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 “satanic greatness” to the Nazis, a hint of “myth and legend”. “It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what truly characterises them,” he wrote. “Bacteria can cause epidemics that wipe out nations, but they remain merely bacteria.” His letter had an obvious influence on Arendt, and on the way terrible human actions have been considered ever since. Everyone knows her phrase “the banality of evil”. It is, in its way, a cliche.
It is also easily misunderstood. “Banal” could be interpreted as exculpatory – 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, defends Arendt’s thinking on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief planners of the Holocaust. “Arendt did think that Eichmann was banal. She also believed it was important to understand that Nazism had corrupted everyone it touched.” That is, the crimes of the Holocaust were committed not just against individuals’ bodies, but against everybody’s morality; the mass murder of the 1940s could only have come about through a “disabling of moral choices”.
