Lectures For Lifelong Learners!

Hannah Arendt, refugee from Nazi Germany, famously defined evil as banality and argued that Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, was not a monster but simply an ordinary man following orders. Could he have been so unimaginative as not to have seen the horror of the world he helped create? Or, consider Hannah, the pivotal character in The Reader, Bernhard Schlink’s famous novel adapted to film. Hannah is a thirty-five-year-old woman who seduces a fifteen-year-old boy, a woman, we come to learn, who was a former Nazi war criminal. She seems to find redemption at the end. Does that vindicate her? She was cruel to her prisoners during the War, and she was cruel to her young lover. He finds excuses that make her sympathetic to many of Schlink’s readers and members of the film’s audience. Should we ever excuse or forgive evil?