Through an Auschwitz commandant\u2019s family life, Jonathan Glazer\u2019s chilling new film reminds us of the banality of evil<\/p>\n
In a letter to his former student Hannah Arendt about the Nazi war crimes trials, written in October 1946, philosopher Karl Jaspers told her that he was uneasy with her view that the very boundaries of crime had been exploded by the Holocaust: that line of thinking might offer a streak of \u201csatanic greatness\u201d to the Nazis, a hint of \u201cmyth and legend\u201d. \u201cIt seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that\u2019s what truly characterises them,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBacteria can cause epidemics that wipe out nations, but they remain merely bacteria.\u201d His letter had an obvious influence on Arendt, and on the way terrible human actions have been considered ever since. Everyone knows her phrase \u201cthe banality of evil<\/a>\u201d. It is, in its way, a cliche.<\/p>\n It is also easily misunderstood. \u201cBanal\u201d could be interpreted as exculpatory \u2013 as if ordinary activities such as filling out forms, organising logistics and attending to bureaucracy might somehow imply a lesser degree of guilt, even when attached to industrial-scale murder. Lyndsey Stonebridge, in her new book on the philosopher We Are Free to Change the World<\/a>, defends Arendt\u2019s thinking on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief planners of the Holocaust. \u201cArendt did<\/em> think that Eichmann was banal. She also believed it was important to understand that Nazism had corrupted everyone it touched.\u201d That is, the crimes of the Holocaust were committed not just against individuals\u2019 bodies, but against everybody\u2019s morality; the mass murder of the 1940s could only have come about through a \u201cdisabling of moral choices\u201d.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Through an Auschwitz commandant\u2019s family life, Jonathan Glazer\u2019s chilling new film reminds us of the banality of evil In a letter to his former student Hannah Arendt about the Nazi war crimes trials, written in October 1946, philosopher Karl Jaspers told her that he was uneasy with her view that the very boundaries of crime … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}