2 - Staging the Banality of Evil

Summary

Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem was an ennobling treatise that changed the way Nazis were depicted on stage. This chapter explores the Nazi mentality through Arendt's concept of the “banality of evil” as depicted in Donald Freed's The White Crow: Eichmann in Jerusalem, Cecil Taylor's Good, Peter Barnes's Laughter!, and Thomas Bernhard's Vor dem Ruhestand.

Adolf Eichmann was a mediocre student and subsequently a salesman for an electric company before joining the National Socialist Party and then entering the SS in 1932. He was an ambitious young man who married in 1935 and soon began to realize that the Nazi Party provided him with the means to move up in the ranks and thus to develop enough security to take care of his family fairly well. Arendt explains Eichmann's motivations in the early part of his career: “From a humdrum life without significance and consequence the wind had blown him into History, as he understood it, namely, into a Movement that always kept moving and in which somebody like him–already a failure in the eyes of his social class, of his family, and hence in his own eyes as well–could start from scratch and still make a career.” Eichmann quickly became an expert on Jewish affairs and then advanced in the Party to become the Nazis' leading authority on emigration; as such, Eichmann worked closely with Jewish leaders to achieve their mutual goal of emigrating Jews to Palestine during the 1930s.