Minotaur, Morlok, bestia… Obrazy niemieckich żołnierzy w polskiej literaturze dziecięcej o Zagładzie

The aim of the article is to create a ‘bestiary’ of monstrous German soldiers appearing in Polish Holocaust children’s literature of the 21st century. Body of analyzed works consists of Rutka by Joanna Fabicka, Bezsenność Jutki by Dorota Combrzyńska-Nogala, and Arka czasu by Marcin Szczygielski, among others. The figures of monstrosity were divided into three groups, as the characters (1) preserve the natural appearance of a man, or exceed the physical norm as being (2) the result of the author’s imagination or (3) references to other cultural texts. The negative and inhuman way of depicting the antagonists raises a certain doubt, caused by the reading of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt - the final part of the article is devoted to the problem expressed in the subtitle of her work.

Leaving a Life Behind: Eliza Binemeciyan’s Encounter with “the Banality of Evil”

Among the Armenian actors who were essential in creating and sustaining Istanbul theaters at the turn of the twentieth century, Eliza Binemeciyan (1890-1981) emerged as a prominent one. In the aftermath of taking part in the play Kösem Sultan in 1912, she became the star of Istanbul theaters for more than a decade until she left her beloved city when she was 35 years old. She never returned to Istanbul, the city that was her home and where the remains of her parents, both well known Armenian actors, were buried. Her story as well as the stories of her Armenian colleagues reveal the decline of cosmopolitanism and the rise of nationalism in Istanbul. The change of scene in Istanbul theaters from multi-lingualism and cosmopolitanism to nationalism was like a microcosm of the policies of Turkification during the decline of the Ottoman Empire. In many memoirs about the era, Eliza Binemeciyan’s departure was normalized since she was depicted as an actor whose absence fostered the acting careers of Muslim Turkish women without much regard for her remarkable presence in Istanbul theaters.

The Human Chameleon: Zelig, Nietzsche and the Banality of Evil

This article revisits the case of Woody Allen’s mockumentary Zelig (1983) via Friedrich Nietzsche’s diagnostic of mimicry in The Gay Science. It argues that the case of the “human chameleon” remains contemporary for both philosophical and political reasons. On the philosophical side, I argue that the case of Zelig challenges an autonomous conception of the subject based on rational self-sufficiency (or Homo Sapiens) by proposing a relational conception of the subject open to mimetic influences (or homo mimeticus) that will have to await the discovery of mirror neurons in the 1990s in order to find an empirical confirmation. On the political side, I say that Zelig foregrounds the power of authoritarian leaders in the 1930s to cast a spell on both imitative crowds and publics in terms that provide a mimetic supplement to Hannah Arendt’s account of the “banality of evil”. The philosophical purchase of Zelig’s cinematic dramatization of a mimetic subject is that it reveals how the “inability to think” (Hannah Arendt) characteristic of the case of Eichmann rests on unnoticed affective principles constitutive of the all-too-human penchant for “mimicry” (Nietzsche) the film dramatises. Thus reframed, the human chameleon reflects (on) the dangers of mimetic dispossessions that reached massive proportions in the past century and continue to cast a shadow on the present century.

To explain evil. Philosophical interpretation of Philip Zimbardo's Prison Experiment

The main problem of this paper is the issue of the evil and attempts at explaining this phenomenon. It is an analysis and reinterpretation of the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo. The leading argumentation is composed of Hannah Arendt's thesis of the banality of evil and philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Paul Ricoeur. Facing the radical experiment's conclusions, questions about human free will, motives and responsibility was raised. Therefore, the main thesis of this paper is an objection against the radical postulate of social psychologists about a profound influence a situation has on our moral decisions. The conclusion leads us to assumption of the incomprehensible character of evil and a strong need to expand our ability of self-reliant thinking allowing us to make a morally right choices and to counteract evil.

Revelation after the Holocaust

The challenges which the Holocaust presents to reflections, especially Judeo-Christian, on divine revelation may be introduced by surveying how some poets, philosophers, and psychologists who have debated the seemliness of finding meaning in its barbarity have identified the search for this meaning to be intrinsic to conscience and necessary to human resistance against the banality of evil. However, by being the Nazi attempt and failure to exterminate the Jewish people in particular, the Holocaust must be defined in ways that address the sense of betrayal and abandonment fostered in its Jewish victims by their biblical conceptions of being the recipients and bearers of divine revelation. These definitions represent the Holocaust either as an event continuous with Jewish heritage and history, or so discontinuous as warranting either their negation or reformation in ways that suggest the contours of a new revelation. The many Jewish biblical and theological models guiding reflection on the Holocaust militate against reductionistic positions which represent it as a divine punishment and open up to representing the Jewish people as a Servant given to participate in the anguish which God nurtures for the created world. The extent to which the Holocaust was facilitated by Christian theological contempt for Judaism, and the extent to which this contempt was fostered by Christian scripture and tradition, all these stand to reveal the need for Christians to renew their understanding of Christian-Jewish relationships in general and of the relationship of Christology to Jewish suffering in particular.

Legitimating a Topic as Old as Esther

Here I rebut three fundamental challenges to the idea that Jewish moral monotheism was a primary cause of German anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. The first challenge is the claim that the National Socialist persecution of the Jews was based solely on race, and not on religion. The second challenge is the more sweeping claim that there was nothing objective about the Jews or Judaism—neither race nor religion—that motivated Nazi oppression and murder; these were simply irrational. The third challenge is what I call, echoing Hannah Arendt, “the banality of evil” claim. According to this perspective, most Nazis, including many who were very highly placed (e.g., Eichmann), were without evil intention or malice of forethought toward the Jews and were motivated primarily by mundane concerns, such as power or promotion or simple prudence. I take all three of these positions to underestimate human malice and, by implication, human (and divine) benevolence.