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