Tuesday, November 20, 2007

The Face of Altmann


For no real reason I suddenly got the urge to look at exactly who Scott spoke of in class on Monday, and so I did a little research. For those of you who are also curious, here he is.
Interesting chap Klaus. Scott barely scratched the surface of the demon this man actually was when he told us the brief summary of his endeavors. Upon looking more into what he did, you have to wonder what kind of transformation takes place in the human psyche in order to become the kind of person who would not only do the things that he did, but enjoy them to the level that he did. There is a quote calling Klaus "a dedicated sadist." I wonder if this is something he would have been proud of.

If you are curious still, here is a link to his entry in the Jewish Virtual Library.


Care for some tongue?


~ B

3 comments:

Scott Abbott said...

What a normal, slightly sad human face. I'd like to see Lavater predict his actions from this physiognomy.

Grabloid said...

This might be interesting for some people to check out. It's a book about the Stanford Prison Experiment. It's called "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil"...by: Philip Zimbardo (the guy who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment). It seems relevant to this conversation and the conversation we had in class yesterday. If you haven't heard about/read about this, you should, it is very interesting. Here is a link to a wikipedia article on the experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

And also...Kathy French is teaching an interesting class at UVSC this coming semester (Spring January 2008) called "The Psychology of Good & Evil". It is dealing with this exact topic. Too bad the class doesn't fit my schedule...

Grabloid said...

oops...that link is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Stanford_prison_experiment