"Worry about the suffering of others. Listen to them and care about them." Rarely in recent decades did an episode of Summer Guests close with a more heavily penetrating final chord than that of Sunday 17 August 2025. Summer Guest Uğur Ümit Üngör thus crowned the deep impression he made during the three hours he spent with us at home, in the presence of writer Griet op de Beeck.
We experienced a man who paired scientific purity with a radically open view of the world and exemplary human patience in the search for truth. An anthropologist who, as a professor of holocaust and genocide studies, investigates the most extreme atrocities that seem inseparable from human history, and yet continues to believe in the inherent goodness of our species. No psychology of the cold ground can match that. Neither is hot-ground psychology, for that matter.
We were terrified
So things could have gone horribly wrong, this Sunday, as host Griet Op de Beeck had not behaved well during the first three episodes. Pretty much everything went wrong that could go wrong: we reported on that in three episodes as well: the bias towards Eus, the suffer from excessive preparation at Simon Kuper and the lust for therapy with Eva Crutzen. After that, it was only an anxious wait and see what would remain of Zomergasten as a necessary institution of public broadcasting.
No one around me had really heard of Uğur Ümit Üngör, but his field of study 'Holocaust and Genocide Studies' already suggested that it was not going to be light fare. Beforehand, I feared that Op de Beeck would try to go in search of 'how that feels', such a topic, which could turn the evening into a piece of soul searching against the backdrop of smoking gas chambers and ruins of once thriving cultures.
Changed facebook update
A few days before the broadcast, Op de Beeck posted an announcement on Facebook that foreshadowed exactly that: she wanted to "search together for whatever good can still be found" and something about her service dog, who was always prominent in the first episodes. Funnily enough, the text of that post had suddenly changed a few days later. There was now only a short text left, in which Op de Beeck reported having learned a lot during the preparation.
On Sunday 17 August, we saw what Op de Beeck had learned, and it was a feast. It began with her starting to ask questions that for once did not start with a verb, but with open question words like "how?" and "why?". She still sometimes fell back on closed questions to which only a very sympathetic interlocutor could answer with more than 'yes', 'no', or 'no idea', but the more open-ended questioning made an enormous amount possible.
Moreover, Üngör was so affable and forthright that, even at those few moments when Op de Beeck did fall back into attempts at psychologising, he was able to smoothly regain himself and the conversation. That too made you want to spend every day with this man hanging on his every word.
Where was the assistance dog?
There was even more different than in the first three episodes, and that will all have to do with the difference between those two Facebook updates. For instance, the glitter jacket that annoyed so many people was gone. Instead, Op de Beeck wore a beautiful silk blouse and the glitter (apparently something to do with superstitious necessity) was confined to under the table and on the hostess's back.
What was also gone: the service dog. I suspect, but this is speculation from me as a dog owner, that the guest had something to do with that. Could be that he was allergic or otherwise averse to dogs, could also be that the dog could not combine its calm presence with the short-skirted professor's bare male legs. Dogs like to sniff and sniff, or even lick, at that. Something that can be quite distracting when you are in a concentrated conversation.
Anyway: the service dog was not in the picture, and that seemed to make Griet Op de Beeck feel more vulnerable than all those other times. This could be seen in the way she treated her guest, and how she looked at him: no longer with her head back, radiating a kind of superior detachment, like the previous times, but with her head straight ahead, making open contact with her guest and really listening to his words with dedication. She also let him speak remarkably often, which was unique this summer.
Heartbreak
Especially wonderful (for us at home, that is) was the moment when, for the first time, the effects of war crimes on young children were addressed: Op de Beeck uttered a cry of heart that allowed us for the first time a glimpse into the vulnerable soul of the writer, who until then had always tried to keep something of the distance that her interlocutor possessed so much more naturally. Typical of a moment when the service dog might have intervened and awakened the Bram within. Good thing that was impossible now.
Thus Üngör got the conversation he deserved, with an interlocutor, cum interviewer, who allowed himself to be touched by his words, just as he himself made wonderfully palpable how, as a researcher, he allowed himself to be touched by his subject.
Art and science
On that subject, every word he said for three hours was on point. His observations on the relationship between art and science make 15 years of pleas for the value of art redundant, and his analysis of the situation in the Middle East is unprecedentedly pure and illuminating. I am not going to paraphrase that in my own words. For that, you have to go back and see how he washes ears on the left and right about positions taken all too easily.
Towards the end of the evening, the oppression increases, leaving little of the prospect of positive thoughts and feelings that Op de Beeck promised to look for just a few days earlier. Thankfully, because in the deep darkness of what people do to each other by seeing each other no longer as people but as opinions, garments, skins and objects, there is always the art that offers solace. Like the Jezidi singers, who, thanks to their chants, uphold the memories of what was before the genocide.
Love in the Face of Genocide | TRAILER
