American Academy Lecture

The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in Times of War

A Hassidic con-man in Holland under Nazi occupation, a cross-dressing Manchu princess in wartime China and Japan, a Baltic German with a Finnish passport—all of these individuals collaborated with regimes that murdered millions of people. They were fraudsters, mythmakers, and Hochstapler who reinvented themselves over and over again, and ultimately became the stuff of legend. In this talk, Ian Buruma examines the reasons why such figures have thrived in times of crisis, and why they decide to collaborate with criminal regimes. He considers the confused national loyalties, ideological delusions, and sheer opportunism that can lead to collaboration in wartime—seen most recently in our own times, in Ukraine.

Ian Buruma is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, Harper’s, The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, NRC Handelsblad, among others. He is a regular columnist for Project Syndicate. Buruma’s work has focused on the culture of Japan and China, but he has written extensively on European affairs and film, among other subjects. He is the author of books including A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex, The Wages of Guilt, and Year Zero: A History of 1945. His latest book, The Collaborators, will be published in March 2023. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and recipient of the Erasmus Prize, LA Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel, Buruma studied Chinese at Leiden University and cinema at Nihon University, Tokyo, and holds fellowships at St. Anthony College, (Oxford); Woodrow Wilson Institute (Washington, DC), Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Remarque Institute, New York City.