Warfawek’s Reviews > Eichmann in Jerusalem: Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen > Status Update

all them controversial claims are made in chapter 7.

On the bright side: A plenty of her psychologic insights I did hear as truisms from Germans before.

Mommsen's mention of her not being a historian in the beginning evidently was an understatement. Not only did she buy herself wholesale in the shoddy scholarship behind the Amt Blank attempts to exculpate the Wehrmacht (somewhat forgivable for a German of that era) but she also reproduces long discredited rumors about Jewish kill squads in the holocaust, or of the commies hiring Heinrich Müller. tss tss tss

The patriotic blurb on the Russian edition of 2008 is an amusement to behold.

The afterword in it is by Dr.Ephraim Zuroff. Refereshing to read that after the lyrical laudations by Hans Mommsen of the German Piper Verlag edition.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtm...
There you can get the manuscripts. She didn't do the German translation herself but edited it for stylistic and ideological reasons.

Her edits sometimes are obvious. "monster or clown" in German is specified further to "ogre or churl"; she overlooks "Clownerie" closeby. Comparing Eichmann quotations to what she makes of it in English is exciting, too.

The German edition by Piper Verlag includes an introduction by historian Hans Mommsen which is very laudatory in tone.

Interesting insights:Her decission to slam Jewish institutions was voiced before she started her research in a letter to Jaspers (to make her'lesson'more universal)

It was odd that in ch1 she launched some wild claims on nepotism in Israel, or on how the court is a show trial orchestrated by Ben Gurion for some nefarious ends. By ch4 you start getting what it was about. She was gonna milk it for ends of her own. My favourite part, is in the German edition, she calls GDR "das Zonenregime". It's little things like that got streets and museums named in her honour in the FRG.

Chapter 3: Eichmann has a good memory only for the high points in his career and speaks only in self-aggrandizing stock phrasing. Best moment in the chapter was her having noticing that the notion of a "Versöhnung", that is forgiving your victim, was popular not only with Eichmann (Sassen interview) and other nazi elites after the war but with the Germans in general. Tolstoy says: "it is common to all"

Sometimes the same sentence is sourced only in the English sometimes only in the German text.
Chapter I: Ad Hitlerums for Israel. & for a counterweight she later is being nasty to West Germany.
Capter II: The way she paints the early Eichamann calls back in mind a conversation in a Soviet satyrical novel from the 1920s where both "prole" and "bourgeois" are understood as an insult in the same conversation.