By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on February 11, 2023
Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Berlin
The new banality of evil is tourism, capable of turning a Nazi concentration camp, where 200,000 people were interned between 1936 and 1945, into an object of consumption. In Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, more than 30,000 died from disease, starvation, medical experiments, torture or the gas chamber.
It was a center conceived by its leader, Heinrich Himmler, as a “model” camp for his extermination policy, which began by imprisoning opponents of the fascist regime, but later included all those the Nazis considered racially or biologically inferior. From 1939, it included citizens of German-occupied countries. Among them were communists, socialists, anarchists, blacks, gypsies, homosexuals, Jews, Catholics, evangelicals and soldiers from different armies.
The Nazi regime was from its beginnings inextricably linked to the brutalization of politics, to the need to “purify” with violence a decadent society, such as the Germany of the Third Reich. It did so by building a perfect machinery of pain and death like this concentration camp that, seen from afar, seems to be assembled from perfect and ordered blocks, like a lego game in which the most innocent pieces can be perverted and transformed into elements of destruction.
As you walk around, an electronic guide that you put in your ear tells you in an impersonal tone what the function of each block was, and does not miss an opportunity to reiterate that the Soviets who liberated the prisoners in April 1945 committed as many abuses as the Nazis. He forgets many details, such as the fact that after the war, only 6 percent of the German soldiers at Sachsenhausen were tried. If you happen to pass by Bertolt Brecht’s house in East Berlin, now a museum, the employee in charge will try to convince you that the author of The Threepenny Opera and The Caucasian Chalk Circle was not as Marxist as he himself insists on emphasizing in all his work.
I am in Berlin, invited to the Rosa Luxemburg Conference, which every year commemorates the brilliant Marxist intellectual, executed with a shot in the back of the head on the same day that her fellow fighter, Karl Liebknecht, was shot in the back on January 15, 1919. Those who committed these crimes later helped Hitler rise to power. For the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the murder of Rosa and Liebknecht marked a turning point in history, which she defined as “the line separating Germany before and after the First World War.”
The feeling on the German left now is one of great concern that the line has been crossed again. Federal government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit confirmed the dispatch of Leopard tanks to Ukraine on the grounds that for Germany “it is a matter of life and death with regard to the defense of the country itself.” The disciples of the Prussian general Clausewitz are determined to believe that a good war is better than a bad peace, and the drums are beating for what could end up being a Third World War.
If the “logic of weapons” is trying to lead a rearmed Germany towards a devastating world conflagration, the “weapons of logic” have long since legislated and governed subjectivities, to the point that some of the tourists at Sachsenhausen, without the slightest modesty, take selfies of themselves balancing on the ruins of a gas chamber. The grossest economic determinism, the elimination of historical references and future perspective, the trivialization and manipulation of life, do not even have to cross the limits of common sense. They are here, with literal and tacit violence normalized in the media and social platforms.
The banality of evil is the negation of thought. Hannah Arendt coined the concept after witnessing the trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, of whom she claimed he was a “terribly and frighteningly normal” man, a bureaucrat, part of a murderous cog. He had merely played his part. Evil did not smell of brimstone or have horns. He was banal, he was a good neighbor, people like one. People who consume and create virtual fast food out of anything and everything without thinking too much, while Berlin sends 14 Leopards to war.
Source: Cuba Periodistas