MUSINGS ON SCIENTIFIC
MEMORY CULTURE
Meagan Olsen, FASPE
Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE) promotes ethical leadership for today’s professionals through annual fellowships, ethical leadership trainings, and symposia, among other means. Each year, FASPE awards 80 to 90 fellowships to graduate students and early-career professionals in six fields: Business, Clergy & Religious Leaders, Design & Technology, Journalism, Law, and Medicine. Fellowships begin with immersive, site-specific study in Germany and Poland, including at Auschwitz and other historically significant sites associated with Nazi-era professionals. While there, fellows study Nazi-era professionals’ surprisingly mundane and familiar motivations and decision-making as a reflection-based framework to apply to ethical pitfalls in their own lives. We find that the power of place translates history into the present, creating urgency in ethical reflection.
Each month one of our fellows publishes a piece in Memoria. Their work reflects FASPE’s unique approach to professional ethics and highlights the need for thoughtful ethical reflection today.
The night after visiting Auschwitz I, I sat in my hotel room and stared at a diagram depicting a wastewater outflow system constructed there. This figure, so similar to ones I had calculated in multiple fluid mechanics classes, stopped me in my tracks and lingered at the periphery of my mind for the rest of my time in Poland. I felt that my relationship with chemical engineering had changed. And yet, upon my return to Chicago, it was disturbingly easy to let the experiences and conversations fostered by the FASPE program fade into the background of daily life.
The first few days were filled with little reminders. I nearly cried cooking dinner two days after returning because the image of the pots and pans brought to Auschwitz by Jewish families in hope of a life afterwards flashed before my eyes. But as soon as
I stepped back into the workplace, those thoughts receded, replaced by more mundane concerns about experiment timelines and conference preparations. This rapid ability to disconnect from painful truths has left me contemplating the role of memory in science.
We decouple history and contemporary life no matter the society we come from or our professional field. The Trail of Tears ran through my hometown. Small metal placards dot the streets, marking the historic route alongside modern roads and the occasional bike path. One of my childhood homes stood less than 700 feet from the route. Despite this fact, no history class mentioned
a connection between our town and the Trail. I did not even know a memorial park stood across the street from my high school until earlier this year.
In Berlin, buildings that used to house forced laborers during the Nazi regime now serve as bowling alleys, bonsai tree shops, and kindergartens. Only through recent efforts have euthanasia sites, labor camps, and other locations of atrocities been converted into documentation centers and memorials. Even with bronze Stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks embedded in the sidewalks, it is easy to avoid directly facing the history of the city.
Separated by time and an ocean, the relationships each society has cultivated with its past ethnic cleansing and genocide resemble one another. There is a desire to forget, a hope that modern life can be separated from what came before. These choices to neglect or obscure history out of comfort or convenience prevent us from
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