Essay: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a book by political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt, published in New York by Penguin Books in 1963.
When the news of Eichmann’s capture and forthcoming trial was broadcast, Hannah Arendt proposed herself as a trial reporter to William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker magazine. Shawn gladly accepted Arendt’s offer, as she had already earned a distinguished reputation as a political analyst through her work The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Also, as a Jew and an early refugee from Nazi Germany (she had escaped in 1933), Arendt was uniquely qualified to cover the trial. She stayed in Jerusalem from April untill June 1961, and published her impressions of the trial in a series of controversial articles for The New Yorker magazine in February and March of 1963.
They were published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil later that year.
The book immediately set off a controversy that a half-century later shows no signs of abating.
Eichmann in Jerusalem—I The New Yorker, February 16, 1963 P. 40
The book was the most well-known of her writings, and bore her a number of enemies and opponents both in Israel and around the world. The book begins a longtime discussion. The most questionable was her theory of the “banality of evil” that in many opinions depreciates Jewish suffering and reduces the crimes of the Nazis.
The Hebrew translation of the book was released only in 2000, translated by Ariel Uriel, and published by Bavel, 40 years after it was originally published.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil has been translated into many languages.
Dutch translation: Arendt, Hannah, De banaliteit van het kwaad. Een reportage. Moussault, Amsterdam, 1969 (translator: W.J.P Scholtz)
Polish translation: Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann w Jerozolimie, rzecz o banalności zÅ,a.
Znak, Kraków, 1998 (translator: Adam Szostkiewicz)
German translation: Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: Ein Bericht von der Banalität des
Bösen, with a preface by Hannah Arendt, Piper, Munich, 1986 (translator: Brigitte Ganzow)
2. The Role of the Text in the Author’s Career
On May 11, 1960, Adolf Eichmann, who had been masquerading in Argentina as factory worker Ricardo Klement, was captured by Israeli agents and brought to Jerusalem for trial. During World War II, Eichmann, an obedient Nazi bureaucrat, had risen to Obersturmbannführer (a rank equivalent to lieutenant colonel) in the Schutzstaffel (SS), a branch of the state secret police, or Gestapo, headed by Heinrich Himmler. Eichmann became the “Jewish expert” of the branch known as the Head Office for Reich Security. In accordance with Adolf Hitler’s plan for a “final solution” for the Jewish people, Eichmann was put in charge of arranging the mass deportations to the killing centers, which were mainly in Poland.
After Germany’s defeat in May, 1945, Eichmann was captured by the Americans but hid his true identity and, with the aid of Nazi sympathizers, eventually escaped to Argentina. For ten years, reunited with his family, he lived a quiet life until his capture.
The trial began before the District Court of Jerusalem on April 11, 1961, and continued until August 14. The court announced its judgment on December 11, 1961, declaring Eichmann guilty of most of the crimes in the fifteen-count indictment (including “crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and memberships in hostile organizations”). He was condemned to death and, after the rejection of his legal appeals, was executed by hanging at midnight on May 31, 1962.
In Hannah Arendt reporting of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial for The New Yorker magazine, which evolved into Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the phenomenon of Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions and inaction.
She was sharply critical of the way the trial was conducted in Israel. She also was critical of the way that some Jewish leaders, notably M. C. Rumkowski, acted during the Holocaust. This caused a considerable controversy and even animosity toward Arendt in the Jewish community.
Her friend Gershom Scholem, a major scholar of Jewish mysticism, broke off relations with her. Arendt was criticized by many Jewish public figures, who charged her with coldness and lack of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust.
Because of this lingering criticism, her book has been translated into Hebrew almost 40 years after original publication.
Arendt ended the book by writing:
Just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.1
In the first decades after its publication, Eichmann in Jerusalem provoked readers primarily over what it had to say about Jewish cooperation with the Nazis. Arendt cast her eye on everyone from the Zionists who negotiated with the Nazis to the Jewish Councils that provided them with detailed lists of Jewish property for dispossession, helped Jews onto the trains, administered the ghettos, and helped Jews onto the trains again. She concluded, “The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.” It was a sentence for which she would never be forgiven.
When the series of five articles about Eichmann trial saw first time the light of day in the New Yorker magazine, Hannah Arendt was traveling in Europe. Her first indicator of the magnitude of
1 Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann w Jerozolimie: Rzecz o banalności zÅ,a. Kraków: ZNAK, 2010, p. 362.
the storm of indignation that would follow was a friendly letter from Henry Schwarzschild, warning that his organization, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith, and others were preparing a hostile attack. The articles in The New Yorker, he wrote, were fast becoming the sensation of the New York Jewish scene. Much wailing and wringing of hands, especially on the part of the German Jews, who feel their honor and that of their late friends attacked.
Schwarzschild admired Arendt’s insight into Eichmann as “Kafkaesquely normal,” her “demotion” of Eichmann to his real place in the Nazi hierarchy, her emphasis on “grey bureaucratic normality,” as “greatly valuable contributions.” He explained that he was writing to forewarn her that others were reading the articles differently. “Come back [to New York] soon,” he ended, “I can’t single-handedly preserve you from character and scholarship defenestration.” 2
A few days later she received a hostile note from Siegfried Moses, written on behalf of the Council of Jews from Germany, making a “declaration of war” on her and the Eichmann book.3
Moses flew to Switzerland to meet with Arendt and demanded that she stop publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem in book form. She refused, and warned Moses that “her Jewish critics were going to make the book into a cause célèbre and thus embarrass the Jewish community far beyond anything that she had said or could possibly do.” 4
William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker magazine sent a telegram saying that “people in town seem to be discussing little else.” 5
Hans Morgenthau, whose review in the Chicago Tribune lauded Arendt’s work as “superb”, “concise”, “incisive” and “powerful”, wrote to her that the Jewish community was up in arms and in a state of “psychological havoc”. A few weeks later the Anti-Defamation League distributed a memorandum informing its members about the New Yorker series and alerting them to “Arendt’s defamatory conception of Jewish participation in the Nazi Holocaust.”
This was followed by a public statement condemning the book and by several critical reviews published in the Jewish magazine Aufbau,8 where many of Arendt’s articles had been published in the 1940s.
Although Arendt had never been religious, and had long been open in her criticism of the Jewish leadership, her involvement with Jewish issues and the Zionist cause had been such that Alfred Kazin characterized her as “a blazing Jew.”
Now, however, she became a pariah among her own people. Leo Mindlin wrote in The Jewish
2 Schwartzschild, Henry, Letter to Arendt. March 6, 1963. Arendt Archive, Yad Vashem Library.
3 Moses, Siegfried, Letter to Arendt. March 7, 1963. Arendt Archive, Yad Vashem Library
4 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven: Yale, 2004 (2d edition) p. 348-349
5 Shawn, William, Telegram to Arendt, March 8, 1963. Arendt Archive, Yad Vashem Library
Floridian that Arendt was a self-hating Jew who had turned her back on her faith and promulgated a hostile attack on the integrity of the Jewish leaders in Europe with a post-mortem defense of Eichmann, concluding that she was “digging future Jewish graves to the applause of the world’s unconverted anti-Semites.”
Trude Weiss Rosmarin, the editor of the Jewish Spectator published a review under the title “Self-Hating Jewess Writes Pro-Eichmann Series for the New Yorker” arguing that “Miss Arendt should disqualify herself from writing on Jewish themes to which she brings the pathology and confusion of the Jew who does not want to be a Jew and suffers because ‘the others’ will not let him forget that he is a Jew.” 6
The Anti-Defamation League followed its original denunciation with a brochure entitled Arendt Nonsense calling the book banal, evil, glib and trite, and encouraging Rabbis to speak out in their congregations in opposition to the book, perhaps with the goal of persuading readers either to hate the book before reading it, or simply not read it at all.
Returning to New York in July, Arendt wrote to Karl Jaspers (on July 20, 1963) that her “whole apartment was literally filled with unopened mail about the Eichmann business.” Much of this bordered on hate mail, like the letter from a woman in New Jersey which began with the declaration that she had never read the Eichmann book and “would never read such trash,” and concluded with the hope that “the ghosts of our six million martyrs haunt your bed at night.” 7
That summer debate among the New York intellectuals began in earnest in the pages of Partisan
Review with a scathing review by Lionel Abel, who had always found Arendt too self-assured: Hannah Arrogant is what he sometimes called her. Arendt never forgave the editors, who had published so much of her work in the preceding years, for choosing a reviewer who was widely known to dislike her. She wrote to Mary McCarthy (who twenty-five years earlier had been a founding editor of Partisan Review) that she was breaking her relationship with the journal not because of Abel’s comments, but because the editors showed an extraordinary lack of the most elementary respect for her and her work by choosing him as a reviewer.
Lionel Abel suggested that Arendt had called the Holocaust itself banal, ignoring that it was the motives and character of the Holocaust’s operatives (Eichmann and others) and not the harm they had done that she identified as banal. It was preposterous, he wrote, for her to deny that Eichmann was a moral monster: How could a man who had murdered five million people (ignoring the point that however great his guilt, Eichmann had not personally killed anyone) be anything other than
6 Rosmarin, Trude Weiss, “Self-Hating Jewess Writes Pro-Eichmann Series for New Yorker Magazine,” Jewish News, April 19, 1963
7 Unsigned letter to Arendt, Arendt Archive, Yad Vashem Library.
morally monstrous? Then, opening the door to the calumny that Arendt was more German than Jewish, he declared that Arendt’s portrayal of the Nazis made them more aesthetically appealing than their victims, which overlooks the fact that the Eichmann book is very severe in its judgment of the Germans both during the Third Reich and in the years after.
At least a dozen intensely critical reviews of Eichmann in Jerusalem appeared in the next few months. Marie Syrkin’s vitriolic review, “Hannah Arendt: The Clothes of the Empress,” in Dissent, a relatively new high-brow, leftish Jewish journal, asserted that Eichmann was the only character who came out better in the book than he went in, and accused Arendt of manipulating the facts