WELCOME REMARKS / Michael Ignatieff / President and Rector, CEU
ABSTRACT / If there is any moral consensus in contemporary Europe and North America, it is that the Holocaust was evil. There is less agreement on what happened after the Holocaust, and whether Germany’s attempts to face that evil can be a model for other nations. I argue that precisely the slow and difficult path to Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung has important lessons for other peoples seeking to come to terms with their own national crimes. While my focus will be the United States, I will touch on other countries as well.
BIO / Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman studied philosophy at Harvard and the Freie Universität Berlin, and was professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant, Evil in Modern Thought, Fremde sehen anders, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists, Why Grow Up?, Widerstand der Vernunft. Ein Manifest in postfaktischen Zeiten and Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.