On 13 October, Marc Jongen, a leader of the German far-right populist party, AfD, engaged in an onstage conversation with New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma, as part of the annual conference given by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center.

Jongen’s participation in the conference, Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times, sparked intense debate. A damning letter published in the Chronicles of Higher Education and signed by dozens of academia’s brightest stars, criticized the Arendt Center director, Roger Berkowitz, and charged that the German politician’s inclusion “enabled him to leverage Hannah Arendt’s legacy to legitimize and normalize the AfD’s far-right ideology”.

In a letter of his own, the Bard president, Leon Botstein, pushed back against the “self-righteous stance of the signatories and the moral condemnation of the letter”. And in the New Yorker, Masha Gessen sided with the academics: “An invitation to talk at a famous center at a prestigious college does lend legitimacy to the speaker and his views.” Arendt “stressed the simplicity and the ‘preposterous’ nature of ideas that underlie evil: these were ideas to be called out, not debated. She was also sensitive to the appearance of legitimacy that an invitation can lend.”

It was pure coincidence that, on the afternoon of Jongen’s morning appearance at the conference, my Bard literature class met to discuss Gitta Sereny’s journalistic masterpiece, Into that Darkness.

A book-length interview with Franz Stangl, the former Kommandant of the Treblinka extermination camp (where an estimated 1.2 million people were killed), Sereny’s book is based on conversations conducted in the German prison where Stangl was held after his capture in Brazil, and on interviews with Stangl’s loved ones, associates, and with Treblinka surviviors.

Officially, my class is called “Literary Responses to Totalitarism”, but the range of the regimes in the plays, stories, novels and memoirs on the syllabus is so wide (from Pinochet to Pol Pot, from Stalin’s Russia to Atwood’s fictional Gilead and Philip Roth’s Nazi-ruled America) that it is more accurately a class about literature generated in response to – and in anticipation of – extreme and oppressive governments. The writers include Nadezhda Mandelstam, Roberto Bolano, Nuruddin Farah, Wallace Shawn, Norman Manea and Spalding Gray.

Because I am a novelist and not a historian, I tend to place a nuts-and-bolts emphasis on authorial decisions: determinations about tone, form, length, focus, dramatization, narration, etc. But because of the nature of the books, and because my students feel the pressure of the current political moment, our discussions range more widely. We talk about choice, resistance and complicity, about the ways that repressive governments take hold, about the assault on individuality, and the persecution of so-called enemies of the state.

The week before Jongen’s appearance, we’d had an incisive and moving conversation about Primo Levi’s memoir, Survival in Auschwitz. My students admitted they’d found it a difficult book, because it is painful and dense.

But they were full of praise for the mostly dispassionate, even taxonomic tone in which Levi (a scientist, after all) describes the routines, the prevailing spirit and the horrors of daily life in Auschwitz, a narrative calm broken by passages of deeper emotion and by reminders that the Nazi social experiment (that is how Levi describes it) took a brutal approach to the question of what it means to be human.

My class’s response to the Sereny book was even stronger. One student saw a warning in the way in which the Nazi leaders and their minions viewed themselves as victims. Another spoke about Sereny’s ability to make us consider whether one person can decide that another should make a moral decision that will likely result in death.

A student noted the confusing compassion he felt for so many of the people (even the evil ones) with whom Sereny spoke. And they kept returning to the book’s subtitle: An examination of conscience. What did Stangl tell himself? How could he do what he did?

A quarter of my students had been to hear Marc Jongen that morning, and the discussion was different than it otherwise would have been. Unlike the academics and Gessen, they noticed that Jongen was not alone on stage, ranting and waving his arms, but was engaged in conversation with Buruma, who impressed the students with his civility, knowledge and, above all, his ability to make Jongen reveal what he was (“a Nazi”, they said) and not what he claimed to be (a thoughtful German citizen concerned about his nation).

A Muslim student said that despite Jongen’s anti-Muslim ideology, he wanted to hear him; he didn’t want him shut down. Another suggested that what Buruma did was akin to what Sereny accomplished. They’d both tried get at the truth of who someone was: what he thought, and why.

None believed that Jongen’s presence had legitimized his ideas; he hadn’t been awarded an honorary degree. Being invited to address a conference at a college, they agreed, was not like being asked to speak at a public rally. They were proud to be associated with a school that trusted their ability to weigh unpopular ideas, an institution brave enough to invite Jongen: an educational institution. They felt that hearing Jongen had been part of their education.

It was. Seeing Jongen made them realize that the past is not the past (as Jongen insists) but the present as well, that the evil espoused by Hitler and carried out by Stangl did not die with them.

Gessen writes that “what Jongen said has been heard before, and could have been discussed in his absence”. I disagree.

I could have assigned my class to read about far-right ideology, or to watch a video, but it wouldn’t have been the same. It would not have had the effect of seeing Marc Jongen (as it were, in the flesh) and realizing that men of that sort are not all dead and gone, but remain a living, pernicious force in the world that my students are about to inherit.