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On the compartmentalization of evil & The Zone of Interest.
Some years ago, I visited a learned antiquarian bookseller of my acquaintance. He had the largest collection of classical-music CDs that I have ever seen, and when I arrived he was playing an exquisite performance of the Winterreise, both sensitive and moving. It was obviously a recording of a live performance, for one could hear in the background the faint shuffling and suppressed coughing of an audience.
“What performance is it?” I asked.
“Berlin,” he replied. “1943.”
Berlin, 1943: refinement, sensitivity, and powers of discrimination in the year of Stalingrad and the Final Solution, in the capital city of a political regime so vicious and brutal that it has remained the gold standard of human evil, so to speak, ever since.
Continue reading the piece here at The New Criterion
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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