Banality's Downfall

In writing about the trial of Adolph Eichmann, Hannah Arendt described the banality of evil. I had a friend who vociferously disagreed with that concept. Evil, my friend said, was big and odious, and overwhelming. You always knew when you were in the presence of evil, she insisted. If that were true, of course, we'd always be able to recognize and sidestep evil no matter how it presented itself. It would also mean that all the evil we encounter in the world, both large evil and small evil, would be the result of conscious choice. I never had a chance to pursue this argument with my friend, and perhaps that's what she believes.

Downfall, the Academy-Award-nominated German film that chronicles the end of the Nazi regime in Hitler's bunker, presents its evil as fairly banal. The movie is gripping and fascinating, but a large part of that is due all the baggage we bring to it as viewers. We know who these people are and what they did. Many of them, including Adolf himself and perhaps especially Eva Braun, are portrayed as oblivious to the world around them. In a short segment at the very end of the film, the real Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary who's portrayed by an actress during the film itself, says as much--although she claims she hadn't been aware of the atrocities of the Nazi regime while she served Hitler, when she did find out about them, she had a hard time relating them to her own actions, recognizing that these horrors had anything to do with the work she and her colleagues did during World War II. As viewers, we don't have that problem. We know what they did, and we easily assign blame where it is due. The characters themselves are symbols of evil, so banal or not, we're mesmerized by what they do and what happens to them.

If we were not seeing Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, and the others now notorious to history, would this movie be as compelling? If it were telling the story of the end of some anonymous totalitarian regime, would it hold our interest as relentlessly as it does now? That's hard to say, but I'm not sure it would. This is a tale of hubris, of overreaching, of bringing about one's own downfall. And as such, it's something we've seen a number of times before, if not exactly in this guise. The familiarity of the basic situation can't be denied. And that, I'm afraid, is testament to the true banality of evil, to how evil can remain unassuming and unobtrusive, to how it can slip through our defenses and take hold before we even know what's happened.