Mario Kessler is senior fellow at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam, Germany.
Before launching his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin claimed that the country he is now attacking is a Bolshevik creation. His mythical vision of history draws on the darkest tsarist imperialism.
German understanding of the Nazi era is often seen as a model of how a country comes to terms with its past. But the limits of this experience also have much to teach us about building a public memory culture based on a thoroughgoing universalism.