Areas of Expertise

• Contemporary history and politics in Ukraine
• German and European relations with Ukraine within the context of EU integration and the EU’s Neighborhood Policy
• Contemporary history and politics in the Russian Federation
• Domestic and foreign-policy implications of the Ukraine-Russia crisis
• Nationalism, identity-based politics, and new currents of Slavophilism in post-Soviet Russia
• History of the German nationalist/anti-democratic movement in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown

Short Bio

Wilfried Jilge has been an associate fellow at DGAP's Center for Order and Governance in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia since 2018. From 2016 to 2018, he worked in its program on Central and Eastern Europe.

A historian of Eastern Europe, Jilge is a mediation adviser on Ukraine at the Center for International Peace Operations (ZIF). He is also a visiting lecturer at the Universität Leipzig and, since 2015, an associate scholar at the Universität St. Gallen’s Center for Governance and Culture in Europe.

Jilge, who has spent considerable time in Kyiv and conducted research in Moscow from 2013 to 2014, has advised members of the German Bundestag and European parliament on matters relating to Ukraine. In 2014, he served on an expert advisory group coordinated by the Deutsche Gesellschaft Osteuropakunde and sponsored by the German foreign ministry to develop recommendations for German policy toward Ukraine and Eastern Europe. He serves on the board of Kiewer Gespräche, a German-Ukrainian civil forum of which he is a founding member.

From 2012 to 2014, Jilge was a fellow at the Universität Leipzig’s Institute for Slavic Studies, where he prepared a study of German nationalism within the first Czech Republic, which focused on the construction of Sudeten-German identity through such völkisch movements as the Kameradschaftsbund. The project, entitled “Heroischer Nationalismus: Der Sudetendeutsche Kameradschaftsbund und die Konstruktion sudetendeutscher Identität in der Ersten Tschechoslowakischen Republik,” was supported by the German Ministry for Culture and Media. As a research fellow at the Universität Leipzig’s Center for the History and Culture of East Central Europe (GWZO) from 2001 to 2010, he examined various aspects of post-Soviet Ukraine – including politics of memory, collective cultures of remembrance, political and collective identity, and nation building – as well as related matters in Eastern and Central Europe. He also worked on post-Stalinist Soviet Ukraine.

Languages

German, Ukrainian, Russian, English, Polish

[Last updated: January 2023]