The late Spanish American philosopher George Santayana warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Santayana would likely appreciate the Spring 2026 Holocaust Memorial Lecture by Dr. Andrew Port, professor of History at Wayne State University and recipient of the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies.

Port’s upcoming lecture, “Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust,” based on his 2023 book of the same title, looks at concrete ways in which postwar Germans in the East and West embraced the lessons of the Third Reich and the Holocaust — above all in response to other genocides that took place elsewhere after 1945 in places such as Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. Port’s book resonates with any country confronting a dark past, making the lessons, limits and liabilities of politics harrowingly clear. Port will also address the controversies surrounding German efforts to come to terms with the past since Oct. 7, 2023, and especially since the start of the recent war in Gaza.

The lecture will take place at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, April 7, in the Stetson Room at the CUB (Carlton Union Building). The lecture is free and open to the public, both in-person and on Zoom. Undergraduate students can receive cultural credit.

The following day, April 8, at 11 a.m., Port will host a roundtable discussion at the Hillel House on the question: “Are Fascism and Communism Really the Same Thing?” Cultural credit will also be available.

Both events are sponsored by Stetson’s Jewish Studies Program in collaboration with Campus Hillel; the College of Arts & Sciences Dean’s Office; the Stetson Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies; and the Departments of Religious Studies, Philosophy, and History.

‘Learn Patterns from the Past’

“Stetson has a longstanding commitment to examining the lessons and legacies of the Holocaust,” said Eric Kurlander, PhD, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at Stetson and a co-organizer of the event. “It’s important to learn patterns from the past and potentially identify them in the present before political situations escalate. Vulnerable ethnic and religious minorities, immigrants and refugees, women, and the LGBTQ community have all faced forms of exclusion since the Holocaust, especially under the conditions of war and sociopolitical crisis. These lectures provide a dialogue with the past in order for us to anticipate and possibly prevent similar transgressions.”

The roots of Stetson’s annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture date back to 2008, when Professor Emeritus Grady Ballenger, PhD, then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, contacted the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., to seek their help in bringing Holocaust lecturers to Stetson.

Soon after, the Bernard Weiner Memorial Holocaust Lecture was founded at Stetson and funded for many years by Dr. Sy Weiner of DeLand to honor the life and work of his late brother Bernard Weiner. The lecture series, which has brought in leading Holocaust scholars such as Christopher Browning, Marion Kaplan, A. Dirk Moses, Jan Gross, Mark Roseman, Natalia Aleksiun, Jennifer Evans, and Atina Grossman, is now funded primarily by Stetson Hillel.

-Renee Garrison