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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN<br />
towers reached the factory in which they were made from yet another place.<br />
The person who put together the IKEA-like instructions was maybe placed<br />
at the same factory, maybe somewhere else, the paper produced from wood<br />
felled at another site. The trucks that brought them here were probably<br />
serviced regularly by a mechanic. These networks of people and things<br />
demonstrate that the making and assembling of these watchtowers involved<br />
many different people, vehicles, tools which can all be seen as actors in their<br />
construction. What becomes clear through following these connections is<br />
how the totalitarian and dark oppression of people that I first wanted to<br />
place on a symbolic piece of barbed wire extended so much longer, further<br />
to include so much more, and in that making it somehow stronger. None of<br />
these different elements can be seen as responsible for the oppression of the<br />
people but they were all part of a system that held this oppression together,<br />
even though it might have been unknown to them. These were people who<br />
got up in the morning and headed off to their job in a factory or a<br />
mechanics, a job like any other. I came here to find the barbed wire of the<br />
metaphor I had got to know as I grew up but what I find is something else.<br />
As I climbed down the metal steps of the watchtower I realized that this is<br />
not monumental, in fact, it is rather mundane.<br />
One can see this as a sort of material correlation to Hannah Arendt’s<br />
observations of how networks in society can create circumstances where<br />
evil can be found in the ordinary, the ‘banality of evil’ (Arendt 1963:252). In<br />
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil Arendt wrote about<br />
the former SS officer Adolf Eichmann who was put on trial in Jerusalem<br />
and subsequently found guilty and hung for his role in “the final solution of<br />
the Jewish question” (Arendt 1963:5). Arendt’s observations as she looks<br />
closely at his role in the Nazi machine show that by breaking down events,<br />
people and places into smaller pieces when studying them it becomes clear<br />
how they can appear much more banal and ordinary than first thought. She<br />
described how people expected to see a monster in court, something encouraged<br />
by the prosecution (Arendt 1963:54), but instead they saw an<br />
ordinary looking man: “medium-sized, slender, middle-aged, with receding<br />
hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes” (Arendt 1963:5) who was more a<br />
clown than a monster. Even if our historical knowledge makes us look at a<br />
person, a material or an event through particular glasses, creating expectations<br />
of what we should find, it often becomes clear when looking at the<br />
smaller pieces that what we see as evil can be found in the most ordinary<br />
and banal.<br />
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