Eichmann in Jerusalem : a report on the banality of evil

I’ve read this book after finishing Berlant, and my first emotion towards it has been relief. Arendt write in such a clear and engaging way. The first chapters have an almost reportage-like style (the book did at first appear in The New Yorker), whilst later in the book she turns towards a persuasive / essay-ish tone. Throughout, she is concerned with keeping a constant pace, using precise and understandable words, and avoiding all rhetoric - clearly triggered by the style of both the accused and the prosecution in the Eichmann trial. Vite scadenti, mitologie eroiche (a sentence I saw attributed, in Italian, to Susan Sonntag).

In preparation to reading the book, I listened to a The Dig episode on the book 'The rights to have rights', which takes as a starting point Arendt's thinking on human rights to discuss migrant rights today. The authors (Astra Taylor and Stephanie de Gooyer) are taken in by Arendt observations about how human rights become extremely flimsy when people are deprived of citizenship, when they are just 'naked humans' with no state to protect them. Their critique of Arendt, as one would aspect from The Dig, is mainly about her insistence on the political as a separate sphere, which essentially elevates political rights over, say, economic rights.

One of the reasons I was drawn to the book in the first place is precisely that Arendt is so divisive. It is someone who many admire, and many (perhaps especially in Pro-Palestinian circles), love to hate. 'One of the most overrated ''philosopher'' in history' is a hot-take I have recently seen on Twitter, pardon, X. I know she opposed desegregation in the American South, but also that she changed her mind on things throughout her life. Changing your mind, publicly and without denying your earlier position is something I respect.

I found her critical outlook on the trial remarkable. She firmly critiques Ben Gurion's desire to use to reinforce the message that Israel is the only safe haven for Jews, and its courts the only institutions that could ever fairly judge the perpetrators of the Holocaust. She is also sharp in noticing the hypocrisy of Israel’s ‘shock’ about racial laws under the Naxi, noting the irony of an Israeli court discussing the German laws that prohibited mixed-marriages, when Israeli law also does not recognise marriages between Jews and non-Jews, and considers the children born of this kind of unions 'legal bastards'. I know part of the antipathy for Arendt stems from her involvement with the Zionist Agency, but this is quite a clear-sighted comment, in 1960, and one that today would certainly get one’s into trouble.

Her trust in (international) law is both idealistic and pragmatic: she believes it is paramount that the trial be fair, but also that it remains a trial about the guilt of one individual, not of a nation or a group of people - because, as she persuasively points out, if we allow Eichmann to stand in for the German or for the Nazi as a whole then (1) we relativise his guilt, implicitly recognising that he was unlucky and most people could have been on the stand in his place and (2) we then imply the ‘justice has been done’.

Yet, her reading of Eichmann rests on the assumption that indeed he was not particularly evil, or even ideologically antisemitic, and had simply internalised the prevalent morals, to the point that in his view acting well meant doing what Hitler wanted (Eichmann himself refers to this duty as a Kantian moral imperative, disturbingly). Arendt's interpretation also foregrounds how some of the most grotesque beliefs held by Nazi were widely shared, even within the opposition, and even within Jewish communities (eg. about the superiority of German civilisation, and/or the need for Jewish to live among themselves). She tries to really understand the acrobatics and contortions made by German minds and conscience to embrace, or at least comply with Nazi ideology. She also denounces the ways many Jews and non-Jews in positions of leadership crossed the line that divides ‘helping Jews to emigrate’ and ‘helping Nazi Germany carry out its deportation programmes’.

I have to say that the book slightly blew my mind on several fronts. First, although WWII and the Holocaust are theoretically one of the subjects most covered in school, the version I learnt was so simple and black and white to be basically useless when it comes to reflecting on questions of responsibilities, on what could have been different, and on how avoid similar horrors. Second, the clarity with which Arendt was able to critique Israel, not only for particular policies, but for its very setup as an exclusively Jewish state, comes across as shocking at this moment in time. Last but not least, also her take on the futility and emptiness of feelings of collective guilt (among Germans in particular) seems very foresighted.

This book wasn’t quite what I expected, which meant I wasn’t as big of a fan of it. I was personally less interested in the bureaucratic details and legal questions. I wanted to focus more on the question of what Eichmann was guilty of, complicity, and how someone “normal” does evil things. I don’t feel like that was explored all that much ultimately, so I was dissatisfied.

I did learn a lot about the history of these events that I didn’t know before, and I found the political context of the trial interesting to learn about. My book club enjoyed thinking about the culpability of people like Eichmann and the Jewish councils that cooperated in order to try to mitigate the situation.

While the onslaught of detail was a little much for me, I did enjoy gaining a more nuanced picture. I love/hate that learning more about a thing creates more questions than it answers.