Review on
Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report On The Banality Of Evil. New York: The Viking Press, 1963.

By: Malte Goebel

For: Professor Kornberg, Rebecca Wittman

Date: December 4, 1998

Course: HIS398Y, The Holocaust

Hannah Arendt was a journalist for the newspaper “The New Yorker” when she saw the Eichmann Trial in Israel in 1961. Her book is based on a series of articles she wrote about the trial. Adolf Eichmann, the accused, was born in 1906, and after early failures in school and difficulties to get a job he joined the NSDAP and the SS out of ambitions to enter a career in 1932. He organised the Jewish emigration from Germany, and after the “Final Solution” was ordered by Hitler, he – as an “expert on the Jewish Question” – became the chief organiser of the transports of Jews to the gas chambers in the “Generalgouvernement”. After the war Eichmann could disappear to Argentina, where he was kidnapped by the Israel secret service and brought to Jerusalem in order to be put on trial in 1960. The trial began in April 1961 and ended with Eichmann being sentenced to death. The capital punishment was executed in May 1962.

“Eichmann in Jerusalem” is structured chronologically, following the trial. Broadly said, it deals with three topics (which admittedly are strongly connected to each other): the trial itself, Eichmann as a person, and the treatment of Jews. The latter is the biggest section and describes the three “solutions” of expulsion, concentration and killing through German authorities, and the deportations to the killing centers in the east. This part of the book caused a controversy over the compliance of Judenrat officials (pp. 117-119). Dr. Arendt's conclusion is that without this collaboration, many lives could have been saved (p. 125), and naturally, many people did not like to hear this at the time the book was published.

But the most interesting parts of the book are the sections on the person of Eichmann. Hannah Arendt does not try to psychologically analyse his personality. She just recounts his actions and words. This alone is enough to reveal the image of a unexceptional, simple-minded man. Eichmann willingly participated in the extermination of millions, and even on his trial, Eichmann showed no remorse and his principal regret was that his career had not advanced further within the Third Reich. Adolf Eichmann was no fanatic visionary. He was a small man, following his duties and proud of himself as a law-abiding citizen (as he points out, Hitler’s word meant law, p. 132). He embodied the “banality of evil” from the book’s subtitle.

This subtitle already implies the thesis Hannah Arendt outlines. According to the rationale of the  “banality of evil”, the organiser of the Holocaust being such a man of almost frightening mediocrity, it could have happened everywhere. The Holocaust was no German phenomenon, and it can happen again.

Although I do strongly support Arendt’s thesis, her book alone would not have convinced me. Yes, Adolf Eichmann was an ordinary man without personal hatred of Jews, and he became, driven by careerism, one of the chief functionaries in the organisation of the Holocaust. He was a cog in the machinery, maybe one of the bigger cogs, but still an example for the bureaucratic nature of the Holocaust (Hilberg). The description of the bureaucracy, more than Eichmann as one special person, is startling – the possibility for people not to feel responsible for what they do.

However, Eichmann is just one man. His personality is stunning to the people who believe that monstrous deeds require a monstrous character. In fact, referring to this expression and the famous German love of restricting and ruling out everything, I would inappropriately say: Monstrous deeds require a monstrous bureaucracy. Eichmann was a simple man. Far more convincing must be studies of not one, but more men, which I e.g. expect of Christopher Browning: “Ordinary Men”, a book I have not read so far but will do soon without doubt.

Further convincing to me personally is the fact that Hannah Arendt has no personal interest to defend Germans or German culture when she proposes that the Holocaust is nothing that could have only happened (or can still happen) in Germany. One could assume germanophile feeling because of Arendt’s German origin - born as a German in 1906 she emigrated to Paris in 1933 to escape the Nazis and fled to New York in 1941, where she found her new home. Of course, objectivity towards a sensitive topic like the Holocaust is difficult if you are personally connected to it. Also Hannah Arendt does not manage to keep objectivity all the time, her personal feelings shine through her writings.

But these feelings are not pro-German. In fact, Hannah Arendt does not like Germany. It is no wonder that she criticises how Germans dealt with the past in the years after the war, since in this case her feelings are completely justified. It is more the small things that show her dislike: At some points she denounces German language where it is just not necessary; e.g. that it is possible to collect all countries outside Germany into a singular noun (“das Ausland”) (p.14), or that in the Nuremburg Charter’s definition of “crimes against humanity” is translated into German as “Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit” (p. 252).

More revealing than this is Arendt’s judgement on the behaviour of the German post-war youth. Eichmann said of himself that he felt deeply impressed when he heard that German youth felt guilty for the Holocaust – his sense of duty was activated, he wanted to do his “part in lifting the burden of guilt from the German youth” and hang himself in public (p. 221). Mrs. Arendt on the other hand shows no understanding for feelings of guilt by the German post-war generation. When Martin Buber, a famous professor from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (who was also of German origin), pleaded for mercy after Eichmann was sentenced to death because he feared Eichmann’s death might “serve to expiate the guilt felt by many young persons in Germany”, Arendt calls the feelings “spurious”. She denounces them as attempts to escape from the pressure of present problems into a cheap sentimentality (p. 229), a judgement I have to reject because of my personal experience.

 
(Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report On The Banality Of Evil. New York: The Viking Press, 1963.)

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