Eichmann in Jerusalem

The famous concept of the banality of evil was proposed by the German philosopher Hannah Arendt as she reported from the trial to the war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. But Arendt and her philosophical theses are but a stepping stone to Jernej Lorenci and his associates to investigate historical facts, sociological and philosophical texts, personal insights of the performers, as well as familiar elements of popular culture in order to rationalise and contextualise evil and its true consequences. With this in mind, our show borrows from a variety of media – from Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah, Jaspers’s collection of lectures published in The Question of German Guilt to Curzio Malaparte’s novel The Skin and Stanley Kramer’s feature film Judgement at Nuremberg – to address the issue as broadly as possible. Eichmann in Jerusalem thus becomes more than an important theatrical event that it undoubtedly is; it becomes a deeply moving experience of sharing and a humble attempt at collective healing.