Already in 1946, our Jorge Luis Borges, imagined in the story “Deutsches Requiem”, the last hours of a deputy commander of a Nazi concentration camp, surnamed Zur Linde, who wanted a new order “where violence and the faith of the sword". In the story, the protagonist, a lover of music and philosophy, had lost his feeling of piety. He accepts his condemnation, but shows no signs of repentance.
Borges anticipated, in several ways, the biography of Commander Rudolf Höss, which is shown in the film “Zona de Interés”, winner of the Oscar for best foreign film.
The plot focuses on the commander's idyllic family life, in his mansion next to the concentration camp. A wall separates paradise from the worst of hells. Auschwitz is behind the wall. You hear, but you don't see what happens there (the viewer must imagine it).
The fiction – possibly based on reality – shows Höss as a sensitive father with his children, with plants and with his horse. In real life, many years later, his daughter Briggitte (who did not dare to use her father's surname) remembers him as “the nicest in the world.”
The film is silent about the life of the commander inside Auschwitz, it proposes to the viewer to deduce it. It happens that most of us can't even imagine it.
It should be remembered, then, that Höss was the one who designed, conducted and perfected the largest death camp in human history. A million murdered Jews did not change their family life.
How could he lead such an extremely different double life inside and outside his home? Can you be affectionate with your family and brutal with other people?
In recent days, prestigious media described Höss's criminal actions, applying the concept of “banality of evil.”
The philosopher Hannah Arendt coined this term in 1963 to explain that a mediocre person can act evil, following the laws established by the regime and without thinking about the consequences. She had witnessed the trial of Adolf Eichmann and understood that this Nazi criminal was not an anti-Semitic psychopath, he was simply an executioner who did not think about the results of what he was doing.
The question is whether the term “banality of evil” could also be applied to Höss's case. Eichmann was an official who coordinated transportation to the concentration camps. He bought “one-way tickets only” on the railways. While he was a radical fanatic, he did not see the mass death conveyed to him and argued that he was a bureaucrat.
On the other hand, Höss witnessed the mass murder daily, it was impossible for him not to be aware of what he was doing.
Just like the protagonist of Borges' story, he lost the feeling of mercy and never repented.
Consequently, I question the application of the concept of “banality of evil” to a murderer of the brutality of Rudolf Höss.
Finally, it would seem that the regimes “of violence and the sword” will always find executors - such as Eichmann, Höss and the imaginary Zur Linde - to murder massively following orders. All that remains for good human beings is to resist, resist and resist these regimes.
The snake egg must be destroyed before it hatches.
Mario Eduardo Cohen is president of CIDICSEF