Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil Read online

  EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM

  HANNAH ARENDT was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906. She studied at the Universities of Marburg and Freiburg and received her doctorate in philosphy at the University of Heidelberg, where she studied under Karl Jaspers. In 1933 she fled from Germany and went to France, where she worked for the immigration of Jewish refugee children into Palestine. In 1941 she went to the United States and became an American citizen ten years later.

  She was a research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations, chief editor of Schocken Books, executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction in New York City, a visiting professor at several universities, including California, Princeton, Columbia, and Chicago and university professor at the graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952 and won the annual Arts and Letters Grant of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954.

  Hannah Arendt's books include The Origins of Totalitariansim, Crisis in the Republic, Men in Dark Times, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercizes in Political Thought, and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. She also edited two volumes of Karl Jaspers's The Great Philosophers. Hannah Arendt died in December 1975.

  AMOS ELON was born in Vienna, Austria, and has spent most of his adult life in Jerusalem. A frequent essayist, lecturer, and critic who is well known for his articles in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, he is the author of such bestselling works as The Israelis, Flight into Egypt, Founder, Herzel, and most recently The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch.

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  HANNAH ARENDT

  Eichmann in Jerusalem

  A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL

  Introduction by AMOS ELON

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1963

  Revised and enlarged edition published 1965

  Published in Viking Compass edition 1965

  Published in Penguin Books 1977

  This edition with an introduction by Amos Elon published in Penguin Books 2006

  Copyright © Hannah Arendt, 1963, 1964

  Copyright renewed Lotte Kohler, 1991, 1992

  Introduction copyright © Amos Elon, 2006

  All rights reserved

  The contents of the original edition of this book, in slightly abbreviated and otherwise slightly different form, originally appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193159-3

  Contents

  Introduction by Amos Elon

  Note to the Reader

  I: The House of Justice

  II: The Accused

  III: An Expert on the Jewish Question

  IV: The First Solution: Expulsion

  V: The Second Solution: Concentration

  VI: The Final Solution: Killing

  VII: The Wannsee Conference, or Pontius Pilate

  VIII: Duties of a Law-Abiding Citizen

  IX: Deportations from the Reich—Germany, Austria and the Protectorate

  X: Deportations from Western Europe—France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Italy

  XI: Deportations from the Balkans—Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania

  XII: Deportations from Central Europe—Hungary and Slovakia

  XIII: The Killing Centers in the East

  XIV: Evidence and Witnesses

  XV: Judgment, Appeal, and Execution

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction

  THE EXCOMMUNICATION OF HANNAH ARENDT

  In December 1966, Isaiah Berlin, the prominent philosopher and historian of ideas, was the guest of his friend, Edmund Wilson, the well-known American man of letters. An entry in Wilson's diary mentions an argument between the two men. Berlin “gets violent, sometimes irrational prejudice against people,” Wilson noted, “for example [against] Hannah Arendt, although he has never read her book about Eichmann.” In a memoir in the Yale Review in 1987, Berlin made exactly the same charge against Wilson and elaborated upon this in a 1991 interview with the editor of Wilson's diary.1 We don't know the outcome of this quarrel. One thing we do know: more than three years after the publication of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil first appeared in print, the civil war it had launched among intellectuals in the United States and in Europe was still seething. Describing the debate that raged through his own and other families in New York, Anthony Grafton later wrote that no subject had fascinated and aroused such concern and serious discussion as the series of articles Hannah Arendt had published in The New Yorker about the Eichmann trial, and the book that grew out of them. Three years after the publication of the book, people were still bitterly divided over it. No book within living memory had elicited similar passions. A kind of excommunication seemed to have been imposed on the author by the Jewish establishment in America. The controversy has never really been settled. Such controversies often die down, simmer, and then erupt again. It is perhaps no accident that at this time of a highly controversial war in Iraq, Arendt's books are still widely read and that, even though close to 300,000 copies of her book on Eichmann alone have so far been sold, this new edition is now published by Penguin.

  Eichmann in Jerusalem continues to attract new readers and interpreters in Europe, too. In Israel, where the Holocaust was long seen as simply the culmination of a long unbroken line of anti-Semitism, from pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler and Arafat—David Ben-Gurion, the architect of the 1960 show trial wanted it that way—the growing interest among young people in this book suggests a search for a different view. A new Hebrew translation was recently published to considerable acclaim. In the past, the difficulty of many Israelis to accept Arendt's book ran parallel to another difficulty—foreseen by Arendt early on—the difficulty of confronting, morally and politically, the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians. The Palestinians bore no responsibility for the collapse of civilization in Europe but ended up being punished for it.

  In Europe, the collapse o
f communist totalitarianism contributed to the renewed interest in Arendt's work. Interest was further kindled by the publication, in the past several years, of Arendt's voluminous correspondence with Karl Jaspers, Mary McCarthy, Hermann Broch, Kurt Blumenfeld, Martin Heidegger, and her husband Heinrich Blücher.2 All bear witness to a rare capacity for friendship, intellectual and affectionate. Arendt's correspondence with Blücher is the record also of the intense, lifelong conversation of a marriage that for two hunted fugitives was a safe haven in dark times. “It still seems to me unbelievable, that I could achieve both a great love, and a sense of identity with my own person,” she wrote Blücher in 1937 in what is one of the most remarkable love letters of the twentieth century. “And yet I achieved the one only since I also have the other. I also now finally know what happiness is.”

  The letters shed a fascinating light on her thinking, and on some of the intimate feelings that went into the making of Eichmann in Jerusalem. “You were the only reader to understand what otherwise I have never admitted,” she wrote Mary McCarthy, “namely, that I wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria.” Like Arendt's biography Rachel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, written before her emigration to the United States, Eichmann in Jerusalem was an intensely personal work. The writing helped give her relief from a heavy burden. As she wrote Mary McCarthy, it was a “cura posterior,” the delayed cure of a pain that weighed upon her as a Jew, a former Zionist, and a former German.3

  The main thesis of Eichmann in Jerusalem was summed up (not very felicitously) in its subtitle. It is odd, and sometimes mind-boggling to follow the overheated debates of four decades ago. Irving Howe claimed in his memoirs that the polemic in America was partly due to feelings of guilt, pervasive, and unmanageable yet seldom (until then) emerging into daylight. For this reason, Howe thought, something good came out of the confrontation with Arendt.

  Some of the accusations voiced against the style and tone of the first version of her book, as published in The New Yorker, were well founded and were excised in the book, e.g. her description of Leo Baeck as the Jewish “Führer”; others were patently false. For example, it was claimed that Arendt had “exonerated” Eichmann but “condemned the Jews.” She had done nothing of the sort. Nor had she assaulted the entire court proceeding, as was frequently claimed; she only attacked the melodramatic rhetoric of the state prosecutor. She supported the death sentence as meted out by the court but would have preferred a differently formulated verdict. Contrary to frequent accusations, she never questioned the legitimacy of a trial in Israel by Israeli judges. Nor did she, as was frequently maintained, make the victims responsible for their slaughter “by their failure to resist.” In fact, she bitterly attacked the state prosecutor who had dared make such a heartless claim. Still, this accusation even found its way into the Encyclopedia Judaica.4 In a similar vein she was falsely accused of having claimed that Eichmann was an enthusiastic convert to “Zionism” and even to “Judaism.” Hand-me-downs from one critic to another drew on alleged references in the book which no one seemed to have checked. The argument was by no means restricted to academic circles but exercised young and old, historians, philosophers, journalists, as in the case of Grafton's father; priests of several faiths; atheists; community functionaries; and professional propagandists. The attacks were often intensely personal. Many published reviews were serious, meticulously documented, fair and well-reasoned; others were clannish, full of personal invective, and of a surprisingly hackneyed intellectual level of mean personal innuendo. The book undoubtedly seems less controversial now than forty years ago as new generations of scholars take a fresh, less partisan look also on Arendt's other writings on Jewish history, Israel, and Zionism.

  Eichmann in Jerusalem is best read today in conjunction with these other essays. Most were published long before Eichmann in publications (some of them now defunct) like Menorah Journal, the New York German-language refugee weekly Aufbau, the Review of Politics, the Jewish Frontier, and Jewish Social Studies.5 They spell out a conviction (which in Eichmann is for the most part only implied) that like other nineteenth-century nationalisms, Zionism had already outlived the conditions from which it emerged and ran the risk of becoming, as Arendt once put it, a “living ghost amid the ruins of our times.”6 A decade or so earlier, she had still been an ardent disciple of the German Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld (the father of “post-assimilationist Zionism”), an advocate of compromise with the Palestinians, either territorial or through establishing a joint, secular binational state. At the time of writing Eichmann in Jerusalem she had all but despaired of this and bleakly foresaw decades of war and bloody Palestinian–Israeli clashes. In the 1930s, she anticipated her criticism in Eichmann of the ghetto Judenräte by opposing the Transfer of Goods Agreement between the Zionists and the Nazis, an agreement that enabled German Jews to transfer some of their frozen assets to Palestine at a highly punitive exchange rate but ran counter to an attempted worldwide Jewish boycott of German goods. The Zionists, for whom emigration to Palestine was the overwhelmingly important priority, justified this violation as a “dialectical necessity.”

  By this time, Arendt had little patience left for all Weltanschau-ungen. She became more and more disillusioned with official Zionist policy in Palestine because of its failure to achieve a peaceful modus vivendi with the Arab population. She foresaw the spread of religious and nationalist fundamentalism among Israelis. These warnings seemed at the time as provocative as her book on the Eichmann trial. She argued on both moral and pragmatic grounds, insisting that Israelis must share power and/or territory with Palestinian Arabs. In retrospect, her warnings displayed considerable foresight. Today's readers may be more willing to accept both her essays and her book on Eichmann on their merits.

  This was certainly not the case when Eichmann first came out. Most Jewish readers and many others were outraged. Friendships broke over it. Not long before, Israeli diplomats had successfully convinced the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith that criticism of Zionism or Israel was a form of anti-Semitism. Some of the published attacks on Arendt's book are astonishing in their unbridled vehemence. In Israel the reaction was more complicated and the criticism was muted compared to the reaction in America. Outrage was much less pronounced perhaps because on a first reading, Arendt's critique of Jewish communal leaders in Nazi-occupied Europe appeared to confirm Zionist cliché descriptions of “diaspora Jews” as servile, passive lambs who had meekly gone to the slaughter.

  Several of Arendt's critics have since expressed some regret at their past fervor. Arendt was already dead when such apologies were first heard. Arendt subscribed to no isms and mistrusted sweeping theories. Her intuitions on the nature of political evil may find more sympathetic ears these days than when the book was first published. Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority. With her disregard of conventional scholarship and academic norms, she remains a stimulating intellectual presence. Thirty or forty years ago the mixture of social analysis, journalism, philosophical reflections, psychology, literary allusion, and anecdote found in the best of her work exasperated and annoyed critics. Today, it fascinates and appeals.

  2.

  Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 as a reporter for The New Yorker. The idea was not The New Yorker's but her own. She felt she simply had to attend the trial, she owed it to herself as a social critic, displaced person, witness, and survivor. She had never seen a Nazi butcher like Eichmann, she wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation, “and this was probably [her] only chance.” To attend this trial was an obligation she owed her past. She was interested, as she put it, in understanding Eichmann's mind (if he had one) and, through the testimonies at the trial, to explore “the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society.”

  The result, as it first came out in The New York
er and later in expanded form in the book, was largely the report of a trial, an attempt to examine the extent to which the court, confronted with a crime it could not find in the law books, succeeded in fulfilling the demands of justice. The book combines philosophy and day-to-day observation and is reminiscent, not only in its suggestive style but in its sarcasms and ironies, of Karl Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon III.

  The resultant storm broke out mainly because of Arendt's portrait of Eichmann as a diligent yet “banal” bureaucratic criminal. (The term “banality” actually appears only on the last page but is implicit throughout the entire book.) Eichmann's mediocrity and insipid character struck Arendt on her first day in court. Her initial reaction, expressed in letters to Jaspers, McCarthy, and Blücher, was impressionistic. He isn't even sinister, she wrote (Arendt used the common German term unheimlich, which can also be translated as “uncanny”). He was like a “ghost in a spiritualist sauce.” What was more, he had a cold and was sneezing inside his bullet-proof glass cage.

  She ought to have known better. Hitler would not have cut a better figure under the circumstances. Out of power, most tyrants and serial murderers seem pathetic or ordinary, harmless, or even pitiful, as Saddam Hussein did coming out of his rathole with an unkempt beard. Was she perhaps, at this early stage, a victim of what might be called the Fallacy of Physiognomy? We all succumb to it at times. Arendt was interested not only in physiognomy but also in graphology. The “science” of physiognomy was a popular intellectual pastime during her youth in Germany. (Her teacher Martin Heidegger, according to Karl Jaspers, imperiously dismissed Jaspers's terror at watching a man like Hitler seeking to be Germany's chancellor, with the exclamation “Just look at his hands!”) A few days into the trial, however, Arendt consciously moved away from exteriors. “[Eichmann] is actually stupid,” she wrote Jaspers, after listening to one of Eichmann's exhortations “but then, somehow, he is not” (Er ist eigentlich dumm aber auch irgendwie nicht). Her private letters from Jerusalem enable us to trace the slow development of her thesis. She plowed through the 3,000-page transcript of Eichmann's pretrial interrogation by the Israeli police captain Avner Less and gradually came to think that it was mostly, as she first put it, a kind of brainlessness7 on Eichmann's part that had predisposed him to becoming the faceless bureaucrat of death and one of the worst criminals of all time. She emphasized Eichmann's moral and intellectual shallowness, his inner void. He was probably not lying when he told Less that he could never be a doctor because he could not bear the sight of blood.