Book Review: Eichmann in Jerusalem

When I came across this book a couple of weeks ago in a second hand bookstore, I immediately snapped it up. I had heard of the book before, of course, but never gotten around to getting a copy and reading it.

The book, Hannah Arendt's account of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, raised a storm of controversy at the time. A controversy I did not know about until I read the introduction. But to many in the Jewish community, Arendt became a pariah. The reason is her dispassionate objectivity. She raises a number of uncomfortable issues about the trial, including that it was a show trial concocted for a definite political purpose and whether it objectively proved what it set out to prove.

But mostly she was condemned for her analysis of Eichmann the man. She came to some conclusions that were startling at the time culminating in her famous phrase, the banality of evil. What she meant by this line is that Eichmann was an unoriginal mediocrity, a parrot of ideas he was fed. He personally had no animosity towards Jews. He also did not personally ever engage in violence, towards Jews or anyone else. But he did manage the levers of the transportation system conveying European Jewry to the death camps. And he prided himself on his efficiency. He was a bureaucrat through and through.

The book includes an epilogue and a startling postscript where Arendt gets very philosophical on the nature of criminal law, the nature of government, what constitutes criminal government, and the nature of totalitarianism. She also discusses the two great defences offered by Nazi war criminals - that their actions were acts of state and therefore beyond judgement, and that they were merely following orders.

Perhaps the most profound comment is that purpose of the court was to assign responsibility, that "the cogs in the machinery (of state), no matter how insignificant, are in court transformed back into perpetrators, that is to say, into human beings." She notes that Hitler despised the judicial system. "When Hitler said that a day would come in Germany when it would be considered a disgrace to be a jurist, he was speaking with utter consistency of his dream of a perfect bureaucracy."

The book is chock full of history as well. Perhaps the most important are two sections that are a study in contrasts - the Danish immunity to anti-semitism and its reaction to the German occupation and that of Rumania where "even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of old-fashioned spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way."

In Denmark, the native liberalism of the population rubbed off on their Nazi overlords and these soldiers often found ways to sabotage their superiors in Berlin.

Arendt's observations about the banality of evil were put to the test a number of years later at Yale University when psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted his famous experiments to show just how far average people would go in inflicting cruelty on their fellow men at the behest of an authority figure.

Arendt's book remains important today and is well worth the read. It is not an easy read. She likes to use long sentences with many clauses, and long paragraphs. But those drawbacks notwithstanding, I highly recommend it to students of history, law and political philosophy.

I may comment further on the book, notably on the Postcript, in future posts. There is a lot of interesting stuff there.

Today's Quote of the Day is from Hannah Arendt.