In April 2018, an audience packed the American Academy in Berlin to listen to the political scientist Kristen Renwick Monroe. The room crackled with energy. Donald Trump had been president for just over a year, and people desperately wanted insight into the tumultuous changes happening in the United States. The newspapers were filled with stories about the Muslim travel ban, a planned wall along the US-Mexican border, and White House attacks on the press.
Monroe’s talk, “Third Reich Émigrés and Traumatic Political Change,” looked at the decisions people made in Nazi-occupied Europe. It also explored what we could learn from people who had lived through that time. How, in perilous times, would we know how to act?
The lecture was a game changer for me. I was used to being offered simplistic explanations for why people became fascists: It was the economy or a lack of education or a need for nationalist pride. By studying rescuers, bystanders, and perpetrators, Monroe gave me a new way to understand people’s choices.
Monroe’s research explores how identity constrains choice, limits the options we see, and influences our sense of ethics. A two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and a finalist for the
— source thenation.com | Linda MannheimTwit | Oct 29, 2021