424
DANIEL BELL
even Stalinism, death camps, purge trials, degradation through forced
confession, were the work of madmen who, in unique circumstances,
had seized control of the machinery of a modern state, and who, with
some kindred henchmen, had terrorized the other normal persons into
silence and even acquiescence.
If
all this were so, we could then settle
back once more in an optimistic belief about human nature and spin
out our utopian dreams. Then evil could again be seen as something
"other," as something cunning, mephitic or surrealistic, the conjuring of
literary romancers like Lautreamont who in his
Chants de Maldorer
narrates a "career of evil" through the incantations of sadism. But the
reality of evil, as Simone Weil once noted, is that it is "gloomy,
monotonous, barren, and boring," because evil, when done, is felt not
as evil, but as a necessity or a duty. And this was the evil of Adolf
Eichmann.
Adolf Eichmann was the
declasse
son of an Austrian middle class
family (his father was a lawyer) who joined the Nazi party after he
had been fired from a humdrum job as a traveling salesman for the
Vacuum Oil Co. He did not join as a zealot or a convert; in fact,
he had at the same time joined the Freemasons' Lodge Schlaraffia
("from
Schlaraffenland,
the gluttons' Cloud-Cuckoo Land of German
fairy tales") and had been expelled from the Lodge just as his Nazi
sponsor, Ernst Kaltenbrunner (a friend of his father's, and later the
chief of the Head Office for Reich Security) told him that membership
in the two was incompatible. When Eichmann joined the Security
Service, he was under the impression that he would be guarding
the high Party officials, and that his job would consist of standing on
the running board of their shiny cars as they wound through the
street demonstrations. In all this, he was truly Hans Fallada's white–
collar clerk in
Little Man, What Now?
How did Eichmann happen to change, or did a change even take
place at all? Adolf Hitler once wrote in his manual on rhetoric that
mass demonstrations "must burn into the little man's soul the proud
conviction that though a little worm he is nevertheless part of a
great dragon." Eichmann was not a cog or a wheel in the machine-such
an image is too mechanical and fails to realize the way human beings
respond to situations that give outlet to their hunger and fantasies–
in this case, of importance and omnipotence. He saw his opportunities
and he jumped to them with alacrity. And he had a
Fuehrer,
a legitima–
tion (the Nazi concept of race superiority), and a system that allowed
him to act out his puffed-up dragon pride. One other ingredient
completed the role: like Caliban, he was given "speech," the
Amtsprache
