Page - 43 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

Trauma and Conformity | 43www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 35–46 BYSTANDER EFFECT A third social-psychological phenomenon addressed in Das radikal Böse con- cerns the failure to respond when another individual is in danger or suffering, behaviour that has been termed the “bystander effect”. This behaviour has been explored in various forms, in particular in the experiments of Darley and Latané, which sought insight into what people do when they detect a threat.12 The main purpose of this research was to detect how people were influenced by other individuals’ failure to act. The experiment followed the murder of a young woman in New York in 1964. Kitty Genovese was raped and killed in the street at night. More than 35 persons saw or heard something, but nobody alerted the police. Why did they fail to act? In one of these experiments, the test subjects were confronted with signs of danger: their room was filled with smoke, which suggests fire. Participants who were alone in this room responded on average in four seconds. If they were together with people who did not react, actors naturally, it was 20 seconds on average before they themselves reacted. It thus took five times longer for them to respond to a danger when they were in the presence of passive others. In an- other version of this experiment, someone appeared to become unwell. Seven- ty per cent of the test subjects offered help if they were alone with the person who became unwell. If they were together with others who did not help, only 40 percent offered assistance. In short, when people are alone they respond more actively to signs of danger that might cause suffering than when they are in the presence of others who remain passive. In Ruzowitzky’s documentary the images of the experiments are effectively interwoven with images drawn from letters written by military men in which they described the horror of killing and / or attempted to justify their deeds; with comments from experts such as Benjamin Frencz, lead prosecutor in the post-war trial of members of the Einsatzgruppen, and Christopher Browning, author of an academic study of one of those Einsatzgruppen; and with the nar- ratives of witnesses of these massacres, Ukrainian villagers who had seen Ger- mans take their Jewish neighbours off to be killed.13 CONFORMITY AS FORCE OF EVIL Das radikal Böse is a product of the anti-authoritarian atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s. It assumes that those who do not conform, obey orders, or let themselves not be guided by the initiatives of others will not commit genocide. People – men – who act autonomously without being influenced by situational pressure will not become mass murderers. The documentary suggests a one- 12 Latané/Darley 1970. 13 Browning 1992.