DIVE-IN – An International Journal on Diversity and Inclusion

Introduction. Täter, Mitläufer, and the Responsibility for Evil

Veronica De Pieri, Elisa Pontini — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Wird irgendetwas mit mir geschehen? Psycho(patho)logical perspectives on Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil

Veronica De Pieri — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

In 1961, the Eichmann trial opened in Jerusalem, and its worldwide resonance through media coverage questioned the collective conscience about responsibility for Nazi crimes. German philosopher Hannah Arendt attended the process as a special correspondent for the U.S. magazine The New Yorker. Her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) caused a great scandal: the author advanced the brazen idea of collective co-responsibility for Nazi crimes, reporting the identikit of a standard bureaucrat, a seemingly ordinary man, just like any one of us. Almost sixty years after its publication, this study adopts a primarily psycho(patho)logical perspective to reflect once again on the considerations Arendt shared in the Banality of Evil. In showing the multiple facets of banality, the research investigates recent results in the analysis of the criminal mind in order to shed light on the etiology of evil.

L’‘incapacità’ di riconoscere la responsabilità: Riflessioni a partire da Ritorno in Germania di Hannah Arendt

Elisa Pontini — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

After her visit to Germany in 1949/50 Hannah Arendt wrote the essay The Aftermath of Nazi-Rule. Report of Germany (1950) in which she collects her reflections on post-war German society. Starting from this analysis, the present article aims to investigate the causes of the inexplicable indifference to Nazi crimes that Arendt observes in the German people. While Arendt emphasizes the inability to think (and feel) provoked by the regime, A. and M. Mitscherlich focus on the failure to process the traumatic ‘loss of the Führer’. In both cases, a mechanism of reality distortion gets triggered, resulting in the repression of the past and the denial of one’s own guilt and responsibility. The studies by Bar-On, Pohl and Welzer (et al.) show how these repression processes are also active in later generations, even today, representing a threat to a successful reworking of the past, to the preservation of collective memory and to the recognition of one’s own responsibility not only for the past, but also for the present and future.

Transgenerationale Schuld in Nora Krugs graphic novel Heimat

Jente Azou — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

In the graphic novel Heimat. Ein deutsches Familienalbum (2018), the German author Nora Krug documents the analysis of her family’s history. As a member of the third generation after the Holocaust, Krug wants to find out if and in which way her grandparents were involved in the Holocaust. In addition, her research shows whether her own family’s history corresponds to Germany’s cultural history. Krug seeks to improve her understanding of her family’s relations and her ‘Heimat’. The archive is the starting point of her investigations and defines the design of the story. Heimat connects information from the archives with testimonies and memorabilia. In this fashion, Krug creates a creative treatment of the family history. Not only the archive, but also photography is significant in the design of the graphic novel. Hirsch’ theory on postmemory explains the self-representation of the family in photographs. Krugs plurimedial design of the story creates a multilayered narrative that processes the complex themes of Heimat in a sensible way.

Allegorie des verdrängten Mitläufertums: Carl Merz’ und Helmut Qualtingers Herr Karl als österreichische ‚Banalität des Bösen‘

Daniel Milkovits — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

With Der Herr Karl (1961), Carl Merz and Helmut Qualtinger created a folk play of a ‘critical, myth-destroying form’ (Bobinac 1992) which is unique in Austrian theatre history. The scandal which this one-hour monodrama caused when it was first broadcast on Austrian television was also due to the unmasking character drawing: In the behaviour of the titular fellow traveller and opportunist ‘Herr Karl’, the audience recognised itself – the post-war mentality of repressing, forgetting and relativising found itself shaken to its foundations. The article aims to examine to what extent Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the ‘Banality of Evil’ are actually applicable to Merz and Qualtinger’s play and which aspects of Austrian mentality history become visible in it. In particular, the Austrian remembrance culture and its way of dealing with the traumatic happenings could become evident – especially in a nation that tried to posit itself as the first ‘victim’ of Hitler’s Germany even before the end of the war

Un areopago a Francoforte: La lezione civile di Fritz Bauer

Michele Paolo — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Throughout his career as a prosecutor, Fritz Bauer has always avoided looking back: from the capture of Eichmann to the Auschwitz trial he was never guided by intentions of revenge, nor was he ever satisfied with arresting those who were guilty; if anything, his intention was to promote democracy by educating the population, and to trigger reflections and debates around the problem of responsibility. Such an attitude emerges clearly from his writings, as well as from numerous public speeches, and interviews. From his first works, the very first one published when he was still in exile in Sweden, his Marxist-socialist vision stands out: the problem is not Hitler, it is the society that promoted him. And therefore it is this society that has to be changed. Of course, by preparing new cases aimed at past mistakes, but primarily through a deep self-analysis.

Amnesia collettiva e Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Psicanalisi e letteratura nella Germania degli anni Sessanta

Filippo Pelacci — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

This paper aims to analyze the effects on German literature of the renewed interest in Nazi past. In order to do that, it considers Adorno’s and Mitscherlichs’ studies, in which they try – from a psychoanalytic point of view – to understand the mechanisms which made Germans support the leader and then made them remove their guilt. Then, the article focuses on some author of the early Sixties, in order to verify how they try to begin the Germans’ Vergangenheitsbewältigung. As far as possible, the paper examines the reception of these texts, trying to understand how and to what extent they give a contribution to overcome this collective amnesia.

Postmemoria e letteratura per l’infanzia: trasmettere il trauma del bombardamento atomico alle nuove generazioni

Giulia Colelli — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

The end of World War II and the trauma of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki mark a complete rupture in Japan’s recent history. Both Japanese and non-Japanese authors of children’s literature have addressed this traumatic memory in their works, aiming to pass it on to the next generations and thus contributing to the construction of a carefully curated postmemory (Hirsch 2012) that conveys specific messages and feelings. There are several perspectives from which the catastrophe is retold, shifting from those who are the “victims” to those who can be considered the “accomplices” and influencing the way this specific memory is passed on to young readers. Through the analysis and comparison of three works of children's literature, including Hiroshima no uta (1960) by Imanishi Sukeyuki, this paper sets out to explore a new way of looking at children's literature that deals with the trauma of the atomic bombing, exploring the role that these texts have played in the transmission of this historical memory to later generations.

Beitrag Grundlosigkeit Genozid. Genozide und die Frage nach dem „Warum?“ Komparatistiche Überlegungen zum Konzept der „extremen Grundlosigkeit“ in autobiographischen Zeugnissen von Überlebenden der Shoah und des Tutsizids

Anne D. Peiter — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Based on autobiographical testimonies written by survivors of the Shoah and the Tutsicide in Rwanda, the article deals with the question of “why?” which accompanied the execution of the respective genocide as much as its “after.” When he dared to ask the “why” of the violence in Auschwitz, Primo Levi received the decisive answer: “There is no why here.” How the victims in Europe as well as in Rwanda, dealt with the arbitrariness and absoluteness of genocidal power instances is traced in three chronological steps: The first phase concerned the question of identifying the group to be killed and the redundancy of definitional access to the apparently “other” body. The second phase showed the disappearance of the question of the reasons for the massacres. The third phase corresponds to the period after the liberation of the victims. Here, the absurdity of the crimes became so glaring that many victims momentarily began to doubt the reality of their suffering. I hypothesise that the study of the extreme groundlessness of genocides does not contradict but complements the historical study of the origins and functioning of mass violence.

Il Parlamento degli invisibili: Note sull’estetica “ingenua” del progetto di Pierre Rosanvallon

Valeria Tettamanti — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Founded in 2014 by Pierre Rosanvallon, a professor in history and sociology at the École des Hautes Études in Social Sciences in Paris, the publishing collection Raconter la vie invites any person, layman and professional writer alike, to produce their own life testimonies. How does the professor's initiative claim to be ‘literary’ while at the same time claiming to extract itself from the conditions of possibility that determine a ‘literary’ text (work on the text, writing as mediation, authority, and peer recognition)? To what extent does Rosanvallon invoke the name of the novel and its specific symbolic profits, denying it?

Saul Friedländer, Norbert Frei, Sybille Steinbacher, Dan Diner, Jürgen Habermas, Ein Verbrechen ohne Namen, München, C. H. Beck Verlag, 2022, 94 Seiten, ISBN 9783406784507

Michael Dallapiazza — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Franz Kafka, Nella colonia penale, testo originale a fronte, trad. it. Nino Muzzi, Roma, Castelvecchi, 2021, 88 pp., ISBN 9788832902761

Giulia Fanetti — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Eva Mona Altmann, Das Unsagbare verschweigen: Holocaust-Literatur aus Täterperspektive. Eine interdisziplinäre Textanalyse, Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2020, 482 Seiten, ISBN 9783839454688

Alexandra Müller — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200