Eichmann in Jerusalem a Report on the Banality of Evil Review
Bookends
L Years Later, Why Does 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' Remain Contentious?
Adam Kirsch and
Each week in Bookends, two writers take on pressing and provocative questions nearly the world of books. This week, Adam Kirsch and Rivka Galchen on why Hannah Arendt'southward "Eichmann in Jerusalem" remains contentious fifty years after it was first published.
By Adam Kirsch
What makes "Eichmann" then inflammatory to some readers is Arendt'due south tone. But tone hither is closely continued to substance.
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Few controversial books remain controversial fifty years after they were published. But the storm of indignation that greeted "Eichmann in Jerusalem" when information technology appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, and then in book form, has non fully died down even now. Hannah Arendt's estimation of the trial of Adolf Eichmann remains a classic, a touchstone in the 20th century'southward thinking about morality and politics. But it is a classic constantly targeted for revision: David Cesarani challenged Arendt's interpretation of Eichmann in his biography of the Nazi bureaucrat, as did Deborah Lipstadt in her written report "The Eichmann Trial."
Information technology'southward no clandestine that reaction to "Eichmann in Jerusalem" has often divided along religious lines. Mary McCarthy, Arendt's close friend, noted this fact in a Partisan Review symposium: "A gentile, once the topic is raised in Jewish company (and it always is), feels like a kid with a reading defect in a form of normal readers — or the contrary. It is equally if 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' had required a special pair of Jewish glasses to make its 'true purport' visible." To illustrate McCarthy's point, compare her own characterization of the volume — "a paean of transcendence, heavenly music, similar that of the concluding chorus of 'Figaro' or the 'Messiah' " — with Saul Bellow'southward acerbic accept in "Mr. Sammler's Planet": "making use of a tragic history to promote the foolish ideas of Weimar intellectuals."
What made, and nonetheless makes, "Eichmann in Jerusalem" so inflammatory to some readers is in large part Arendt's tone; but tone, in this case, is closely connected to substance. Arendt, who fled the Nazis in 1933 and once more subsequently they conquered France in 1940, was reckoning in this book with the evil that had claimed the lives of millions of her fellow Jews, and damaged her own life every bit well. To counter this injury with a display of pride was for her a moral imperative, a mode of showing her utter contempt for Nazism. Indeed, the whole idea of the "banality of evil" is at lesser a mode of denying Nazism any glamour or substance, of relegating information technology to the realm of nonbeing.
The necessary converse of pride, however, is shame, and whenever Arendt judges Jews to have acted unworthily, she expresses an acute sense of shame. The most famous example is her comment on the Jewish Councils, through which the Nazis ruled some Jewish communities: "To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest affiliate of the whole nighttime story." But the sense that Arendt is embarrassed by the Jews, that they fail to live upward to her loftier standards, begins in the kickoff pages of the book, in which she acidly criticizes the Israeli translation service, the showmanship of the Israeli prosecutor and Israeli marriage laws. In a higher place all, she loathes the thought that "the audience at the trial was to be the world and the play the huge panorama of Jewish sufferings."
It'southward not hard to see that for Arendt, this stringency was a form of respect. Past holding Jews to what she conceived to be the highest professional and personal standards, she was treating them as full moral persons. For Eichmann, on the other manus, she had only contempt, refusing even to dignify him with hatred: He appears in the volume only as a bumbling mediocrity, "genuinely incapable of uttering a unmarried judgement that was not a platitude." Only it's too easy to empathize how this tactic could appear, to readers still traumatized by the Holocaust, as an arrogant inversion placing blame on the victim while minimizing the misdeed of the criminal. "Eichmann" would exist a improve book, perhaps, if Arendt were not so intent on demonstrating mastery over her textile, and could admit that at times the merely adequate response to the Holocaust was mute pity and terror.
Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist for Tablet. He is the writer of two collections of poetry and several other books, including, most recently, "Why Trilling Matters." In 2010, he won the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism.
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Past Rivka Galchen
Many of the objections to Arendt's work have been based on arguments she never made.
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In "Eichmann in Jerusalem," Hannah Arendt shows us an Adolf Eichmann who, describing a trip he took to Bratislava to arrange for the evacuation and extermination of Jews, brags of bowling with the government minister of the interior. He speaks at length and unironically to a Jewish policeman about why he should take been promoted further within the SS. And when he repeatedly, and self-destructively, says, "I will leap into my grave laughing," because having the deaths of millions of Jews on his conscience gives him "extraordinary satisfaction," he seems to do and then mostly to cut what in his mind is an impressive effigy. 1 gets the sense of a man, amid genocide, still and above all concerned with keeping upwardly with the Joneses.
Of grade, "to cut an impressive figure" and "keeping up with the Joneses" are both clichés. As is, now 50 years on, Arendt'south famous phrase "the boiler of evil." Through its own epigrammatical forcefulness, it has lost its force, and its suggestiveness makes it piece of cake for us to think nosotros know what Arendt argues in her unsettling and always intelligent essay, fifty-fifty when we oasis't read it with care.
Arendt does not contend that the Holocaust and its unspeakable horrors are bland. She does not endorse or believe Eichmann's presentation of himself as a man beset by the tricky virtue of obedience. And she does not say that the evil she saw in Eichmann is the only kind of evil. Many of the objections to her work are based on arguments never fabricated.
Simply Arendt does find Eichmann, the man, abysmally laughable (and some all the same discover her laughter'due south proximity to atrocity intolerable). She argues that he is a kind of evildoer — "evildoer" is now a expressionless metaphor, courtesy of our recent history — unlike the sort nosotros tend to find in literature, where evil is most often a fallen angel, a brilliant devil. Eichmann, in Arendt's view, is 2nd-charge per unit and a buffoon. Of Germans who saw figures like him as ingenious monsters, she said: "They maybe understood this as a way of creating a certain alibi for themselves. If you succumb to the power of a animate being from the depths, you're naturally much less guilty than if you succumb to a completely average human." There is also an emotional gain in this view for those who fear being victims: Destroying a few singular monsters is comfortingly more achievable than countering a bottomless amoral mediocrity latent in millions.
Eichmann spoke in a mix of canned speech, officialese and repetitions of his ain formulations. Arendt sees this as a symptom and an abettor of his multifariousness of evil. "The longer i listened to him," she wrote, "the more than 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." Eichmann tells of the "great inner joy" of visiting a former Jewish colleague in Auschwitz; he commiserates with his "love one-time friend"; he doesn't aid the man escape; he describes the meeting as "a normal, human encounter" and fifty-fifty uses it to bear witness how he, Eichmann, did not detest Jews in his heart; Eichmann stands by his take of the "normal, human encounter" fifty-fifty as his "friend" is shot expressionless six weeks subsequently. Eichmann adjusted naturally to the Nazi rules for terming deportation "resettlement" and extermination "special treatment." The net effect of those rules, Arendt argued, was non to proceed the involved officials "ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating information technology with their sometime, 'normal' knowledge of murder and lies."
Nearly 15 years after the publication of "Eichmann in Jerusalem," Arendt wrote another long essay for The New Yorker, "Thinking," in which she tried to clarify and further clarify the "thoughtlessness" of Eichmann. "Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized role of protecting united states of america against reality; that is, against the claim on our thinking attending which all events and facts make by virtue of their existence," she wrote. "If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would shortly be exhausted; Eichmann differed from the residual of us only in that clearly he knew of no such claim at all."
Rivka Galchen is a recipient of a William J. Saroyan International Prize for Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and a Berlin Prize, among other distinctions. Her fiction and nonfiction accept appeared in numerous publications, including Harper'due south and The New Yorker, which selected her for their list of "20 Under forty" American fiction writers in 2010. Her debut novel, the critically acclaimed "Atmospheric Disturbances," was published in 2008. Her second volume, a story collection titled "American Innovations," is forthcoming in May.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/books/review/fifty-years-later-why-does-eichmann-in-jerusalem-remain-contentious.html
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