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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
Arendt makes a distinction between the doer and the deeds: “The deeds are
monstrous, but the doer (Eichmann) is not a monster; ‘he is terrifyingly
normal’” (Bernstein 2010:133). Philosopher Richard J. Bernstein, who has
suggested that Arendt’s use of the term ‘banality of evil’ has been much
misunderstood in part as many has taken this to mean that she considered
Eichmann to be just an innocent cog in the Nazi system, which she did not
(Bernstein 2010). Her descriptions of Eichmann and of the trials clearly
show that she thought he was guilty. Instead through looking at all the
pieces of his life within the Nazi system she demonstrates that he is rather
ordinary and that it was more out of thoughtlessness or “inability to think”
(Arendt 1971:417) that he committed these crimes rather than being a
monster. Bernstein also suggests that people have thought she was trying to
create some sort of theory or thesis on the nature of evil to which he refers
to a lecture given by Arendt in 1971, Thinking and Moral Considerations in
which she claims that: “…reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, I
spoke of the “banality of evil” and meant with this no theory or doctrine but
something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a
gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness,
pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal
distinction was perhaps an extraordinary shallowness” (Arendt 1971:417,
Bernstein 2010:133).
To discover the mundane is therefore not the same as finding the trivial.
It is not my intention to go into the question of guilt or where evil lies
within a system as the one Eichmann functioned in as much of the
discussions about Arendt’s observations have come to focus on this (for a
discussion of this discourse see Bernstein 2010:131) or within the communist
system in Czechoslovakia at the time. Instead my observations are
to make clear that by starting with the materials themselves we can see how
the networks that connect these with other materials, places, people, and
events can extend in a way that we would not expect. I also want to demonstrate
in what we may see as traces of the mundane and the everyday how
we can also find clues that can help us understand a system from the
bottom up. It is neither my intention to go into the details of what ordinary
life in Czechoslovakia at the time was like or the Eastern or Western bloc
more generally for that matter. What I want to demonstrate is what the
materials from the sites that I have investigated reveal and that it is only by
starting within these small pieces that it is possible to extend such research
through the networks outwards and upwards in order not to load the
materials with meanings that they are not fit to hold. It is in the discovery of
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