German Campus Week
Holocaust Crimes Uncovered
An Investigation into History, Arts, and Ethics
The focus of the 2022 Campus Week is an investigation of Holocaust crimes through the lens of history, arts and ethics. Campus Week 2022 is a series of movie screenings, talks and discussions centering on the Wannsee Conference (2022) and its aftermath that are open to the entire UNC Charlotte community of students, faculty, and staff. The intention is to offer space for our community to study the historical events and reflect on how our knowledge and understanding of the crimes of the Holocaust connect to our moral and ethical responsibilities as citizens in our democracies of today.
Join us for a week of reflection, discussion, film screenings, and workshops.
Welcome and screening of the documentary The Wannsee Conference (2022)
Monday, Sept. 26: 6:00-8:00pm – COED 419
Reception & opening of the Poster Exhibit “Holocaust Crimes Uncovered”
Tuesday, Sept. 27: 1:00-3:00pm – COED 4th Floor
Screening of the feature film The Conference (2022), with an introduction to
the movie & Q&A with Dr. Kai-Uwe Werbeck
Wednesday, Sept. 28: 4:00-7:00pm – Student Union Movie Theater
Workshop with Dr. Elizabeth Minnich “The Evil of Banality – On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking”
Friday, Sept. 30: 10:00-3:00pm – COED 434 by invitation only
Dr. Elizabeth Minnich – one of Hannah Arendt’s Teaching Assistants during the Eichmann trial – will give an intensive workshop to our students based on her books “The Evil of Banality – On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking” (2016) and “Thought Work: Thinking, Action, and the Fate of the World” (2019, with Michael Quinn Patton). The workshop will focus on the following aspects of her scholarly work:
Dr. Elizabeth K. Minnich was Hannah Arendt’s teaching assistant when Arendt was defending her book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann (“The Engineer of the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ “) in which Arendt announced her then-controversial observation about “the banality of evil.” In the years since then, while being a professor of philosophy (moral, political) and publishing on other subjects, Minnich has continued reflecting on, researching, and writing about her own reversal of Arendt’s controversial concept: the evil of banality. This book presents her findings, moving through Arendt’s concept to consider further examples of extensive evils such as slavery and human trafficking; economic exploitation; for-profit penitentiaries and deportation centers; and more historical and international examples. Minnich also considers explanations of the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of extensive evils by social psychologists and historians such as Milgram and Zimbardo whose good work on obedience to authority and peer pressure she challenges. The book is vivid, filled with examples, and accessible even as it is grounded in a philosopher’s moral and political resources. Most of all, Minnich invites readers to think with her about what she considers perhaps the moral challenge of our age: the reality that it takes many, many ordinarily decent people doing their jobs reliably for the extensive evils of genocide, slavery, et al – those that persist over time, that become ‘normalized’ – to be possible at all. And she also discusses extensive good, the people and ways of acting that are also always present as we learn to resist, to turn back, extensive evils. (Excerpt taken from Dr. Minnich’s website https://sites.google.com/site/drelizabethminnich/home)
For more information contact:
Bianca Potrykus at bpotryku@charlotte.edu or
Susanne Gomoluch sgomoluc@charlotte.edu
Many thanks to our Sponsors:
The Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, Washington
Germany on Campus
The Department of Languages and Culture Studies