Andrea Bernstein
Between “Never Forget” and the Bending of History
The lecture will also be broadcast live on Zoom. To watch online, please register here: Zoom registration
As a journalist in New York City, I’d been planning to work the late shift on September 11, 2001, as the results of the mayoral primary election came in. Instead, I ended up rushing towards Lower Manhattan, interviewing waves of refugees from the Twin Towers, who described something my brain could barely ingest: bodies jumping from the highest floors of the World Trade Center, the city’s tallest buildings collapsing in a tremendous plume of smoke and dust.
“Never forget!,” a phrase borrowed from the Holocaust, became the slogan of 9/11, if there could be a slogan of a terrorist attack: emblazoned on bumper stickers and flags and incorporated into the very conception of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The words carried an implied faith that remembering could somehow inoculate humanity from repeating its horrors. I believed this too, in an unexamined way. But memory, it turns out, is neither a shield nor a vaccine. As Walter Benjamin wrote in On The Concept of History: “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.”
Twenty years after 9/11, I reported on another attack: on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Despite reams of documentary evidence to the contrary, President Trump has used the term “hostages” to describe the men and women who bludgeoned police officers with flag poles, crushed them in doorways, and gouged their eyes. On his first day in office, he gave full pardons to nearly all fifteen hundred demonstrators. He’s run out of government scores of prosecutors and law enforcement who investigated the attacks. No one who says that the 2020 election was fair can today hold an important administration post, or even a federal judgeship.
We are living in an age, where, as Hannah Arendt wrote: “The chances of factual truth’s surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever.” And yet, Arendt also fervently believed in the ever-present possibility of better outcomes.
America appears to be on a long slide towards erasing factual truth forever. This lecture will ask: what is the path back to truth, memory, facts, and historical understanding?
Andrea Bernstein is a Peabody and duPont-Columbia award-winning investigative journalist, and accomplished author, speaker, and Visiting Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. She is also a frequent expert guest on well-known news shows, including Frontline, PBS Newshour, CNN, BBC, and CBC Documentary. Bernstein holds a BA cum laude from Yale University and was a JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. She is the New York Times bestselling author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power (W.W. Norton, 2020) and podcast creator and co-host of Trump, Inc. (WNYC and ProPublica), Will Be Wild (Pineapple Street Studios, Amazon, & Wondery), We Don’t Talk About Leonard (ProPublica and On The Media), and The Law According to Trump (Slate). She covered all five trials of Donald J. Trump and his business for NPR.
Eine Kooperation mit der American Academy in Berlin