Eichmann Kudüs'te (Eichmann in Jerusalem)

Arendt goes to Jerusalem on behalf of The New Yorker to follow Adolf Eichmann's trial in 1961.

Eichmann was one of the people who ran the logistics of the Nazi genocide: he arranged who would board which train and where the trains would go. After the war he had fled to Argentina, and in 1960 he was abducted by Israeli intelligence and brought to Jerusalem.

Arendt expects to see a monster. What she sees disturbs her.

The man in court

Eichmann looks like an ordinary clerk.

He talks about his career. His promotions. His trying to do his duty well. At one point he says he was hurt because he was passed over for promotion.

He speaks in clichés. He repeats the same sentences. Even when telling his own life he uses ready-made phrases.

The conclusion Arendt reaches is this: the man was not thinking. He lacked the capacity to see what he was doing for what it was, to put himself in someone else's place and look.

At first reading it felt insufficient

How can a person's not thinking explain what he did?

Then I understood that Arendt is not explaining. She is describing.

And what she describes is more frightening: evil does not need a monster. Enough people who try to do their own jobs well and never look at the whole are enough.

The phrase in the subtitle comes from here: the banality of evil.

What Arendt is saying is not that Eichmann was innocent. Quite the opposite. At the end of the book she supports the death sentence the court gave and writes her own reasoning: because you saw yourself as having the right to decide whom you would share this world with, no one is obliged to share it with you.

His not thinking does not make him guiltless. It explains how the crime was possible.

The mechanism that stayed with me

The splitting of responsibility into parts.

Everyone does their own small part. Nobody looks at the whole. And in the end something comes out that nobody wanted alone.

I see this not only on a large scale but on a small one. Structures where nobody is ill-intentioned but the result is bad. Places where everybody says "it's not my job." A form passing through six people and nobody reading it.

Arendt's observation about language connects here too: Nazi bureaucracy developed a special vocabulary for describing killing. "Final solution," "special treatment," "resettlement."

The words make the act invisible. Reading this after Orwell creates a strange echo.

What needs to be read knowingly

When the book was published it met a heavy reaction, and the debate continues today. There are two separate objections and it is important not to confuse them.

The first: In the book Arendt also criticized the relationship some Jewish community councils had with the occupation administration — their role in preparing the lists. Those sections drew the harshest reaction and received justified criticism: it was said that she did not build the context sufficiently and that she placed moral responsibility on people who had no chance to choose.

The second, and more important to me: later historical research revealed that the image Eichmann presented in court was itself a defense strategy.

Audio recordings made in Argentina were found. In those recordings Eichmann does not speak like a thoughtless clerk at all: he boasts about what he did, says he regrets not having done more, openly defends his ideology.

So the concept is valuable, but the example it rests on is weak.

You need to read it knowing this. It is possible to rescue the concept from the example — "evil carried out without thinking" really is a thing — but it can no longer be defended that Eichmann is the best example of that concept.

The kind of book it is

It does not begin like a philosophy text. It begins like a court report.

The description of the courtroom, the prosecutor's style, the judges' conduct, the witnesses' testimony. Arendt writes as a journalist and these sections are unexpectedly vivid.

The philosophical conclusion comes at the end and is very short. The book's most famous idea is the part of the book that takes up the least space.

Its difficulty

It runs past three hundred pages and the legal detail is dense. Arendt's sentences are long, her arguments layered, and the irony that slips in sometimes blurs whose side she is on.

There are sections that proceed country by country: what happened in Denmark, what happened in the Netherlands, what happened in Romania. Valuable as information, but heavy going.

The main thesis is gathered in the first and last chapters.

It is also demanding in its subject. It is not an easy read, and it is right that it is not easy.