Eichmann in Jerusalem Read online

  In an open letter in Encounter, Gershom Scholem harshly blamed Arendt for her lack of tact and sympathy (Herzenstakt), especially in her discussion of Leo Baeck and other members of the Judenräte. Many readers today will agree with him about this. But I doubt if as many would also follow him in his appeal to Arendt to show more “Ahavat Israel” (love of Israel) by which he meant more patriotism, more emotional involvement. That was precisely what Arendt believed she must avoid. And yet a careful reading of Scholem's public letter to Arendt shows how ambivalent, indeed partially in agreement, he was on the touchy subject of the Judenräte. “I cannot refute those who say that the Jews deserved their fate, because they did not take earlier steps to defend themselves, because they were cowardly etc.,” he writes. “I came across this argument recently in a book by that honest Jewish anti-Semite Kurt Tucholsky. I cannot deny that [Tucholsky] was right.” Unlike Arendt, Scholem did not presume to judge. “I was not there,” he wrote. Arendt's answer to this was that the refusal to take a position undermined the very foundations of historiography and jurisprudence.

  Would Scholem have reacted as harshly if Arendt had shown more empathy for the plight of the Jewish leaders? If, for example, she had written “Leo Baeck, in his blindness or naivete,” or words to this effect? Perhaps he might even have made some judgments of his own.

  Thinking, judging, and acting were closely linked in this and in other books by Hannah Arendt. Her position was that if you say to yourself, “Who am I to judge?” you are already lost. In her lifetime, Arendt continued to be marked, as it were, by the debate set off by her book. Even though many years have passed since she died, she is still the subject of controversy. One saw this a few years ago when a sensational book was published on the innocent love affair she had as a teenager with Martin Heidegger. The author depicted her as a self-hating Jew and as a silly bimbo sexually entrapped for life by her aging Nazi professor, a married man with two children. The book gave a crude version of her long and complex relationship with Heidegger; yet some reviewers seemed to take a particular satisfaction in the book's simplistic account.

  As Tony Judt wrote a few years ago in The New York Review of Books,8 Arendt made many small errors for which her critics will never forgive her. But she got many of the big things right and for this she deserves to be remembered. She would have been wryly amused by the reawakened interest in her work. She once said that the saddest form of fame was posthumous fame. At the height of the scandal over Eichmann in Jerusalem, Jaspers wrote to console her: a time will come, he wrote, which she will not live to see, when Jews will erect a monument to her in Israel as they were just then doing for Spinoza.9 This has not yet happened. But we could be getting there.

  NOTES

  1. Lewis M. Dabney, editor, and Edmund Wilson, The Sixties (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1993), pp. 560, 562. Also see Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996) and “Arendt in Zion,” a paper delivered at an international colloquium on Arendt at Potsdam by Idith Zertal of Tel Aviv University.

  2. Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, 1926–1969, edited by Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, translated by Robert and Rita Kim-ber (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992); Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends, edited by Carol Brightman (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995); Hannah Arendt and Kurt Blumenfeld, “in keinem Besitz verwurzelt”: Die Korrespondenz, edited by Ingeborg Nordman and Iris Philling (Nordlingen: Rotbuch, 1995); Hannah Arendt and Hermann Broch, Briefwechsel 1946 bis 1951 (Frankfurt: Jdischer Verlag, 1996); Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, Briefe 1936–1968, edited by Lotte Kohler (Munich: Piper, 1996); and Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters: 1925–1975, edited by Ursula Ludz (New York: Harcourt, 2003).

  3. See also the standard biography, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

  4. The entry “Arendt, Hannah (1906-)” falsely states that in Eichmann in Jerusalem she had claimed inter alia that “the victims were partly responsible for the slaughter by their failure to resist.” Nowhere in the book does she make this claim.

  5. A good, but by no means exhaustive, selection can be found in Ron H. Feldman, editor, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York: Grove Press, 1978), essays written by Arendt between 1942 and 1966. It also includes some of her letters to editors after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem as well as her famous exchange of letters on the book with Gershom Scholem.

  6. “Zionism Reconsidered,” Menorah Journal, vol. 23, no. 2 (October–December, 1945), p.172.

  7. Mary McCarthy would soon take her to task, and not for the first time vainly, for her use of the word Gedankenlosigkeit, which in English didn't mean what it means in German. In English “thoughtlessness” means forgetfulness or neglect. “Inability to think,” McCarthy suggested, would have been better.

  8. The New York Review, April 6, 1995.

  9. Jaspers to Arendt, October 25, 1963.

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  Note to the Reader

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  This is a revised and enlarged edition of the book which first appeared in May, 1963. I covered the Eichmann trial at Jerusalem in 1961 for The New Yorker, where this account, slightly abbreviated, was originally published in February and March, 1963. The book was written in the summer and fall of 1962, and finished in November of that year during my stay as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University.

  The revisions for this edition concern about a dozen technical errors, none of which has any bearing on the analysis or argument of the original text. The factual record of the period in question has not yet been established in all its details, and there are certain matters on which an informed guess will probably never be superseded by completely reliable information. Thus the total number of Jewish victims of the Final Solution is a guess—between four and a half and six million—that has never been verified, and the same is true of the totals for each of the countries concerned. Some new material, especially on Holland, came to light after the publication of this book, but none of it was important for the event as a whole.

  Most of the additions are also of a technical nature, clarifying a particular point, introducing new facts, or, in some instances, quotations from different sources. These new sources have been added to the Bibliography and are discussed in the new Postscript, which deals with the controversy that followed the original publication. Apart from the Postscript, the only non-technical addition concerns the German anti-Hitler conspiracy of July 20, 1944, which I had mentioned only incidentally in the original version. The character of the book as a whole is completely unaltered.

  Thanks are due to Richard and Clara Winston for their help in preparing the text of the Postscript for this edition.

  HANNAH ARENDT

  June, 1964

  O Germany—

  Hearing the speeches that ring from your house, one laughs.

  But whoever sees you, reaches for his knife. —Bertolt Brecht

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  I: The House of Justice

  * * *

  “Beth Hamishpath”—the House of Justice: these words shouted by the court usher at the top of his voice make us jump to our feet as they announce the arrival of the three judges, who, bare-headed, in black robes, walk into the courtroom from a side entrance to take their seats on the highest tier of the raised platform. Their long table, soon to be covered with innumerable books and more than fifteen hundred documents, is flanked at each end by the court stenographers. Directly below the judges are the translators, whose services are needed for direct ex-changes between the defendant or his counsel and the court; otherwise, the German-speaking accused party, like almost everyone else in the audience, follows the Hebrew proceedings through the simultaneous radio transmission, which is excellent in French, bearable in English, and sheer comedy, frequently incomprehensible, in Ger
man. (In view of the scrupulous fairness of all technical arrangements for the trial, it is among the minor mysteries of the new State of Israel that, with its high percentage of German-born people, it was unable to find an adequate translator into the only language the accused and his counsel could understand. For the old prejudice against German Jews, once very pronounced in Israel, is no longer strong enough to account for it. Remains as explication the even older and still very powerful “Vitamin P,” as the Israelis call protection in government circles and the bureaucracy.) One tier below the translators, facing each other and hence with their profiles turned to the audience, we see the glass booth of the accused and the witness box. Finally, on the bottom tier, with their backs to the audience, are the prosecutor with his staff of four assistant attorneys, and the counsel for the defense, who during the first weeks is accompanied by an assistant.

  At no time is there anything theatrical in the conduct of the judges. Their walk is unstudied, their sober and intense attention, visibly stiffening under the impact of grief as they listen to the tales of suffering, is natural; their impatience with the prosecutor's attempt to drag out these hearings forever is spontaneous and refreshing, their attitude to the defense perhaps a shade over-polite, as though they had always in mind that “Dr. Servatius stood almost alone in this strenuous battle, in an unfamiliar environment,” their manner toward the accused always beyond reproach. They are so obviously three good and honest men that one is not surprised that none of them yields to the greatest temptation to playact in this setting that of pretending that they, all three born and educated in Germany, must wait for the Hebrew translation. Moshe Landau, the presiding judge, hardly ever withholds his answer until the translator has done his work, and he frequently interferes in the translation, correcting and improving, evidently grateful for this bit of distraction from an otherwise grim business. Months later, during the cross-examination of the accused, he will even lead his colleagues to use their German mother tongue in the dialogue with Eichmann—a proof, if proof were still needed, of his remarkable independence of current public opinion in Israel.

  There is no doubt from the very beginning that it is Judge Landau who sets the tone, and that he is doing his best, his very best, to prevent this trial from becoming a show trial under the influence of the prosecutor's love of showmanship. Among the reasons he cannot always succeed is the simple fact that the proceedings happen on a stage before an audience, with the usher's marvelous shout at the beginning of each session producing the effect of the rising curtain. Whoever planned this auditorium in the newly built Beth Ha'am, the House of the People (now surrounded by high fences, guarded from roof to cellar by heavily armed police, and with a row of wooden barracks in the front courtyard in which all comers are expertly frisked), had a theater in mind, complete with orchestra and gallery, with proscenium and stage, and with side doors for the actors' entrance. Clearly, this courtroom is not a bad place for the show trial David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, had in mind when he decided to have Eichmann kidnaped in Argentina and brought to the District Court of Jerusalem to stand trial for his role in the “final solution of the Jewish question.” And Ben-Gurion, rightly called the “architect of the state,” remains the invisible stage manager of the proceedings. Not once does he attend a session; in the courtroom he speaks with the voice of Gideon Hausner, the Attorney General, who, representing the government, does his best, his very best, to obey his master. And if, fortunately, his best often turns out not to be good enough, the reason is that the trial is presided over by someone who serves Justice as faithfully as Mr. Hausner serves the State of Israel. Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and that all the other questions of seemingly greater import—of “How could it happen?” and “Why did it happen?,” of “Why the Jews?” and “Why the Germans?,” of “What was the role of other nations?” and “What was the extent of co-responsibility on the side of the Allies?,” of “How could the Jews through their own leaders cooperate in their own destruction?” and “Why did they go to their death like lambs to the slaughter?” left in abeyance. Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann, son of Karl Adolf Eichmann, the man in the glass booth built for his protection: medium-sized, slender, middle-aged, with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes, who throughout the trial keeps craning his scraggy neck toward the bench (not once does he face the audience), and who desperately and for the most part successfully maintains his self-control despite the nervous tic to which his mouth must have become subject long before this trial started. On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.

  And Justice, though perhaps an “abstraction” for those of Mr. Ben-Gurion's turn of mind, proves to be a much sterner master than the Prime Minister with all his power. The latter's rule, as Mr. Hausner is not slow in demonstrating, is permissive; it permits the prosecutor to give press-conferences and interviews for television during the trial (the American program, sponsored by the Glickman Corporation, is constantly interrupted—business as usual—by real-estate advertising), and even “spontaneous” outbursts to reporters in the court building—he is sick of cross-examining Eichmann, who answers all questions with lies; it permits frequent side glances into the audience, and the theatrics characteristic of a more than ordinary vanity, which finally achieves its triumph in the White House with a compliment on “a job well done” by the President of the United States. Justice does not permit anything of the sort; it demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight. Judge Landau's visit to this country shortly after the trial was not publicized, except among the Jewish organizations for which it was undertaken.

  Yet no matter how consistently the judges shunned the limelight, there they were, seated at the top of the raised platform, facing the audience as from the stage in a play. The audience was supposed to represent the whole world, and in the first few weeks it indeed consisted chiefly of newspapermen and magazine writers who had flocked to Jerusalem from the four corners of the earth. They were to watch a spectacle as sensational as the Nuremberg Trials, only this time “the tragedy of Jewry as a whole was to be the central concern.” For “if we shall charge [Eichmann] also with crimes against non-Jews,… this is” not because he committed them, but, surprisingly, “because we make no ethnic distinctions.” Certainly a remarkable sentence for a prosecutor to utter in his opening speech; it proved to be the key sentence in the case for the prosecution. For this case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done. And, according to Mr. Hausner, this distinction would be immaterial, because “there was only one man who had been concerned almost entirely with the Jews, whose business had been their destruction, whose role in the establishment of the iniquitous regime had been limited to them. That was Adolf Eichmann. Was it not logical to bring before the court all the facts of Jewish suffering (which, of course, were never in dispute) and then look for evidence which in one way or another would connect Eichmann with what had happened? The Nuremberg Trials, where the defendants had been “indicted for crimes a the members of various nations,” had out of account for the simple reason that Eichmann had not been there.

  Did Mr. Hausner really believe the Nuremberg Trials would have paid greater attention to the fate of the Jews if Eichmann had been in the dock? Hardly. Like almost everybody else in Israel, he believed that only a Jewish court could render justice to Jews, and that it was the business of Jews to sit in judgment on their enemies. Hence the almost universal hostility in Israel to the mere mention of an international court which would have indicted Eichmann, not for crimes “against the Jewish people,” but for crimes against mankind committed on the body of the Jewish people. Hence the strange boast: “We make no ethnic distinctions,” which sounded less strange in Israel, where rabbinical law rules the personal statu
s of Jewish citizens, with the result that no Jew can marry a non-Jew; marriages concluded abroad are recognized, but children of mixed marriages are legally bastards (children of Jewish parentage born out of wed-lock are legitimate), and if one happens to have a non-Jewish mother he can neither be married nor buried. The outrage in this state of affairs has become more acute since 1953, when a sizable portion of jurisdiction in matters of family law was handed over to the secular courts. Women can now inherit property and in general enjoy equal status with men. Hence it is hardly respect for the faith or the power of the fanatically religious minority that prevents the government of Israel from substituting secular jurisdiction for rabbinical law in matters of marriage and divorce. Israeli citizens, religious and nonreligious, seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits intermarriage, and it is chiefly for this reason—as Israeli officials outside the courtroom were willing to admit—that they are also agreed upon the undesirability of a written constitution in which such a law would embarrassingly have to be spelled out. (“The argument against civil marriage is that it would split the House of Israel, and would also separate Jews of this country from Jews of the Diaspora,” as Philip Gillon recently put it in Jewish Frontier.) Whatever the reasons, there certainly was something breathtaking in the naïveté with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans. The better informed among the correspondents were well aware of the irony, but they did not mention it in their reports. This, they figured, was not the time to tell the Jews what was wrong with the laws and institutions of their own country.