Dino De Angelis in Castellammare with his show “The banality of evil”. A journey into memory and justice

Dino De Angelis and his skill as a refined narrator have hit the mark once again.

With a monologue focused on a strong and complex theme such as the Nuremberg and Jerusalem trials, the artist, in the evenings of the weekend just gone, performed at the Teatro Stabile Santa Filomena in Castellammare di Stabia with his latest show, “La banalità del male”.

In an atmosphere full of pathos and emotion, an involved and interested audience was immersed in the investigation of absolute evil on the eve of the day dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust.

The enormous loss of human life, the terror of the extermination camps and the total domination over man, annihilated and deprived of his dignity, has been punctually reconstructed by De Angelis. With the intent of making us understand what could have generated that absurd evil - and with evident emotional intensity - he has provided an accurate account of the events that occurred.

“The real goal was to give history a verdict that could not be discussed.”
This is the powerful motivation for the trials against Nazi criminals. To ensure justice for the martyrs and persecuted of the saddest period in history, it was necessary to provide certainty of the evil perpetrated with a sentence. One that would never again call it into question.

Memory, that of the time spent in the Nazi concentration camps, could not be buried in oblivion. The innocents tragically torn from their lives and deported, the famous freight train on platform 21 at the Milan station that took them to their deaths, the tragic discovery of January 27, 1945, were the dramatic pieces of human suffering to be reconstructed to attest to its truthfulness.

Involving the audience with the intensity of his emotions, De Angelis illustrated the contradiction inherent in the Nuremberg trials during the first weeks. The absence of a clear legal principle that nailed the Nazis, fueled in them the belief that they had done nothing wrong.

Subsequently, exponents of the Third Reich such as Rudolf Hess, Herman Göring and Joachim Van Ribbentrop, to name a few, had to deal with concepts such as crimes against humanity and genocide, which became part of that same process.

Giving due weight to words and events, the artist, supported by evocative images and videos, has also explored the figure of Adolf Heichman, defendant in the Jerusalem trial.

Here the narrative has brought to light a feeling of disbelief and dismay of the author. Heichman, responsible for the deportation of the Jews to the concentration camps, was in reality an ordinary individual, who did not express his own wickedness, but carried out terrible atrocities as a simple executor, feeling himself the oppression of the system.

The Nazis were therefore ordinary men without any personal ethics, intimately anything but executioners, who committed, with surprising unawareness, brutal actions in the mechanical execution of an order.

This, which qualifies the banality of evil, is also the faithful and disturbing portrait of Adolf Heichman, perfectly outlined by the narrator-author, in the context of a work that has the great merit of provoking reflection and making us perceive the importance of memory.