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Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics) |  | Author: Hannah Arendt
Creator: Amos Elon
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 23,590
Media: Paperback
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.7
ISBN: 0143039881
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5318092
EAN: 9780143039884
ASIN: 0143039881
Publication Date: September 22, 2006
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Product Description
Hannah Arendts authoritative report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann includes further factual material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendts postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
Emphasis on Banality December 5, 2007
S. Johnson
36 out of 38 found this review helpful
A previous reviewer claims that Arendt's book shows the ambivalence of human nature, proving that in effect anybody could have done what Eichmann did. In fact, this is exactly the cynical point of view that Arendt opposes in this, and her other writings. Her argument here is a revision of her earlier position on 'radical evil' advanced in The Origins of Totalitarianism, a position which Heidegger claimed to find 'incomprehensible.' She argues here that banality and "sheer thoughtlessness" (akin to Heidegger's reflections on boredom) are in fact the root of Evil. To put it better, evil continues precisely because of its inherent rootlessness, its constitutive disregard of the world. Thus, the detachment of claims such as "Anybody could have done what Eichmann did" distort her intention. Evil, she insists, is not an inevitable aspect of human nature, but instead arises from an unwillingness to understand.
A Classic that Elaborates on the Genocide of Jews and Others September 20, 2007
Jan Peczkis (Chicago IL, USA)
39 out of 42 found this review helpful
I am delighted to see this classic back in print. Jewish author Hannah Arendt has provided a wealth of timeless information that goes far beyond the trial of the German war criminal Adolf Eichmann. This review is based on the original (1964) edition.
Arendt (p. 39) gives the readers a taste of the scale of the Kristallnacht (November 1938): 7,500 Jewish shop windows broken, all synagogues burned, and 20,000 Jewish men incarcerated in concentration camps. In common with many others who wrote during the first two decades after WWII, Arendt (p. 5, 11-12) addresses the issue of Jewish passivity in the face of death during the later roundups and transports to the death camps.
Arendt briefly discusses the fate of Jews of some individual European nations. She mentions the conniving of the Bulgarians (with, of course, the implied freedom to do so) performed in order to avoid sending their Jews to the death camps, and the fact that Finland, Germany's ally, was never seriously pressured to turn over her 2,000 Jews to be murdered (p. 170). Clearly, the latter part of the oft-repeated statement, "Not all of the victims of the Nazis were Jews, but all Jews were victims of the Nazis" is incorrect.
Throughout this work, Arendt gives various biographical details of Adolf Eichmann. For example, she mentions that he was a Gottglaubiger (p. 27), a Nazi term for those who had broken with Christianity, and which Eichmann maintained right up to the very moment of his hanging, having refused the solace and Bible reading of a Protestant minister (p. 252).
Arendt briefly discusses Hitler's flouting of the Versailles treaty and his rise to power. While Jan T. Gross has asserted that there were Poles who praised Hitler in the 1930's, Arendt makes it clear that this was far from limited to Poland during that time: "...Hitler was admired everywhere as a great national statesman." (p. 37).
While most recent Holocaust materials focus on the real or imagined collaboration of locals in the sending of Jews to their deaths, Arendt is unsparing in her criticism of Jewish collaborators in this regard: "Without Jewish help in administrative and police work--the final roundup of Jews in Berlin was, as I have mentioned, done entirely by Jewish police--there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower. (p. 117). She adds that, because of this collaboration, only a few thousand Germans, most of whom furthermore only did office work, were able to send hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths (p. 117). Finally, Arendt concludes that: "Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had 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. (According to Freudiger's calculations about half of them could have saved themselves if they had not followed the instructions of the Jewish councils..." (p. 125).
Arendt (p. 42, 118, etc.) elaborates on the actions of a Jew, Rudolf Kastner (Kasztner). He made a deal with Eichmann in which 1,684 Jews were allowed to go to Palestine in exchange for Kastner's silence before and during which 476,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Jan Tomasz Gross, who has gotten a great deal of publicity for his books (NEIGHBORS and FEAR), has stated that the 2-3 million Poles who died in the hands of the Germans were largely the collateral victims of military action. Arendt knows better: "...Eichmann knew that right behind the front lines all Russian functionaries ("Communists"), all Polish members of the professional classes, and all native Jews were being killed in mass shootings." (p. 95). "At no point, however, either in the proceedings or the judgment, did the Jerusalem trial mention even the possibility that extermination of whole ethnic groups--the Jews, or the Poles, or the Gypsies--might be more than a crime against the Jewish or the Polish or the Gypsy people, that the international order, and mankind in its entirety, might have been grievously hurt and endangered." (pp. 275-276). Arendt realizes the alternative future: "The measures against Eastern Jews were not only the result of anti-Semitism, they were part and parcel of an all-embracing demographic policy, in the course of which, had the Germans won the war, the Poles would have suffered the same fate as the Jews--genocide. This is no mere conjecture: the Poles in Germany were already being forced to wear a distinguishing badge in which the "P" replaced the Jewish star, and this, which we have seen, was always the first measure to be taken by the police in instituting the process of destruction)." (pp. 217-218).
Arendt praises the Danes for saving Jews during WWII and then, without mentioning the incomparably more difficult conditions under which Polish rescuers of Jews labored, nevertheless gives the Poles their due. After listing some individual examples of Polish assistance to Jews, Arendt adds the following: "One witness claimed that the Polish underground had supplied many Jews with weapons and had saved thousands of Jewish children by placing them with Polish families. The risks were prohibitive; there was the story of an entire Polish family who had been executed in the most brutal manner because they had adopted a six-year-old Jewish girl." (p. 231).
Rethinking the Nature of Evil November 20, 2007
Andrea Ocier (Metro Manila, Philippines)
27 out of 28 found this review helpful
"It was sheer thoughtlessness that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of the period," political theorist Hannah Arendt observes of Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the logistics behind the mass deportations of Jews and other so-called asocials to ghettos and extermination camps during the 2nd World War. The face of evil, she suggests through her portrayal of the high-ranking SS bureaucrat at his trial in Jerusalem, is not necessarily that of a radically perverse pathological mastermind, but instead and more frightening still, can come in the form of a banal and unimpressive caricature of normalcy.
In his testimony, Eichmann characterizes himself as a blameless cog who was only following orders, and even goes on to cite instances where he tried to help certain Jews who were friends of his escape their inevitable fate. His tone is that of one regaling a run-of-the-mill human sympathy story of hard luck, and his telling is rife with contradiction, blanks in memory, and ridiculous cliché. According to Arendt, this "created considerable difficulty during the trial - less for Eichmann himself than for those who had come to prosecute him, to defend him, to judge him, and to report on him. For all this, it was essential that one take him seriously, and this was very hard to do, unless one sought the easiest way out of the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them, and declared him a clever, calculating liar - which he obviously was not."
Also relevant for its criticism of the shaky legal foundation upon which the trial was conducted (Eichmann was illegally abducted in Argentina, then was brought to Israel and prosecuted there using an outdated framework that was unable to properly address the problem of genocide as specifically carried out by the Nazis).
This book is very smart, very elegantly written. The questions it raises about ethics and preconceived notions of good and evil are universal and remain relevant to the times. If it were a person, I'd sleep with it on the first date.
A plea for clear thinking and honest speaking March 27, 2009
Stephen R. Laniel (Cambridge, MA USA)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
The story floating around in the zeitgeist about Eichmann in Jerusalem is that Hannah Arendt established how boring the Nazis were: that the men responsible for the destruction of millions were just paper pushers. This captures part of Arendt's book, but not nearly all of it. Overall, I think it's best to describe Eichmann in Jerusalem as a clear-eyed look at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a study of guilt, and a dispassionate analysis of war-crimes trials. It's a tremendous book.
Many Jews may stop reading when Arendt seems to accuse them of collaborating with the Nazis. I know virtually nothing about how this book was received, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if it offended a lot of people. If the historical record is as clear as Arendt claims, however, then there's nothing to get upset about. Councils of Jewish Elders, says Arendt, were formed in every country that the Nazis took over; those Councils documented the assets of the Jews within their communities, dutifully went around collecting them, turned them over to the Nazis, and only later found themselves herded into cattle cars to Auschwitz. In the death camps, she says, Jews did much of the gruesome work, like removing gold teeth from gas-chamber victims.
This is obviously sensitive stuff. Arendt's style is to deliver it as honestly and forthrightly as possible. Her style, indeed, is tightly bound to her subject. She writes of Eichmann,
[H]e apologized, saying, "Officialese . . . is my only language." But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché ... To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was "empty talk" -- except that they thought the emptiness was feigned ...
She says elsewhere in Eichmann that the man's inability to speak was a symptom of his inability to think. It is her duty, then, to view Eichmann's trial with the clearest eye and sharpest mind possible.
Readers may recall the backstory here: the Israelis kidnapped Eichmann from Argentina in 1960, tried him in Israel, and hanged him in 1962. The trial sought to paint Eichmann as one of the masterminds behind the Holocaust and the vilest sort of monster. Arendt retorts that he was, at best, a high-level functionary, and indeed a paper pusher, and that everyone at the trial could see immediately that this was the case. He never killed anyone, and indeed it seems pretty clear that the merest sight of blood would make the man queasy.
None of this lets Eichmann off the hook, though, which is exactly the point: there's a world of difference between passers-by, who allowed the European Jews to be destroyed, and the Eichmanns who filed away the forms to send them to their destruction.
Granted, then, that Eichmann deserved to pay in a way that the silent millions did not, why was Israel the proper forum for his punishment? Arendt is skeptical that it was. Eichmann's crime was a crime against humanity, and he should have been punished the same way that other Nazis were punished at Nuremberg. At the same time, no other nation had stepped up to try Eichmann, and Argentina was refusing to turn over the Nazis within its borders, so Israel may have had no choice. Arendt, and the court's decision itself, approvingly quote Grotius's line: "punishment is necessary `to defend the honor or authority of him who was hurt by the offence so that the failure to punish may not cause his degradation.'"
Israel seemed to believe that it had the right to try Eichmann because of his crimes against the Jews, which makes me wonder: does Israel automatically grant itself the right to try crimes against Jews even today? Suppose some other country tried to kill all the Jews within its borders now; would Israel grant itself the right to try the leaders of that country?
Arendt says that Israel's trial of Eichmann was much less about Eichmann and much more about the history of anti-Semitism from the time of Pharaoh all the way up to the Germans. There is an element of farce in all of this, and I think it's fair to say that Arendt took offense: a crime as serious as Eichmann's deserves a serious trial, rather than a circus. Fortunately the legal decision that came down at the trial's conclusion was a model of seriousness.
Even with Eichmann swinging from the gallows, there's still the matter of Europe's guilt. Arendt, as ever, is only as brutal as she needs to be here: the nations of Europe stand guilty of allowing the slaughter to happen. The French, for instance, allowed foreign Jews within French borders to be shipped off to Germany, but put their foot down when the Nazis demanded French Jews. Their refusal to export their own Jews points out another matter: when nations said no to the Nazis, the Nazis often backed down. They were by no means an immovable wall of violence. The evil that European nations allowed to happen is all the more inexcusable when we know that there were exceptions.
At the heart of all of this is the basic principle, which Arendt summarizes so well:
There remains, however, one fundamental problem, which was implicitly present in all these postwar trials and which must be mentioned here because it touches upon one of the central moral questions of all time, namely upon the nature and function of human judgment. What we have demanded in these trials, where the defendants had committed "legal" crimes, is that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgment, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all those around them.
This moral question, and the denunciation that necessarily follows it, doesn't go away even if the Nazis mercilessly destroyed those who refused to follow their orders. We wish for a clear voice calling out from the maelstrom. Arendt's is that voice.
Incredible investigation of Adolf Eichmann May 14, 2008
R. Caverly (Downingtown, Pa. United States)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Arendt's analysis of the "banality of evil" characterized by Adolf Eichmann is a chilling look into how evil can be systematized, how it can be seemingly bureaucratic, and how normal people can be turned into monsters through law.
This is a great book for anyone interested in World War 2, the Holocaust, political philosophy, or getting really really depressed.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
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