Ordinary men and the banality of evil: recovering the conversation between Arendt and Browning

Abstract

This article seeks to recover the conversation between Christopher Browning and Hannah Arendt, which has been obscured by common misinterpretations of Arendt. I aim to show that reading Browning's account of “ordinary” German perpetrators alongside Arendt's analysis may help us re-think the way perpetrators often participated in mass murder because they adapted themselves to the Nazi order the same way they adapted themselves to the pre- and post-Nazi order. The return of this repressed Arendtian insight in Browning's work, I suggest, marks a realization that remains underexplored in Holocaust studies.