 1940, the UNI linguist Yaroslav Rudnyckyj, who in 1938 moved to Berlin from Lviv, published a textbook of the Ukrainian language for German students (subsequently reprinted four times). The textbook collected and systematized all the grammatical information about the Ukrainian language of the inter-war period, and covered various cultural aspects, as evidenced, in particular, by an interesting selection of folklore texts for reading or song texts. An important supplement to the book was a German-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-German dictionary, as well as a small terminological index. In 1945, with the approach of Soviet troops to Berlin, the UNI first moved to Leipzig and soon ceased to exist. Most of its staff moved to Munich, while a significant number emigrated to the United States, Canada, and Latin America. Key words: Ukrainian emigration in Germany, interwar period, Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Berlin, Ukrainian language, textbook of Ukrainian language, Zenon Kuzelia, Yaroslav Rudnyckyj.