STANFORD, CA—In commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950, Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) is hosting a number of special events.

On May 27, Shorenstein APARC will pre-screen a major new South Korea film, "Into the Fire." Set in the desperate early days of the Korean War, the drama is based on actual events involving South Korean high school students defending the port of Pohang against advancing North Korean regular forces. The film is scheduled for commercial release in South Korea in June.

Immediately following the pre-screening, Shorenstein APARC will host a panel discussion about the film and the Korean War. Panelists will be the director, New York University-trained John H. Lee; actor Kwon Sang-woo; Scott Foundas, Associate Program Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Contributing Editor, Film Comment; Kyung Hyun Kim, Associate Professor, East Asian Languages & Literature, and Film & Media Studies, University of California, Irvine; Chi-hui Yang, Director, San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival; and John R. Stevens, Lt. Col. USMC (ret), Commanding Officer of Able Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, when the 1st Marine Brigade arrived in Pusan on August 2, 1950. Daniel C. Sneider, Associate Director for Research at Shorenstein APARC, will moderate the discussion.

The film pre-screening and panel discussion will both take place in Cubberley Auditorium on campus, beginning at 6:00 P.M. Also, on the evening of the pre-screening, photographs taken in and near Pohang during the time of the events portrayed in the film will be exhibited in the lobby of Cubberley Auditorium, courtesy of the South Korean embassy in Washington, D. C., and the War Memorial of Korea, in Seoul.

On May 28, Shorenstein APARC’s Korean Studies Program will host a lecture by Bruce Cumings, Professor and Chairman of the History Department, University of Chicago, on "The Korean War After 60 Years: History and Memory in Korea and the United States." To attend, registration is required by 5:00 P.M. on May 25.

Shorenstein APARC’s director, Professor Gi-Wook Shin, commented: "The Korean War is often referred to as ‘the forgotten war,' but th at is not the case. As we can see from the rapidly unfolding events on the Korean Peninsula in the wake of the sinking of South Korean naval vessel Cheonan, the Korean War is actually ‘the unending war.'" He said that the pre-screening of "Into the Fire," the panel discussion, and the Korean War lecture are intended to recall the significance of the Korean War and underline the magnitude of current issues on the peninsula.  Noting that Shorenstein APARC has conducted a great deal of research and offered policy recommendations on U.S.-Korean relations, Professor Shin said that the pre-screening of "Into the Fire" was also intended to contribute to increased cultural exchanges between the United States and South Korea. Shorenstein APARC has organized similar events, including the screening of Clint Eastwood’s film "Letter from Iwo Jima," which was also followed by a discussion with the director. Shorenstein APARC also hosts speeches by major figures in U.S.-Korean relations, including last year’s address by former ruling party leader Madam Park Geun-hye.

Shorenstein APARC is a unique Stanford University institution focused on the interdisciplinary study of contemporary Asia. Shorenstein APARC’s mission is to produce and publish outstanding interdisciplinary, Asia-Pacific–focused research; educate students, scholars, and corporate and governmental affiliates; promote constructive interaction to influence U.S. policy toward the Asia-Pacific, and guide Asian nations on key issues of societal transition, development, U.S.-Asia relations, and regional cooperation.  Shorenstein APARC’s research spans the worlds of scholarship, business, and government, and cuts across traditional academic disciplines to provide broad, deep perspective.

The Center supports many ongoing projects, and also launches new studies every year to respond to its primary research goals. All projects are interdisciplinary and collaborative, involving faculty, students, and experts at Stanford, across the United States and around the globe. New projects currently under way consider topics ranging from nationalism in Asia and regionalism in Southeast Asia to the rise of high technology in Greater China, outsourcing to Southeast Asia, and globalization in Korea.

The Stanford Korea Program was formally established in 2001 at the Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) with the appointment of Professor Gi-Wook Shin, as the founding director. The Stanford KSP offers courses on Korea, hosts seminars related to the study of Korea, sponsors workshops and conferences, conducts research projects, supports fellowships, and collaborates with a broad range of visiting scholars. Stanford KSP also works closely with Stanford's Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS), which offers a Master's Degree in East Asian Studies with a specialty in Korea.

Stanford KSP's many activities include the "New Beginnings" policy research study group on U.S.-Korean relations, which since 2008 has made annual recommendations to the United States government on strengthening bilateral ties. Stanford KSP has an active program of visiting senior Korean officials and scholars. In recent years, visitors have included Hyong O Kim, speaker of the National Assembly; Sei Hoon Won, head of the National Intelligence Service; Won Soon Park, Executive Director, The Hope Institute; Seoul National University Professor Se-Il Park; Seoul National University Professor (and former foreign minister) Young-Kwan Yoon; Jong Seok Lee, Senior Fellow, Sejong Institute (and former unification minister); and General (ret.) Byung Kwan Kim, former Deputy Commander, ROK-U.S. Combined Forces Command. Visiting scholars currently include Byongwon Bahk, a former vice minister of finance and former senior secretary to the President for economic affairs.

The 20th century world of philosophy did not, as a rule, create superstars.

Hannah Arendt was an exception – almost from the time she coined the phrase that has become a cliché, "banality of evil," to describe the 1961 trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in a series of articles for The New Yorker. She acquired a cult status that her mentors, philosophers Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, could hardly imagine.

Thirty-five years after her death, the German-Jewish political theorist, author of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and Life of the Mind, among other works, is an international industry, with new letters, commentaries and biographies published every year. But perhaps her message has been obscured by celebrity.

A scholarly conference at Stanford attempted to redress the imbalance in its own way with a recent two-day workshop, "Hannah Arendt and the Humanities: On the Relevance of Her Work Beyond the Realm of Politics," sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Scholars from around the world discussed the life and thought of one of the most seminal and influential political philosophers of the last century.

A friend remembers

In a surprise appearance, Stanford University President Emeritus Gerhard Casper spoke of his friendship with Arendt, from their meeting in 1961 until her death in 1975.

"Why Arendt? Why Arendt now?" asked Professor Amir Eshel, director of the Forum on Contemporary Europe. He said that in the humanities, her "insights about the link between the past and the future" can "address the predicaments of our time, specifically such manmade disasters as genocide and mass expulsion."

Arendt fled Germany when Hitler rose to power in 1933, immigrating in 1941 to the United States, where she taught at a number of universities. Her works, particularly The Origins of Totalitarianism, a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, spurred a wide-ranging debate on the nature and history of totalitarianism. Her books analyzed freedom, power, evil, political action – and, always, thought.

Stanford professor Robert Harrison, chair of the Department of French and Italian, made the conference's most spirited address in a talk on "passionate thinking." He considered Arendt's notion of friendship and thought as rooted in solitude and the ability to commune with oneself – that "plurality begins with the individual."

The "overwhelming question" in the humanities, he said, is "How do we negotiate the necessity of solitude as a precondition for thought?"

"What do we do to foster the regeneration of thinking? Nothing. At least not institutionally," he said. "Not only in the university, but in society at large, everything conspires to invade the solitude of thought. It has as much to do with technology as it does with ideology. There is a not a place we go where we are not connected to the collective.

"Every place of silence is invaded by noise. Everywhere we see the ravages of this on our thinking. The ability for sustained, coherent, consistent thought is becoming rare" in the "thoughtlessness of the age."

Harrison decried the public fascination with Arendt's youthful affair with Heidegger, a Nazi sympathizer; the publication of Arendt's personal letters; and her biographers' invasive use of private material – although at least one biographer, Thomas Wild of Berlin, author of Hannah Arendt, attended the workshop.

Casper said that he had to be "cajoled into coming" as Arendt was "a very private person."

"She would not have approved of videos, being taped at all times and put out on the web," he said, indicating the camera that was filming the event.

He noted that "she liked to gossip – very much so." However, he said, "What she would have been appalled by is the industry. Cottage industry? This is hardly a cottage industry anymore."

Guarded her solitude

Casper reinforced the notion of Arendt as a guardian of her own solitude: attending conferences infrequently and "always thinking … always fiercely independent," protecting her "private time, time for study, time in her apartment on Riverside Drive."

"She was forceful, opinionated, never had any doubts about her views," he said. "In certain circumstances she was willing to listen carefully and be convinced she was wrong. Those were rare."

Casper said he considered her best book to be Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book that concluded, famously, with a direct address to Eichmann:

Just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

"She was incredibly good when she observed, when she told what she saw," Casper  said. "She was incredibly suggestive and artistic – she was not definitive, not scientific," he said. "That's why she's not popular among philosophers, nor among political scientists. She was putting forward a kind of truth, not definitive, about the human condition. That was her great strength."

Arendt is more than another talking head; Eshel said that she forms a formidable counterpoint German philosopher Walter Benjamin's view of the past "as one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage at the feet of the angel of history."

Arendt instead "wants us to acknowledge our ability to set off, to begin, to insert ourselves with word and deed into the world. Arendt seemed to have sensed that if we do not do so there may be indeed no future for us to share."