Central Europe in the Twentieth Century: The Vortex of New Technologies for Living and Dying

Kate Brown will narrow in on the years following the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, when there was a furious uptick in the United States of medical testing on unwitting human subjects. Strangely, the genesis of secret CIA, Army and federal government programs to develop truth serums and better torture methods originated in the mind of a Russian-American from the Baltics. Boris Pash carried out his medical research programs with the help of former Nazi scientists imported to the USA after WWII. Brown argues that it is possible to trace an arch between the brutal tactics and vital animosities of the fin de siècle collapse of Central European empires to the latent violence of the postwar Pax Americana. Underlying her remarks will be her fascination with the problem of only seeing certain kinds of places according to the time in which we live.