Wird irgendetwas mit mir geschehen? Psycho(patho)logical perspectives on Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil

Abstract

In 1961, the Eichmann trial opened in Jerusalem, and its worldwide resonance through media coverage questioned the collective conscience about responsibility for Nazi crimes. German philosopher Hannah Arendt attended the process as a special correspondent for the U.S. magazine The New Yorker. Her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) caused a great scandal: the author advanced the brazen idea of collective co-responsibility for Nazi crimes, reporting the identikit of a standard bureaucrat, a seemingly ordinary man, just like any one of us. Almost sixty years after its publication, this study adopts a primarily psycho(patho)logical perspective to reflect once again on the considerations Arendt shared in the Banality of Evil. In showing the multiple facets of banality, the research investigates recent results in the analysis of the criminal mind in order to shed light on the etiology of evil.

Keywords

• shoah
• nazi genocide
• evil
• psychopathology
• trauma