“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hannah Arendt introduced the expression “the banality of evil” into the lexicon during the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. She has been criticized over the years for describing Eichmann as a small, mundane man who only followed orders, one after another.
In The Life of the Mind Arendt wrote, “ I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of rootsor motives.”
She believed he wasn’t innately malevolent, any worse than others in war. He just acted without thinking, not realizing the depth of the horror of the orders. He just didn’t have any notion of critical thinking, of sound judgment, of introspection. No planning. Evil seems to be part of living. Just one small step in the wrong direction, taken over and over, again. No moral responsibility. It was behaviour reminiscent of our reptilian ancestors-no gap between the instinct and the response to it-no place for thought. No humanity involved.
So I suppose one could say, based on Ms. Arendt’s reporting that it wasn’t his fault. His evil actions were simply banal; trite, obvious, even predictable. In Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship, Arendt emphasizes: “It was as though morality, at the very moment of its collapse within an old, highly civilized nation, stood revealed in its original meaning, as a set of mores, of customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with no more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of a whole people.”
She concluded then that humans are easily persuaded to let go of one manner of behaviour for another for the sake of self. But that would mean accepting that we are incapable of developing an internalized ethic of responsibilities, obligations and duties to others. That we cannot put the needs of others ahead of our own. That we are condemned to respond only to our innate selfish animal instincts.
Arendt came to her conclusions more from reading the record than reporting on the trial; unfortunately, she wasn’t there for much of it. The written word can be dry, leaving no room for intonation, inflection and most importantly the ability to see the person talking, watch the little movements of face and eyes, the hand gestures, the clues, the minutiae that our brain take in that unconsciously affect our emotional responses. Arendt did not feel the evil. She did not see the damage caused by linking evil and banal. But the expression is with us.
Every Man Dies Alone, byHans Fallada, was published in the United States more than 60 years after it first appeared in Germany. Although written before the writings of Arendt, it was not widely read until after she had penned the banality of evil. Yet, the theme of the novel could easily be “the banality of good.”
The book is based on a true and simple storyof Otto and Elise Hampel, whose postcard protest campaign — “Hitler’s war is the worker’s death!” — frustrated the Gestapo. The frustration only ended when the couple was captured in October 1942 and subsequently beheaded.
A working-class Berlin couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, discover that their only child, a son, has died while serving in the German army, WWII. The grief is so overwhelming that the parents re-purpose their lives. The father decides that the Nazis have gone too far. He decides to take a stand. He will write postcards and leave them where others will find them. His hope is to arouse others to the horror of Hitler; to encourage a mob mentality filled with the “banality of good.”
“Isn’t this thing that you’re wanting to do, isn’t it a bit small, Otto?” Anna asks. To which her husband responds, “Whether it’s big or small, Anna, if they get wind of it, it’ll cost us our lives.”
The book is about the consequences of a simple, peaceful act of protest that comes from a desire to participate in change. A desire to breakdown the all-pervading atmosphere of evil. The actions taken are benign, banal in a safe place. But this isn’t a safe place. From the apartment building in which they live with a Jewish couple upstairs, the husband missing for some time, and a rowdy, pro-Nazi family on the downstairs, to their community at large. No one is safe.
Each step they took toward completing their project, from buying the paper, the ink, the pen, hiding the work in progress, and then delivering the cards, banal in our world, was fraught with peril in their totalitarian, terror run society that encouraged spying on family and friends and reporting anything suspicious. Fallada, by supplying every minute detail of each and every action and sharing the plethora of feelings of the all the characters draws us into the difficulty of performing an act of good. Nothing is left to the imagination. The reader is left with a feeling of exhaustion from the exertion required to act against evil.
Quangel tries to explain his decision: “If one man sees he has no option but to fight, then he will fight, whether he has others on his side or not.” At first he truly believed that goodness would prevail if only others could be shown the way. Their acts of defiance would begin to normalize goodness, lead to mob banal acts of good. I don’t think I am giving away the plot when I report that goodness did not become commonplace.The story is a grotesque comedy that ends in torture and death.
Yehoyakim Stein, a psychoanalyst, wrote in 2005 in his article, The Banality of Good:
“There are more than enough examples in human history of severe crimes carried out under the influence of the mob. The human being is a herd animal that does not want to be deviant.
“There is nothing more dangerous than the combination of blind obedience and flight from responsibility (Emphasis mine.) If not for the great masses of little people fleeing from responsibility and hiding behind the big skirts of the generals and the politicians, most acts of atrocity in human history would not have been made possible. Every regime, all over the world, in carrying out questionable acts, relies to a large extent on this army of normal people, on the masses. The main problem of humanity is not aggression, but blind obedience.
“Just as there is a banality of evil, so too is there a banality of good.”
The problem we face is that the occurrences of the banality of good are rare. Here is one remarkable instance.
In 1940, in the early onset of World War II, it took Germany a mere six weeks to conquer France. For two years the country was divided between the Northern occupied half and the Southern “Free Zone. But that did not stop Marshall Pétain, chief of the state of Vichy France, the unoccupied south of France, from decreeing in October 1940 that foreign Jews were to be rounded up and interned in special camps. Local prefects could send Jews to concentration camps for any reason at all. For two years, Jews who lived or made their way to the south survived in relative peace.
Over the course of the war, thousands of Jews, mostly children, made their way to a small Protestant village, Chambon-sur-ligne, located in the mountains 350 miles south of Paris. In 1942 the Germans went into Southern France and began to round up the Jews to send them to concentration camps where they would be murdered.
There were approximately 5000 residents in the village of Chambon-sur-ligne. They were descendants of the first French Protestants, the Huguenots, who had been persecuted for their beliefs. The village was also a place of convalescence for the Germans soldiers. The Nazis were the neighbours. Yet, the families of Chambon-sur-ligne, led by their pastor André Trocmé, sheltered every Jew that came to their village. They did this knowing full well that defying the French government which was collaborating with the Nazis they were risking imprisonment, or worse. The villagers provided the Jewish refugees with food, an education, forged identification papers, and escorted many to Switzerland, to freedom.
When you read this story, can you see yourself in it? Do you see yourself sheltering someone for whom you will be killed if discovered? Think about it. You have no connection to these people. They were never your neighbours. You didn’t interact with them, share food or holidays. They were complete strangers to whom you owed nothing. Can you envision yourself putting not only yourself in danger, but your children and anyone else living under your roof to save strangers? Do you see yourself as someone who could keep this deed a secret even form your next door neighbour? Would you deprive your own children of food in order to feed strangers in your midst?
Now, add to this the culture in which the residents of unoccupied France lived. They were well aware of the German attitude toward the Jews. In Germany of the late 19th century, the “Jewish conspiracy” was the explanation for everything that had gone wrong in the world. Jews were described as an alien people endangering the German citizens. These views carried forward into the 20th century. Anti-Semitic propaganda was everywhere. Hatred of Jews was in the water and the air. Could you rise above the culture in which you lived? How would you accomplish that? What would be your guiding force?
Were the residents of Chambon-sur-ligne just born that way? Did they come out of the womb filled with the milk of human kindness willing and able to put the needs of others ahead of their own, like a wolf stopping in the woods to care for a wounded deer?
The residents of Chambon-sur-ligne were students of ethical monotheism; the 3500 year old Judeo-Christian ethic of caring for the weak, the oppressed the stranger, the other. It seems they had internalized their teachings to the point that saving others was simply “banal.” This ethic which is still only in its infancy was easily overwhelmed in Nazi Germany by the banality of evil.
If we want acts of goodness to be thoughtless, commonplace, the flip side of Arendt’s banality of evil then we must become like the residents of Chambon-sur-ligne; able to resist normalized evil even when surrounded by it. But to get to that place we need to internalize the ethic of compassion, responsibilities, obligations and duties like the residents of Chambon-sur-ligne.
There is in this secular postmodern world a belief that the Ten Commandments, the backbone of the Judeo-Christian ethic, are unnecessary, past their prime. Besides, they are common sense. Yet we don’t seem to have internalized the teachings as we continue to idolize ourselves, putting ourselves and our wants first in the centre of our universe, commit murder and incest, covet, and gossip and often disrespect our elders.
If we let secularism continue to demean and disparage all references to the teachings of ethical monotheism, to the testimony of the document and the Author of the document, we will put ourselves in danger of losing the ethic. We need only to remember the Quengels. Every act that they performed should have been commonplace, ordinary-banal. But, each action required careful thought. Perhaps all those years ago, Hans Fallada was warning us that what one takes for granted can be taken away when not remembered and practiced diligently.
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As we prepare for Easter and Passover, Christians and Jews need to think about ways to continue to keep ethical monotheism relevant and in the public square so that we can overco
me and defeat the banality of evil while bringing the banality of good into fruition.
