Oldal 109 [109]
OCR
Arendt touches on the essence of this: “the trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” (Arendt 1964 p.129) Also he was like so many other people. Yes: that is the banality of evil. An evil person is like any other person. Any and other. Here we find smallness in every sense: a lack of broadening, a neutrality emerge. This “person,” in any other circumstance, would be a simple church servant, a postal worker, a minor clerk, or an electrician nobody cares about, who would perish anonymously and vanish into a hole in history. It was the situation—fascism, the revolution of the failures, the little people suffering with inferiority complexes, which put people like this into a position as though they were someone. Eichmann said: his role in the Final Solution „was an accident” and ,potentially almost all Germans are equally guilty”. (Ibid) This failure is a miserable nobody and nothing, who exists in such a way that they simultaneously do not. Eichmann is exactly this. Arendt continues, “this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together for it implied.” (Ibid) The takeaway from Wannsee is that we legalize illegality, or from Gratiano’s perspective we correct the flaws in the law, such as the too-lenient Nuremberg Laws. As he said, “for thy life let justice be accused.” As though there were a need for this, as though we really should follow the thinking of Shakespeare’s character. Even though they say the law is only good to serve a collapsed and infinitely base idea. But it can be overturned openly if it is wanting. This makes it seem as though the law does count for something after all, as though the Nazi regime were not a system of “legalized illegality” (Radbruch again). It is as though law has some sort of meaningful role, even though the Kantian categorical imperative suggests the exact opposite. The harder form of this is the provocation in regard to the “other,” the transformation of that into an enemy, whether in the case of Jews in non-Jewish environments or Hungarians where they are the minority. Nietzsche, who is considered the harbinger
