Book 4 - Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil

Last week I saw a docu/drama about the televising of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem ( The Eichmann Show). It was both fascinating and haunting. Haunting because it contained documentary footage from the concentration camps and fascination because it had a slightly oblique take on the question of whether or not Eichmann was a monster. The director of the 1961 television broadcasts, Leo Hurwitz, was convinced that everybody has a spark of humanity in them and that at some point Eichmann would recognise the horror of what had happened and what he was responsible for. He kept on looking, focusing on the face, wanting to see something - but there was nothing. Apart from the occasional twitch or pulling his mouth up to one side, Eichmann was blank. There was nothing.

The play did not deal directly with evil; the story was mainly about how the trial was televised (something truly remarkable, especially when you consider that even today no cameras are allowed in British courts). Nevertheless it raised the question and the documentary footage was a hammer blow to the solar plexus. For a more considered assessment of what the evidence showed and what the trial meant you need to look elsewhere. That place is the famous account by political philosopher Hannah Arendt.

Her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem:a report on the banality of evil” is the result of an assignment to cover the trial for the New Yorker magazine. It caused a storm when it was published because she did not flinch from writing about Jewish leaders who acquiesced to the process of expulsion and were unable to challenge force of the laws. You can see why that would caused offence: isn’t it enough that the the Jewish race was victim to an unprecedented, unimaginable, monstrous crime? why blame people faced by overwhelming of circumstances? why blame the victim? But Hannah Arendt had a steely hard intellect and would always follow the evidence and her own conclusions no matter where it took her and no matter how uncomfortable that place might be. The acquiescence of the Jewish leaders was part of the story she had to tell  because they shared a mentality with all the other Germans who thought Nazi ideology could not be confronted only ameliorated. By not challenging the idea of what was happening everybody allowed the process to become just that: a matter of process not of morality. For her the shocking thing  was that Eichmann, who was not a stupid man, did what he did unthinkingly. He had no personal animosity to Jews, their elimination was not ideological as such; it was a matter of him doing what was required to progress inside the organisation. What was expected. One of the key parts of his defence was that he was never challenged about what was being done - it just seemed to be accepted.

This is what Hurwitz struggles with in the play. He cannot understand how Eichmann cannot recognise the horror of what he did, the consequence of his administrative actions. The dramatic climax is the moment when Eichmann is forced to watch, in court,  film from the concentration camps of the emaciated bodies being bulldozed into mass graves, of the inhumanity of the conditions and what was done. Hurwitz was convinced that when Eichmann saw, with his own eyes, the eventual consequence of his actions he would break down. But he doesn’t flinch, does not connect what he sees to what he did. It was that disconnect that enabled evil to happen.This was the meaning of the phrase ‘banality of evil’, it was not that Eichmann was banal (though he probably was) but that everything was done organisationally, according to directives and done unthinkingly. The “strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil” or “remoteness from reality” showed itself more capable of wreaking “more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together”.

This week I didn’t read the whole book, instead I read the lengthy extract in ‘The Portable Hannah Arendt”, edited by Peter Baehr, who also provides the introduction. In it he says:

“Already in the late 1940s, Arendt had recognised that among the elite of the Nazi movement, as distinct from its rank and file membership, ideology had played only a limited role. What characterised the thinking of the upper echelon’s members was neither a cognitive straightjacket centred on fundamental premises nor a belief they had found the key to history. The elite mentality evinced instead a view that the distinction between truth and falsehood as a mere construct to be fabricated as expedience dictated and a mercurial capacity to translate “every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose.” For instance when elite members of the Nazi movement heard the statement “Jews are inferior” they understood by that expression that all Jews were to be exterminated. Elite thinking promoted cynicism rather than dogmatism: for while the latter frame of mind might, in its rigidity, have impeded the movements progress, cynicism allowed it to proceed on the assumption that “everything is possible”.

I read that paragraph with chills because the mixture of cynicism and managerialism seems rather too close to the atmosphere of present day politics.

Date of publication
2000 (but the extracts date back many decades and Eichmann in Jerusalem dates from 1963)


Randomness factor
Holocaust Memorial Day was January 27th