I have not much to add to MeisterPfriem's great review. It was a compelling read that I finished in one sitting. An aspect that stood out to me is the way Eichmann's communication is portrayed: carefully distancing himself from any Nazi ideology in an insinuating manner whilst "retreating" to a seemingly unsuspicious position of conservatism. A meneuver ominously familar to observers of today's politics. ( )

The thread in the oeuvre of Kipphardt is the relationship of commands to obedience, of loyalty and conscience. He intends to destroy the myth of Eichmann as the ‘incarnation of the powers of darkness’ as the ‘personification of evil’ as the monster who kills sitting at his desk. He calls it a comfortable myth: He who is seen as a monster becomes the ‘Other’, the convenient recipient of one’s own responsibility and guilt. Extensive document research leads him to present Eichmann growing up to become a law-abiding German lower-bourgeois who wants to ‘fit in’ and be accepted by his social superiors, for whom it is the duty to do what his superiors expect him to do, to obey and not to ask questions: exactly what is required of modern employees to guarantee the function of business and state institutions, the attitude that is fostered in the education system, that every well adjusted person has learned to possess. Kipphardt wants the spectator to recognise in himself the ‘brother Eichmann’. So he intersperses the play with scenes that introduce persons of similar functional behaviour that leads them to treat human beings as dispensable objects: interviews with an U.S. general planning nuclear war, with a B-52 commander about bombing missions in Vietnam, a geneticist who dreams of cloning humans … (XI-11) ( )