Staging the Banality of Evil: Donald Freed's The White Crow: Eichmann in Jerusalem, Cecil Taylor's Good, and Peter Barnes's Laughter!

Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem was an ennobling treatise that allowed playwrights to reconsider the way Nazis were represented on stage. Arendt explicated the Nazi mentality through the concept of the "banality of evil"—a label she applied to Adolf Eichmann, who, like so many German citizens during the Holocaust, professed to act not out of a lack of moral conscience or from evil, but because of a need to obey German law as a prototypical citizen of the state. This essay applies Arendt's paradigm of the banality of evil to the way Nazis are portrayed in three Holocaust dramas: Donald Freed's The White Crow: Eichmann in Jerusalem, Cecil Taylor's Good, and Peter Barnes's Laughter! Although only Freed knew Arendt's study intimately, each of these plays depict how humans function as automatons or robots in totalitarian societies.

Adolf Eichmann was a mediocre student and subsequently a salesman for an electric company before joining the National Socialist Party and then entering the SS in 1932. He was an ambitious young man who married in 1935 and soon began to realize that the Nazi Party provided him with the means to move up in the ranks and thus to develop enough security to take care of his family fairly well. Arendt explains Eichmann's motivations in the early part of his career: "From a humdrum life without significance and consequence the wind had blown him into History, as he understood it, namely, into a Movement that always kept moving and in which somebody like him—already a failure in the eyes of his social class, of his family, and hence in his own eyes as well—could start from scratch and still make a career."¹ Eichmann quickly became an expert on Jewish affairs and then advanced in the Party to become the Nazis' leading authority on emigration. As such, Eichmann worked closely with Jewish leaders to achieve their mutual goal of emigrating Jews to Palestine during the 1930s. Conditions altered drastically for Eichmann after the adoption of the Final Solution at the Wannsee Conference, for his relatively safe job dealing with emigration now changed to making each country in western and central Europe Judenrein ("free of Jews"), which caused logistics nightmares for him. Eichmann, a midlevel bureaucrat who rose through the ranks of the Nazi hierarchy because of the significance they placed on genocide of the Jews, eventually became Obersturmbannführer (equivalent to "lieutenant colonel") reporting to Heinrich Müller whose boss was Ernst Kaltenbrunner (replacing the assassinated Reinhardt Heydrich), Himmler's subordinate.

At his trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Eichmann pleaded "not guilty in the sense of the indictment," which meant that although he found himself guilty in the eyes of God, he was not guilty according to German law. He showed no guilt and took no responsibility for his crimes. Although Eichmann argued that he worked closely with Jews to help them with their desired emigration and felt no personal animosity toward them, the judges refused to believe that a typically "normal" bourgeois citizen of the Reich could be incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. Eichmann, however, had been consistent in his steadfast pursuance of his duties according to German law, which was especially important during the war years when disobedience meant treason. Eichmann argued that Hitler, who rose from corporal to Führer, represented the will of the German people, a man whose vision created prosperity during the worst period of unemployment in German history. Even when the Final Solution became apparent, Eichmann realized that civil servants (represented, for example, at Wannsee), as well as the high-ranking military officers that he so emulated, all agreed that the goals of the genocide were noble and just; Eichmann's conscience was thus in tune with the voice of "respectable society." In short, Eichmann was not only obeying the laws of the land, he was also doing what was lawful and righteous for himself and for his family.

The Nazis adopted code words and...