The EUSTORY Past Forward Festival took place in Hamburg from 7 to 11 September 2026 with more than 200 participants from over 40 countries and 30 workshops. Professionals, practitioners and young activists shared, experienced and discussed strategies and possible solutions to challenges of history and civic education in Europe and beyond.
Impressions from the Programme
Our Highlights
15+ interactive workshops, expert inputs, different Hamburg excursions and a multi-day Youth Workshop on Constructive Journalism offered opportunities to experience and discuss innovative ways how to engage with our past in a responsible, courageous, and forward-looking manner.
All the presentations focused on the three key themes of the event:
Making Peace with History
Who Owns the Past?
Memory Meets Machine
Opening Keynote: The Struggle for Historical Memory
Irina Scherbakowa, Zukunft Memorial e.V.
Memorial International was, before its liquidation in 2021, one of the oldest renowned NGOs in Russia. Irina Scherbakowa is a founding member of Memorial International and of the EUSTORY network as well as a board member of Zukunft Memorial e.V., one of Memorial’s successor organisations in exile. In her keynote speech during the Festival Opening, she reflected on the value of almost three decades of young people autonomously and actively interrogating Soviet and Russian local and family history.
Panel: Shrinking Civic Space
Filip Pazderski, Stefan Batory Foundation
Zsuzsanna Szelényi, CEU Democracy Institute
Jens-Christian Wagner, Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation
What does it take to defend civic space when democracy comes under pressure? Bringing together perspectives from Poland, Hungary and Germany, this panel explores what resistance looks like in practice.
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Further informationKeynote: The Future of Public History in an A.I.-Dominated World
Jason Steinhauer, Public Historian, U.S.
Jason Steinhauer provided an overview of where A.I. is today, where it is headed in the future, and what roles, if any, historians and history educators must assume in order to remain relevant in an A.I.-dominated future.
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Further informationInput and Talk about Processing Collective Trauma After Terror: From Tragedy to Transformation
Jørgen Watne Frydnes, Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee
On 22 July 2011, a white supremacist killed 77 people in Norway, mostly teenagers attending a youth democracy camp on the island of Utøya. In the aftermath, Jørgen Watne Frydnes took on the task of rebuilding Utøya. At the Festival, he reflected on what this decade-long experience taught him about processing trauma.
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Further informationHistory and the Search for Radical Hope
Roman Krznaric, Social Philosopher, University of Oxford
In a public event at the KörberHaus on 8 September, Roman Krznaric explored what unexpected insights we can draw from the past thousand years to address some of the fundamental challenges of our era – from the climate crisis to the rise of authoritarianism.
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Further informationLive Voices from the Festival
The Past Forward Listening Station was a mobile, low-threshold encounter format that invited spontaneous, participant-driven conversations during the EUSTORY Festival. Visitors shared impressions, experiences, or joined short guided conversations with the host Javi Acevedo, supported by Sakura Murayama. Click on the audio file to get an impression of this living archive!