A friend, to whom I sent parts of my journal, wrote back to me and said: What do you mean when you say "overwhelmed by the banality of what happened"? I do not understand what you are trying to say.
Let me try and explain.
It was a reference to Hannah Arendt's comments at Adolf Eichmann's trial about the banality of evil. It is hard to judge how engaged anyone here is in history. I am perceiving people and places and the history presented by various entities through both their lens and my own position and prejudices.
Or, as we would say, if we were in physics, everything is in a moving and non-fixed frame of reference.
On one hand, the collective pain and scars of WWII and subsequent Soviet domination of the area are very real. The Museum of Terror, in just its name, let alone its contents, is a good example. The museum did not shy away from the fact that they were collaborators with the Nazis. On the other, somehow, such people were not "real Hungarians".
What happened to the Jews in Poland and in Hungary was banal, in the sense that, step by step, every day it became normal, acceptable, and just the way things were. To kill people, to take their homes, to send them off to live in ghettos and then camps, and finally to not live at all, was woven into the fabric of every day life. There is memory of it now, and, everyone's ancestors were heros and members of the resistance. Except the ones who weren't, and they weren't part of us.
My old German teacher would talk about how in her village they hid the child with down syndrome and then would say: "everyone now says we didn't know what happened when they took him. But we knew".
Good thing nothing like that goes on in the U.S.!
DM - you comparing US to Nazi Germany? Really, bruh?
[…] nomination. (let’s remember some history; Bush 43 made Clinton look better than he was) banality of evil, exhaustion of tourista David &%#@$! Brooks I spent 2 years cleaning houses. What I saw makes me never want to be rich. […]