When you think of evil, characters like Hannibal Lecter, The Joker, or Michael Myers probably

come to mind. But what really is evil? Evil can take different forms, sadistic and brutal,

but it can also be boring and normalized. During the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, political

philosopher Hannah Arendt reported on the trial for the New Yorker magazine.

Her journalism became incredibly controversial due to her account of Eichmann, viewing him as banal,

normal, and a clown.

Learn more about the banality of evil, what it means, and how it can be used to interpret Nazi Germany on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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A few years ago, I did an episode on the Nuremberg personality tests.

To quickly summarize the episode, many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were captured

and tried in the city of Nuremberg in a tribunal which was run by the Allies.

During these trials, they conducted various clinical tests to assess the competency of the Nazis

to stand trial, and the results were shocking.

The public perception of the Nazis after World War II was that they were monsters, because

how else could you rationalize systematically murdering millions of people? But the results of the

test showed something different. Top Nazi officials were not statistic monsters. They were actually painfully average.

And needless to say, these results proved highly controversial.

I bring this up because it's highly relevant to the subjects of this episode, Adolf Eichmann and Hannah Arendt.

Adel Feikman was born in 1906 to a middle-class Austrian family.

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