Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

Arendt early on-the difficulty of confronting, morally and politically, the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians. The Palestinians bore no responsibility for the collapse of civilization in Europe but ended up being

Arendt’s voluminous correspondence with Karl Jaspers, Mary McCarthy, Hermann Broch, Kurt Blumenfeld, Martin Heidegger, and her husband Heinrich Blücher.2 All bear witness

The writing helped give her relief from a heavy burden. As she wrote Mary McCarthy, it was a “cura posterior,” the delayed cure of a pain that weighed upon her as a Jew, a former Zionist, and a former German.3

it was claimed that Arendt had “exonerated” Eichmann but “condemned the Jews.” She had done nothing of the sort. Nor had she assaulted the entire court proceeding, as was frequently claimed; she only attacked the melodramatic rhetoric of the state prosecutor. She supported the death sentence as meted out by the court but would have preferred a differently formulated verdict. Contrary to frequent accusations, she never questioned the legitimacy of a trial in Israel by Israeli judges. Nor did she, as was frequently maintained, make the victims responsible for their slaughter “by their failure to resist.” In fact, she bitterly

an advocate of compromise with the Palestinians, either territorial or through establishing a joint, secular binational state. At the time of writing Eichmann in Jerusalem she had all but despaired of this and bleakly foresaw decades of war and bloody Palestinian-Israeli clashes. In the 1930s, she anticipated her criticism in Eichmann of the ghetto Judenrate by opposing the Transfer of Goods Agreement between the Zionists and the Nazis, an agreement that enabled German Jews to transfer some of their frozen assets to Palestine at a highly punitive exchange rate but ran counter to an attempted worldwide Jewish boycott of German goods. The Zionists, for whom

Her intuitions on the nature of political evil may find more sympathetic ears these days than when the book was first published. Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.

To attend this trial was an obligation she owed her past. She was interested, as she put it, in understanding Eichmann’s mind (if he had one) and, through the testimonies at the trial, to explore “the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society.”

Eichmann’s mediocrity and insipid character struck Arendt on her first day in court. Her initial reaction, expressed in letters to Jaspers, McCarthy, and Blücher, was impressionistic. He isn’t even sinister, she wrote (Arendt used the

Eichmann’s moral and intellectual shallowness, his inner void. He was probably not lying when he told Less that he could never be a doctor because he could not bear the sight of blood. She concluded that Eichmann’s inability to speak coherently in court was connected with his incapacity to think, or to think from another person’s point of view. His shallowness was by no means identical with stupidity. He personified neither hatred or madness nor an insatiable thirst for blood, but something far worse, the faceless nature of Nazi evil itself, within a closed system run by pathological gangsters, aimed at dismantling the human personality of its victims. The Nazis had succeeded in turning the legal order on its head, making the wrong and the malevolent the foundation of a new “righteousness.” In the Third Reich evil lost its

Nor did he display any distinctive thought of his own. It was his “banality” that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of his time, Arendt claimed. She complained that while in the trial Eichmann had been accused, absurdly she thought, of having been the very architect, the