| Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil | |
| Author: | Hannah Arendt |
| Language: | English |
| Publisher: | Viking Press |
| Media Type: | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Release Date: | 1963 |
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.
Arendt's subtitle famously introduced the phrase "the banality of evil." In part the phrase refers to Eichmann's deportment at the trial as the man displayed neither guilt for his actions nor hatred for those trying him, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply "doing his job." ("He did his 'duty'...; he not only obeyed 'orders,' he also obeyed the 'law.'")
Arendt takes Eichmann's court testimony and the historical evidence available, and she makes several observations about him:
Arendt suggests that this most strikingly discredits the idea that the Nazi criminals were manifestly psychopathic and different from "normal" people. From this document, many concluded that situations such as the Holocaust can make even the most ordinary of people commit horrendous crimes with the proper incentives, but Arendt adamantly disagreed with this interpretation, as Eichmann was voluntarily following the Führerprinzip. Arendt said that moral choice remains even under totalitarianism, and that this choice has political consequences even when the chooser is politically powerless:
Arendt mentions, as a case in point, Denmark:
On Eichmann's personality, Arendt concludes:
Arendt ended the book by writing:
Beyond her discussion of Eichmann himself, Arendt discusses several additional aspects of the trial, its context, and the Holocaust.
Arendt's book introduced the expression and concept of the banality of evil.[2] Her thesis is that Eichmann was actually not a fanatic or a sociopath, but instead an average and mundane person who relied on cliché defenses rather than thinking for himself,[3] was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology, and believed in success which he considered the chief standard of "good society". Banality, in this sense, does not mean that Eichmann's actions were in any way ordinary, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of complacency which was wholly unexceptional.[4]
Many mid-20th century pundits were favorable to the concept,[5] [6] which has been called "one of the most memorable phrases of 20th-century intellectual life," and it features in many contemporary debates about morality and justice,[3] [7] as well as in the workings of truth and reconciliation commissions.[8] Others see the popularization of the concept as a valuable warrant against walking negligently into horror, as the evil of banality, in which failure to interrogate received wisdom results in individual and systemic weakness and decline.[9]
Another of the most controversial points raised by Arendt in her book is her criticism concerning the alleged role of Jewish authorities in the Holocaust.[10] [11] In her writings, Arendt expressed her objections to the prosecution's refusal to address the cooperation of the leaders of the Judenräte (Jewish councils) with the Nazis. In the book, Arendt says that Jewish organizations and leaderships in Europe collaborated with the Nazis and were directly responsible for the numbers of Jewish victims reaching the dimensions they did:
The aforementioned Pinchas Freudiger was a witness in the trial, and during his deposition there were many objections from the public. To the accusation of not having advised the Jews to flee rather than passively surrender to the Germans, Freudiger replied that about half of the fugitives would have been captured and killed. Arendt says in her book that Freudiger should have remembered that as many as ninety-nine percent of those who did not flee were killed. Furthermore, she says that Freudiger, like many other leaders of the Jewish Councils, had managed to survive the genocide because they were wealthy and able to buy the favors of the Nazi authorities.
Eichmann in Jerusalem upon publication and in the years following was controversial.[12] [13] Arendt has long been accused of "blaming the victim" in the book.[14] [15] She responded to the initial criticism in a postscript to the book:
Stanley Milgram, who would conduct controversial experiments on obedience, maintains that "Arendt became the object of considerable scorn, even calumny" because she highlighted Eichmann's "banality" and "normalcy", and accepted Eichmann's claim that he did not have evil intents or motives to commit such horrors; nor did he have a thought to the immorality and evil of his actions, or indeed, display, as the prosecution depicted, that he was a sadistic "monster".[16]
Jacob Robinson published And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight, the first full-length rebuttal of her book.[5] Robinson presented himself as an expert in international law, not saying that he was an assistant to the prosecutor in the case.[6]
In his 2006 book, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes and Trial of a "Desk Murderer", Holocaust researcher David Cesarani questioned Arendt's portrait of Eichmann on several grounds. According to his findings, Arendt attended only part of the trial, witnessing Eichmann's testimony for "at most four days" and basing her writings mostly on recordings and the trial transcript. Cesarani feels that this may have skewed her opinion of him, since it was in the parts of the trial that she missed that the more forceful aspects of his character appeared. Cesarani also suggested that Eichmann was in fact highly anti-Semitic and that these feelings were important motivators of his actions. Thus, he alleges that Arendt's opinion that his motives were "banal" and non-ideological and that he had abdicated his autonomy of choice by obeying Hitler's orders without question may stand on weak foundations. This is a recurrent criticism of Arendt, though nowhere in her work does Arendt deny that Eichmann was an anti-Semite, and she also did not say that Eichmann was "simply" following orders, but rather had internalized the rationalities of the Nazi regime.[17]
Cesarani suggests that Arendt's own prejudices influenced the opinions she expressed during the trial. He argues that like many Jews of German origin, she held Ostjuden (Jews from Eastern Europe) in great disdain. This, according to Cesarani, led her to attack the conduct and efficacy of the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, who was of Galician Jewish origin. According to Cesarani, in a letter to the noted German philosopher Karl Jaspers she stated that Hausner was "a typical Galician Jew... constantly making mistakes. Probably one of those people who doesn't know any language." Cesarani says that some of her opinions of Jews of Middle Eastern origin verged on racism; she described the Israeli crowds in her letter to Karl Jaspers: "My first impression: On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below them, the prosecuting attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would obey any order. And outside the doors, the Oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country. In addition, and very visible in Jerusalem, the peies [sidelocks] and caftan Jews, who make life impossible for all reasonable people here."[18] Cesarani's book was itself criticized. In a review that appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Barry Gewen argued that Cesarani's hostility stemmed from his book standing "in the shadow of one of the great books of the last half-century", and that Cesarani's suggestion that both Arendt and Eichmann had much in common in their backgrounds, making it easier for her to look down on the proceedings, "reveals a writer in control neither of his material nor of himself."[19]
Eichmann in Jerusalem, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, is deeply indebted to Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, so much so that Hilberg himself spoke of plagiarism.[20] [21] [22]
Arendt also made use of H.G. Adler's book Theresienstadt 1941-1945. The Face of a Coerced Community (Cambridge University Press. 2017), which she had read in manuscript. Adler took her to task on her view of Eichmann in his keynote essay "What does Hannah Arendt know about Eichmann and the Final Solution?" (Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland. 20 November 1964).[23]
Arendt also received criticism in the form of responses to her article, also published in the New Yorker. One instance of this came mere weeks after the publication of her articles in the form of an article entitled "Man With an Unspotted Conscience". This work was written by witness for the prosecution Michael A. Musmanno. He argued that Arendt fell prey to her own preconceived notions that rendered her work ahistorical. He also directly criticized her for ignoring the facts offered at the trial in stating that "the disparity between what Miss Arendt states, and what the ascertained facts are, occurs with such a disturbing frequency in her book that it can hardly be accepted as an authoritative historical work." He further condemned Arendt and her work for her prejudices against Hauser and Ben-Gurion depicted in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Musmanno argued that Arendt revealed "so frequently her own prejudices" that it could not stand as an accurate work.[24]
By the 21st century, Arendt had received further criticism from authors Bettina Stangneth and Deborah Lipstadt. Stangneth argues in her work, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, that Eichmann was, in fact, an insidious antisemite. She utilized the Sassen Papers and accounts of Eichmann while in Argentina to prove that he was proud of his position as a powerful Nazi and the murders that this allowed him to commit. While she acknowledges that the Sassen Papers were not disclosed in the lifetime of Arendt, she argues that the evidence was there at the trial to prove that Eichmann was an antisemitic murderer and that Arendt simply ignored this. Deborah Lipstadt contends in her book The Eichmann Trial that Arendt was too distracted by her own views of totalitarianism to objectively judge Eichmann. She refers to Arendt's own work on totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, as a basis for Arendt's seeking to validate her own work by using Eichmann as an example. Lipstadt further contends that Arendt "wanted the trial to explicate how these societies succeeded in getting others to do their atrocious biddings" and so framed her analysis in a way which would agree with this pursuit. However, Arendt has also been praised for being among the first to point out that intellectuals, such as Eichmann and other leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, were in fact more accepted in the Third Reich despite Nazi Germany's persistent use of anti-intellectual propaganda.[25] During a 2013 review of historian Christian Ingrao's book Believe and Destroy, which pointed out that Hitler was more accepting of intellectuals with German ancestry and that at least 80 German intellectuals assisted his "SS War Machine,"[25] [26] Los Angeles Review of Books journalist Jan Mieszkowski praised Arendt for being "well aware that there was a place for the thinking man in the Third Reich."[25]