Lawrence.com

Hollywood, Calif. — Television dramatizes history mostly in isolation. No context, driftwood in a vast ocean. So viewers have an unusual opportunity this weekend, if a painful one.

Saturday brings HBO's "Conspiracy," an uncomfortably real, brilliantly understated reprise of the Jan. 20, 1942, gathering at which arch criminals Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann and 13 other important Nazis coldly addressed the problem of "the Jew."

Displayed here strikingly is the "banality of evil" that noted scholar Hannah Arendt saw in Eichmann years later.

This is not the usual rant from brownshirts and leather coats, but chatty ordinariness at least as sinister, its stony forays into the arcane as to what constitutes a Jew playing almost as dark satire. The implications are unmistakable, though.

How chilling these Nazi functionaries are, how frigidly efficient.

And how valuable that viewers the evening after "Conspiracy" can connect the threads by seeing a story showing a bit of human wreckage resulting from this pivotal conference organized by Eichmann at the behest of his boss, Heydrich.

That happens when ABC revisits Anne Frank, history's most famous Jewish Holocaust victim and diarist whose journal about hiding in occupied Amsterdam, Netherlands, with her family and friends has been published globally and retold on stage and screen, this time formidably in the two-part "Anne Frank."

Barely six months after the Wannsee group gave thumbs up to purging Jews from the continent, Anne Frank and her family moved secretly to a hidden attic above Otto's business. It's here where ABC's new Anne dreams at night of being a twirling ice skater, where kisses her first boy (Peter), puts on her first pair of high heels. For two years the eight Jews remain in hiding here, before they are discovered.