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Cultural Critique 57 (2004) 33-46



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On the Contribution of Normalism to Modernity and Postmodernity

Translated By Mirko M. Hall

Normally, none of us pays attention to the little word normal. Admittedly, since some time ago, we as individuals and as societies have—in the last instance—decided all tricky questions after the criterion of normality. But, if one would ask us to define normality, we would probably not know the answer. With this category, we are obviously dealing with such an elementary building block of our culture that persists, to a large extent, in the blind spots of public and even scientific reflection. Therefore, it is only the other side of the same coin, which advances the normal to a so-called buzzword of the medial-political discourse. This process happens incidentally from unknown reasons and with a kind of peculiar spontaneity. But even in this case, the normal appears to cause nothing but confusion and anger. To begin right away with a topical event, here is a controversial section from Martin Walser's speech delivered during the festivities surrounding his being awarded the Peace Prize at the 1998 German Book Fair:

Auschwitz is not suited to becoming a routine threat, a tool of intimidation that can be used any time, a moral cudgel or merely a compulsory exercise. What takes place through such ritualization is the quality of lip service. But of what does one become suspect if one says that the Germans are now a normal people, an ordinary society? In the discussion of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, future generations can one day glean what people who felt responsible for the conscience of others have done: covering the city center with a concrete nightmare the size of a soccer field. . . . Probably, there is also a banality of the good.1 [End Page 33]

Out of the last phrase ("the banality of the good"), the editorial staff of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung created a short and suggestive title for the entire speech. It is well known that we are dealing here with an intertextual rejoinder: Hannah Arendt, in her essay "Eichmann in Jerusalem" (also controversial from the beginning) also spoke of both normality and banality. "Banality" was in the subtitle of her book and "normality" referred to the results of the psychiatric examination that had certified Eichmann's psychical "normality" (with no conspicuous perversions or the like). Hannah Arendt uses the signifier normal with sarcastic irony in her essay, writing in summary at the end:

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.2

Here, then, we are dealing with the juxtaposition of a "normal" psyche with mass gassing. In Arendt's essay, "normality" is not identi- fied with "banality,"3 nor is the Shoah ascribed, in any place, as an event of "ghastly normality," as was assumed in its reception, for example, by Jürgen Habermas.4 Walser obviously wanted to protest against this description when he deemed it necessary, on this pathos-ridden spot, to tell us the truth one more time—that today's Germans are a "normal people." Arendt also acknowledged this condition of the Germans between 1933 and 1945; in any case, "normal" in this context is a condition that concerns average mental health—and, that is exactly where she saw the problem. Hence, normality actually appears to be a kind of "vicious circle"—it forces speakers into corners they perhaps would not otherwise want. One could also show this with the "Historian's Debate" and, above all, in the so-called normalization of German foreign and military policy after 1989.

The gap between the empirical fundamentality of the normal and its discursive confusion was the reason I tackled a systematic and historical reconstruction of this category.5 Among other things, my conclusion was this: with regard to the normal and normality (or, normalities), we are dealing not only with insignificant commentary...

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