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UBC: Eichmann in Jerusalem
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 1963. 1965. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.
This is a much better book than I was expecting. My preconceptions were based on two primary points:
1. I had to read The Human Condition for a class in college, and I hated it. I don't know how much of my hatred was intrinsic to the book and how much of it was a function of my being too young for the book, but the impression has stayed with me vividly.
2. Many scholars who specialize in the Nazis use Arendt as a kind of straw man, invoking her so that they can dismiss the idea of the "banality of evil" as a widely applicable principle.
So I was expecting Eichmann in Jerusalem to be an overtheorized piece of bombast, full of unsupportable generalizations and ungrounded philosophizing.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
To address my preconceptions in reverse order:
2. Scholars using Arendt as a straw man are misusing her, because nowhere in this book does she claim the "banality of evil" has any wider application than Adolf Eichmann. In fact, she explicitly refutes that idea. And her evidence for the utter, ludicrous banality of Eichmann and his evil is convincing.
1. This is an awesome book. It is not boring, or bombastic. It is not over-theorized. It is not inaccessible. It is harsh and it is difficult and it is devastating, less for what it says about Eichmann and the Nazis than for what it says about Israel and West Germany (and thus the rest of the soi-disant civilized world) in 1961. And for the questions it asks about how we define genocide in relation to other crimes, and about law and morality and the human relationship to both.
It is not a perfect book*; in particular, Arendt's condemnation of the Judenrate as self-serving collaborators is--as I know from other reading--over-simplified, as is her dismissal of the Madagascar plan. But there are three points she makes about the Nazis and about Eichmann himself that clarified things widely for me.
One is almost a throwaway; in discussing the "program of the N.S.D.A.P., formulated in 1920, which shared with the Weimar Constitution the curious fate of never being officially abolished," she says, "The Party program was never taken seriously by Nazi officials; they prided themselves on belonging to a movement, as distinguished from a party, and a movement could not be bound by a program" (43). This, for me, suddenly made the line of descent (and also the progressive degradation of image) from Futurism to Fascism to Nazism clear. It also, of course, speaks to something I've noted before: Nazism's conflicted, both contemptuous and idolizing relationship with the written word.
The second is her identification of Eichmann's crucial flaw: "his almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow's point of view [...] Thus, confronted for eight months with the reality of being examined by a Jewish policeman, Eichmann did not have the slightest hesitation in explaining to him at considerable length, and repeatedly, why he had been unable to attain a higher grade in the S.S., that this was not his fault" (47-48, 49). Eichmann, in other words, had no empathy, no ability to imagine the world from any perspective other than his own. This is connected to his inability to speak in anything other than clichés:
The reason for Eichmann's capacity for evil was simply his inability to see any farther than his own narrow interests: "Eichmann remembered the turning points in his own career rather well, but [...] they did not necessarily coincide with the turning points in the story of Jewish extermination or, as a matter of fact, with the turning points in history. (He always had trouble remembering the exact date of the outbreak of the war or of the invasion of Russia)" (53). Arendt frequently finds points at which Eichmann could have defended himself against specific charges if he were able to remember, for example, Jews other than those "who had been completely in his power" (64). The picture we receive is of a man with a catastrophically narrow mind, not in the usual sense of "not being open to new ideas" (although that may well have been true, also), but in the sense of being so narrow in scope that almost nothing actually got in.
And finally, there's her analysis of why Eichmann committed genocide, the mechanism by which evil became good and good became evil, which is both simple and extremely complex, hinging as it does on how Eichmann (and other Germans) understood Hitler's authority over them. Essentially, she says, Eichmann chose to define "good" as "following the Führer's orders" (a not uncommon stance); thus at the end of the war, when Eichmann disobeyed Himmler's order to stop the deportations, to his way of thinking, he was doing the "right" thing. His morality, in other words, was absolute, and absolutely fixed on Hitler as its touchstone. The fact that, by all other standards of judgment, this morality is completely immoral is . . . well, that's the problem the Nazis present.
---
*I have not read Becoming Eichmann by David Cesarani, which the wikipedia entry cites as having some fairly fundamental criticisms of Arendt, but I would like to point out that she nowhere claims that Eichmann's "abdicat[ion of] his autonomy of choice" was any kind of an excuse or that it was something he couldn't avoid. Those are Eichmann's arguments.
This is a much better book than I was expecting. My preconceptions were based on two primary points:
1. I had to read The Human Condition for a class in college, and I hated it. I don't know how much of my hatred was intrinsic to the book and how much of it was a function of my being too young for the book, but the impression has stayed with me vividly.
2. Many scholars who specialize in the Nazis use Arendt as a kind of straw man, invoking her so that they can dismiss the idea of the "banality of evil" as a widely applicable principle.
So I was expecting Eichmann in Jerusalem to be an overtheorized piece of bombast, full of unsupportable generalizations and ungrounded philosophizing.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
To address my preconceptions in reverse order:
2. Scholars using Arendt as a straw man are misusing her, because nowhere in this book does she claim the "banality of evil" has any wider application than Adolf Eichmann. In fact, she explicitly refutes that idea. And her evidence for the utter, ludicrous banality of Eichmann and his evil is convincing.
1. This is an awesome book. It is not boring, or bombastic. It is not over-theorized. It is not inaccessible. It is harsh and it is difficult and it is devastating, less for what it says about Eichmann and the Nazis than for what it says about Israel and West Germany (and thus the rest of the soi-disant civilized world) in 1961. And for the questions it asks about how we define genocide in relation to other crimes, and about law and morality and the human relationship to both.
It is not a perfect book*; in particular, Arendt's condemnation of the Judenrate as self-serving collaborators is--as I know from other reading--over-simplified, as is her dismissal of the Madagascar plan. But there are three points she makes about the Nazis and about Eichmann himself that clarified things widely for me.
One is almost a throwaway; in discussing the "program of the N.S.D.A.P., formulated in 1920, which shared with the Weimar Constitution the curious fate of never being officially abolished," she says, "The Party program was never taken seriously by Nazi officials; they prided themselves on belonging to a movement, as distinguished from a party, and a movement could not be bound by a program" (43). This, for me, suddenly made the line of descent (and also the progressive degradation of image) from Futurism to Fascism to Nazism clear. It also, of course, speaks to something I've noted before: Nazism's conflicted, both contemptuous and idolizing relationship with the written word.
The second is her identification of Eichmann's crucial flaw: "his almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow's point of view [...] Thus, confronted for eight months with the reality of being examined by a Jewish policeman, Eichmann did not have the slightest hesitation in explaining to him at considerable length, and repeatedly, why he had been unable to attain a higher grade in the S.S., that this was not his fault" (47-48, 49). Eichmann, in other words, had no empathy, no ability to imagine the world from any perspective other than his own. This is connected to his inability to speak in anything other than clichés:
To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was "empty talk"--except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.
(49)
The reason for Eichmann's capacity for evil was simply his inability to see any farther than his own narrow interests: "Eichmann remembered the turning points in his own career rather well, but [...] they did not necessarily coincide with the turning points in the story of Jewish extermination or, as a matter of fact, with the turning points in history. (He always had trouble remembering the exact date of the outbreak of the war or of the invasion of Russia)" (53). Arendt frequently finds points at which Eichmann could have defended himself against specific charges if he were able to remember, for example, Jews other than those "who had been completely in his power" (64). The picture we receive is of a man with a catastrophically narrow mind, not in the usual sense of "not being open to new ideas" (although that may well have been true, also), but in the sense of being so narrow in scope that almost nothing actually got in.
And finally, there's her analysis of why Eichmann committed genocide, the mechanism by which evil became good and good became evil, which is both simple and extremely complex, hinging as it does on how Eichmann (and other Germans) understood Hitler's authority over them. Essentially, she says, Eichmann chose to define "good" as "following the Führer's orders" (a not uncommon stance); thus at the end of the war, when Eichmann disobeyed Himmler's order to stop the deportations, to his way of thinking, he was doing the "right" thing. His morality, in other words, was absolute, and absolutely fixed on Hitler as its touchstone. The fact that, by all other standards of judgment, this morality is completely immoral is . . . well, that's the problem the Nazis present.
---
*I have not read Becoming Eichmann by David Cesarani, which the wikipedia entry cites as having some fairly fundamental criticisms of Arendt, but I would like to point out that she nowhere claims that Eichmann's "abdicat[ion of] his autonomy of choice" was any kind of an excuse or that it was something he couldn't avoid. Those are Eichmann's arguments.
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(And I understand. It's one of the problems reading about the Nazis brings in its train.)
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May I say how much I admire this reading project of yours and fear to emulate it? Just singing Britten's War Requiem threatens to reduce me to quivering uselessness.
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Why I'm reading about the Nazis is a question I'm still pondering, honestly.
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If you haven't read it, the Nazification of Art (eds Taylor and van der Will) is fascinating - a group of essays about what the Nazis thought they were doing with the arts and how they went about doing it. The book talks about ideas of the body, the portrayal of women in Nazi art, whether or not the Nazis were post modernists and Susan Sontag writes about Leni Riefenstahl. Also, it's not as hideously depressing as reading about the Holocaust. It was in fact through reading this book that I suddenly realised that Hitler and Himmler actually believed in the Global Jewish Conspiracy. I had previously thought that it was a grossly cynical invention to justify their actions. But if you have a conception of the state as a body, and that Social Darwinism determines that states compete for resources, then yes, it suddenly becomes believable that other states (or races) not only also think that there is a competition but have stolen a march on you by grabbing all the resources.
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