Dr. Anne Berg to give keynote presentation at USI Edward D. and Regina Rechnic Holocaust Speaker Series

The University of Southern Indiana will host the fifth speaker for the annual Edward D. and Regina Rechnic Holocaust Speaker Series at 6 p.m. Thursday, September 24 in Carter Hall, located in University Center West on the USI campus and online via Zoom. The 2026 speaker is Dr. Anne Berg, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. The presentation is open to the public at no charge, and registration for Zoom is not required. 

Berg is a historian of destruction whose research explores how ordinary people become implicated in systems of race-making, waste-making and war-making, with a focus on Nazi Germany and beyond. Her work spans cities, film, waste, war, genocide, policing and environmental history from local to global perspectives. She is the author of Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2024), winner of the 2023 Ernst Fraenkel Prize, and author of On Screen and Off: Cinema and the Making of Nazi Hamburg (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). She is currently working on two books examining the global history of garbage and the legacies of Nazi recycling.

In her presentation, Berg explores the surprising and disturbing history of waste and recycling in Nazi Germany. How did scrap metal, paper, bottles, kitchen waste, rags and bones become tools of a totalitarian regime? Discover how an early vision of “zero waste” became intertwined with Nazi ideology, resource exploitation and the machinery of war.

This series is made possible by the USI Foundation through the Edward D. and Regina Rechnic Speaker Series Endowment. The endowment was established by the late Irene C. Rechnic and honors her parents' struggle to survive the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during World War II, where 960,000 Jewish people were executed.

For questions on the presentation, contact the USI College of Liberal Arts at 812-464-1855.