An endemic criminality that hides itself in tacit principles, values, procedures, in everyday language and everyday tyranny prvails today……
Ingeborg Bachmann:
„…. our plague is real: our historical and political metaphors are out of control. There is ‘a pandemic of’ we say – and what we also mean is that there is violence we can’t stop, and which seems to infect not only lives and minds, but the very words we use.“
‘No new world without a new language’ is one of Bachmann’s most frequently quoted sayings (‘Keine neue Welt ohne neue Sprache’).
‘I’ve often wondered,’ Bachmann wrote in the 1960s, ‘just where the virus of crime escaped to – it cannot have simply disappeared from our world 20 years ago just because murder is no longer praised, desired, decorated with medals …’ Exactly like Camus, she saw that European fascism had released an insidious kind of evil into the world. Around the same time, Arendt (who admired Bachmann) used the expression ‘the banality of evil’ to similarly describe an endemic criminality that hides itself in tacit principles, values, procedures, in everyday language and everyday tyranny.
Methoden der Psychohygiene 