The political scientist and SPD politician Gesine Schwan was a professor at the Otto Suhr Institute at the Free University of Berlin and president of the Viadrina University in Frankfurt (Oder); she has been chairwoman of the SPD’s Basic Values Commission since 2014. From the beginning, she supported Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s course in Ukraine policy – which Martin Schulze Wessel sharply criticized. The professor of the history of Eastern and Southeastern Europe at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilians University has been friends with Schwan for decades; in December he was co-initiator of the call “War in Ukraine: ‘We have to do more!'”. The atmosphere at the interview at Beck-Verlag in Munich is friendly, Schulze Wessel talks about how much he learned as a student in Schwan’s seminars. But it is also immediately clear that when it comes to Ukraine, the two are far apart – and so this conversation will soon become something of a model case, like the one we should be arguing about today.
Debate on the Ukraine War: Gesine Schwan and Martin Schulze Wessel – Culture
