“Eichmann in Jerusalem” by Hannah Arendt— The Storm

Amos ♦ May 20, 2013 ♦ Leave Your Comment

Arendt, Hannah. “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, Penguin Classics Reprint, 2006.

The Storm

Amos Lassen

Some of you may be wondering why I have decided to go back and review a book that is now fifty years old. My answer is quite simple. I recently had the chance to view the brilliant new film “Hannah Arendt” and I was reminded that it has been a while since I read her classic “Eichmann in Jerusalem”. It is such an important book and at one time, years ago, a part of my life. I have used it as a text in both history and philosophy courses that I have taught and it is a book that few who have read it can remain silent about. Arendt was a brilliant, brilliant woman and a bit of a threat to the university establishment because she was a true intellectual woman and at the time of her tenure, many did not know how to deal with this little woman with the big, big mind.

“Eichmann in Jerusalem” was originally a series of articles written for The New Yorker Magazine in 1963. Arendt wanted to report on the trial and put her academic career on hold in order to do so. The debate started immediately with the publication of the articles first and the book later. There is no question about the authority of stunning information we get from her writing but a controversy arose that touched many lives and could have discredited Arendt altogether. Her writing was “a major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence. “Eichmann in Jerusalem” is as shocking as it is informative–an unflinching…look at one of the most unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the twentieth century”.

This new edition (2006) includes Arendt’s authoritarian report of the trial and other factual material that came to light after the trial had ended. We also have Arendt’s own postscript about the controversy her reportage caused.

Eichmann was living in Argentina in 1960 and was kidnapped by Israeli secret agents and smuggled to Israel where he stood trial for crimes against humanity. While Arendt covered the technicalities of the trial, she also explored the wider themes of it—the nature of justice, the behavior of the Jewish leadership during the Nazi Reign of Terror and the most controversial topic of all, the nature of evil.

Arendt maintained that Eichmann was not evil incarnate as painted by the prosecution. She claimed he was just an average man, a petty bureaucrat who was only interested in advancing his career. The evil that he caused, Arendt says, came from the “seductive power of Nazi Germany, the totalitarian state” and his own unthinking obeisance to orders and the Nazi cause. These thoughts are in themselves disturbing but even more disturbing is Arendt’s analysis of the seductiveness of evil. We have more or less believed and been trained to believe that anyone who is responsible for horror is different from us and that it is quite rare and unusual to find atrocities in the world. However, when we look at ethnic groups, we learn that evil is commonplace. (I am referring to the treatment of Jews, Kurds, Bosnians, native-Americans). What Arendt points out here is that in seeing Eichmann as a pedestrian and little man that he was, we see that history is covered very thinly.

Arendt was for many years the Professor of Political Philosophy on the Graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research and a visiting Fellow of the Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She was considered one of the leading intellectuals of her day and a highly respected author and lecturer. Then she published this book…

Interesting enough is that the book is subtitled “A Report on The Banality of Evil” and Arendt does not use that term anywhere in the text. She was not stating that evil is banal but showing that to be evil someone like Hitler is not necessary—ordinary people or capable of doing evil and while this is a hard idea to deal with emotionally, it is accepted intellectually. Now herein is the problem with understanding Arendt’s ideas. She does not show the ambivalence of human nature to prove that anyone could have been an Eichmann; she, in fact, opposes this idea. She earlier wrote in her classic “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that banality and thoughtlessness are the roots of evil and evil continues because it is rootless as it disregards the world in which it lives. It is not an inevitable aspect of human nature but comes about because people are not willing to understand.

Eichmann hated to lose his identity as a powerful Nazi Commandant. After he was kidnapped he was asked to consent to being charged with crimes against humanity and he agreed. We can suppose that he was having a difficult time living without his Nazi social standing and identity. After all, he fell from an exalted place in the Nazi hierarchy to a clerk in a factory. It almost seemed that going on trial would revive what he considered to be his glory.

The workings of the Nazi machine that was responsible for the torture, rape, and murder of over 11 million Europeans because of religion, sexual orientation, politics and nationality are the issues that Arendt discusses in her book. The trial, however, centered on the role Eichmann had in “The Final Solution” to the question of the Jews.

Arendt first published her reports from the trial, as stated previously, in The New Yorker. She was immediately criticized and some claimed that she was not even present for half of the trial. Her writing nevertheless is considered one of the principal books on the trial and many consider to be the primary one.

Her basic theory is that Eichmann was a “moral eunuch”; “a cog in a large killing machine” and that he never thought about his role or even had the conscience to answer for himself. He simply followed orders and just happened to have a job that was instrumental to the destruction of the Jews of Europe. Arendt maintains that had he not had this job, someone else would have and she patronizes Eichmann as a man who could not form his own thoughts and used clichés, repeated himself, constantly contradicted what he said and was incapable of original though or judgment. She sees him as an automaton who was only interested in moving ahead. She does not blame him for completing his job because he was simply following orders.

The above was one of the three major controversies her book contains. She also criticized David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, Judge Gideon Hausner, the prosecuting attorney and the European Jewish Community. Arendt believed that the European Jewish Community contained organizational abilities and was in some way instrumental in the destruction of the Jews. The organizations were able to document and provide statistics and thereby aided the Nazis. She claims that the Jewish bureaucracy carried out its duties perfectly. Here Arendt was taken to task. If indeed the Jewish community had leaders assigned to these tasks, they were not fulfilled and if they did not than other Jews or Europeans would have done so. This does not totally discredit what Arendt says but it does discredit her theory of blaming the victims and not the criminals when we see that Russian Jews were murdered and killed in much the same way as the Jews of Germany and Poland. There were no Jewish organizations to aid the Nazis and they were able to understand their job without help from Jewish bureaucracy. Arendt’s theory that Jews were leading their own people to death or were just following orders does not hold up. The Jewish organizations did as much as they could.

Regarding Ben Gurion, Arendt is precise when she writes of his handling of the trial. The trial was almost like a spectator sport with journalists and reporters noting every word. She maintains that Ben Gurion used the trial to gain publicity for the State of Israel and because of its nature, this seems correct.

Arendt very cleverly restates the arguments made against Eichmann by the prosecution. When the arguments fall short of her standards, she shows flaws in the judicial procedure, the argument and its place in the trial. There are times when it appears that she is actually belittling the prosecution.

The book was not well received in Israel especially with her view of the role of European Jewry and her indictment of the prosecutors and Ben Gurion. I, along with many other Jews, find the book disturbing in the way it deals with the idea that the horror of the Holocaust did not come about because of the inherent evil of Nazi leaders. These men had the opportunity to commit evil and did so. The even greater horrors were the individuals who may not have been inherently evil but shoved their conscience to the side so that they could advance in a system that was built on evil.

Following Arendt’s view of the Holocaust in different countries, we see that there is a difference in degrees of the destruction of Jewry and it was not defined by evil wrongdoers but by men who put aside their consciences to gain short-term goals. Do we not see here that evil breeds more evil or is it because of lack of conscience and if so, what is the real difference? There is a great difference between the destruction of the Jews of Germany and the survival of Jews of Bulgaria and Denmark and this can easily be seen as due to the Danes and Bulgarians feelings about their countrymen and their desire to save them. Germany had no such men of conscience.

It is quite easy to think that those who were the architects and perpetrators of the destruction of the Jews were madmen. They can be condemned and understood as evil people doing evil deeds. Can the Holocaust be blamed on the acts of evil madmen? To do so makes it easier to believe that the destruction of the Jews could have been prevented. Arendt destroys these rationalizations and raises some very serious questions. She shows that the success of the Holocaust was determined by men who put aside their consciences and therefore the death of six million Jews was not predetermined. If more people had acted on what their consciences said, these deaths would not have been integral to the Nazi conquest of Europe and this is a very disturbing thought.

Arendt does not see Eichmann as a mad man or a sadist. Instead she explains that the prosecutors portrayed him incorrectly. This is not her apology for him. She says that while Hitler was under the illusion that Jews were responsible for the ills of the world, Eichmann was not. He had had friendly relations with Jews in the past yet he was willing and able to forget about this and chose to be part of the extermination of European Jewry. He said he did what he was told to do while Arendt says that he was more worried about not being promoted in the ranks of the Nazi party. This caused him to become the paradigm of Arendt’s term (“banality of evil”). Because of this, Arendt condoned his verdict of death. Arendt is superlative when she delves into the mind of Eichmann and into the reasons that the exterminations were successful in some countries and not in others.

She states that “It was sheer thoughtlessness that predisposed him [Eichmann] to become one of the greatest criminals of the period.” The face of evil does not have to belong to a radically perverse pathological mastermind but it can emerge from “a banal and unimpressive caricature of normalcy”.

At the trial, Eichmann spoke in a tone that was probably meant to cause human sympathy and his defense was full of contradiction, holes in memory and cliché. He certainly knew that he would die in Jerusalem. He knew he had to be taken seriously and this was difficult to do. The trial was based upon shaky legal foundations but the sensationalism of it was contagious. Eichmann had been abducted illegally and prosecuted under an outdated framework that could not fully address genocide.

There is no question that Hannah Arendt was an intellectual. Her book is written with style and elegance and it raises many questions, some of which are very disturbing. It shows us that notions of ethics and preconceived ideas about good and evil are universal and always relevant. Arendt’s book is a classic study of human nature, totalitarian politics and political theory. It is flawed but so is human nature yet it is also an important and insightful commentary on one man in the totalitarian Nazi machine.