O banalnosti zla: slučaj Hane Šmic u romanu Čitač Bernharda Šlinka

Abstract

The novel The Reader (1995) was created as a product of the active confrontation of the 68th generation members with their parents’ crimes committed during Nazism. It is also thinking of the German lawyer and philosopher Bernhard Slink about the nature, anatomy, and forms of evil manifested during the Second World War. Analyzing the case of Hanna Schmitz, a former supervisor in a women’s camp, who actively participated in the destruction process of other human beings with the absence of guilt and responsibility, Schlink grappled with the problem of the nature of the evil and human actions during the rise of Nazism and after its defeat. Methodologically considering philosophical discussions about the nature of evil he sketched a psychological portrait of a contemporary criminal through the case of Hanna Schmitz in the novel The Reader. In this paper we examined whether a person can adopt evil as the usual content and norm of his/her life and whether the normalization of evil is enough to remove the sense of guilt and responsibility for the things done.