Analysis of Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendts - Book Report/Review Example

Eichmann in Jerusalem Being a journalist who worked for the newspaper of The New Yorker, Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem or what is calleda Report on the Banality of Evil is based much on Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961. The book aroused a heated debate and much controversy given the critical era in which it was published. People who read the book shall discover and decipher that Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the trial of Eichmann is meant to expose the world public to the German guilt since it raises serious questions about the nature of totalitarianism and the role of the Jewish leadership in the holocaust. When we give a glance at the book, many questions crop up. For example, can we say that thinking can hamper evil? In other words, can self-reflection help a human being avoid evil? To what extent people are responsible for their deeds? Hannah Arendt subscribes to this view. In the book, she introduced the thesis that Eichmann is actually unable to think and reflect. This has consequently led him to the pursuit of evil. His tendency to engage in the genocide might be ascribed essentially to his banality and stupidity. He was the kind of the thoughtless bureaucrat, who is most essential to the functioning of the totalitarian regime. Indeed, the most outstanding and distinguished political philosopher Hannah Arendt was one of her age’s brilliant intellectuals. She used to give much importance to human thinking. However, in the book of Eichmann in Jerusalem, she endowed the readership with a utilitarian rationale for thinking. If practiced properly and more appropriately, thinking can plainly enable people avoid any moral disaster. For many years, Arendt has consecrated most of her efforts in building many theories about how to think and what it means to think, especially in practical terms about moral and political matters.1 Prominently, Arendt has overvalued the power of thinking because she was much alive to the reality that thinking exerts a tremendous impact on human behavior. Arendt’s portrayal of what is referred to as a “new type of criminal” was not a real and a factual portrayal of Eichmann. The thesis that Arendt’s advanced in the book really sounds very substantial and provocative. Even though her banality-of-evil thesis did not meticulously and succinctly delineate Eichmann, she nonetheless accounted for how lots of commonplace people would commit evil and diabolic deeds in a totalitarian state with great enthusiasm and eagerness. In the book, the reader can well fathom this, The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied...that this new type of criminal...commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong.”2 In her analysis of Eichmann, Arendt drew the following conclusion: “It was as though in those last minutes [of Eichmann’s life] he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”3 As the story unfolds, the reader discovers that Eichmann, who was actually working as a Nazi lieutenant colonel charged with the transportation of the numerous Jews to concentration camps was also much accountable for their deaths. This is why he secretly quitted Germany immediately after the World War II and intended Argentina. It is in this place where he lived under a false identity until 1960. After lots of investigations, Eichmann was found guilty of many mortal crimes and thus was swiftly executed and sentenced to death. If we page through the book, we shall find that it is structured chronologically and it is somehow depicting the entire trial of Eichmann. Seemingly, the book deals with three essential topics that are unquestionably interconnected. On the one hand, there is the trial process, Eichmann as the pivot of the book and the mistreatment as well as the persecution of the Jews. In broad and simplistic terms, the book shows how the Jews were expelled and killed by the German authorities. Evidently, despite the fact that she thinks that Eichmann was responsible for his deeds and thus should be punished, Arendt was so troubled by this banal genocidal bureaucrat who was determined to “Commit his crimes under circumstances that make him well nigh impossible for him to know or feel what he is doing is wrong.”4 Apparently, we can say that Arendt was, from the very beginning, so interested in the inner ego, the conscience of a culprit who took part in carnage under the command of Adolf Hitler. This is why many critics identify Eichmann with Adolf Hitler. His trial is going to appear as the “Trial of Hitlerian Germany on the one hand and of Konrads Germany on the other. Certain people, such as some Israelis not to be named, say that they have no hand in it, and that as far as they are concerned they are interested only in a trial of National Socialism, do not care a damn for Eichmann and are going to multiply the proclamations against Adenauer because employed in his government are quite a number of ex-Nazis, such as his favourite, the Secretary of State Globke, dedicated annotator of the Nuremberg racial laws.”5 In her handling of the banality-of-evil question, Arendt contends that so many people, particularly in totalitarian states, are involved in evil actions not because they were demonic or unusual, but mainly because they were mindless and unreflective. With respect to the problem of evil and thinking, Arendt put into question the personality of Eichmann and wondered how Eichmann chose such a tragic destiny and whether he could have chosen a different destiny. Being the focus of Arendt’s concentrated reflection and pondering upon personal evil, the character of Eichmann really bewildered Arendt and thus posed another problem totally different from her initial encounter and contact with Nazism in Germany. Far from being a mere Jew getting in touch with a high-ranking Nazi official, Arendt’s reaction was one of a human being striving to understand another human being. This is why she felt that Eichmann was nothing but a mere clown who had not carefully considered his murderous deeds. Immediately after the trial, Arendt highlighted the issue not of what Eichmann’s character is like but rather how one can avoid becoming Eichmann. Also, her reflection over the problem of how one might avoid turning out to be Eichmann, Arendt, either directly or obliquely, turned her back to the kind of life introduced by the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1989-1976), who exerted a great intellectual impact on her. Irrespective of her opting for thinking as an optimal solution for avoiding the banality of evil, Arendt advanced an entirely different kind of thinking not akin to that presented by Heidegger. She henceforth called for judgment because the latter can enable one make a clear distinction between all that is good and all that is bad. Remarkable is that Arendt is not satisfied at the conduct of Eichmann. Her view is that thoughtlessness unmistakably leads to evil and this is clearly manifest in the motto “stop and think”. From their childhood, people are taught that the inability to think is synonymous and equated with madness or foolishness. Worse than that, it can make one engage in evil of all sorts. As a philosopher and a political thinker, Arendt attributed to thinking marvelous powers. For her, thinking alone can shield her from indulging in evil. By contrast, non-thinking, as she argued, led to awful outcomes in totalitarian states. This dichotomy of thinking and evil is what the whole book tries to approach. Arendt believed that self reflection is a process by dint of which people can enhance their qualities and moral values. Confessedly, in the Nazi conscience, it is believed that the burning and the murdering of Jews and other undesirable people was a whole social responsibility and a moral duty. None can deny that the genocide is justified and was even recommended from an ethical perspective as long as it was supported by the Nazi regime that thought that the Jews constituted a great danger for the Nazi state. Nazis in turn were resisting to objective self-evaluation because they have celebrated evil. Hence, the “with road to Auschwitz was paved with righteousness.”6 Both naïve and maybe stupid, Eichmann was perceived and conceived as a self-deceived man. The problem with him is that he believed himself a righteous man, yet he had turned into evil. In spite of the excessive power he was wielding as a high-ranking SS official, Eichmann seemed unimpressive, mundane and even banal especially in Jerusalem. This occurred partly because he lacked the true knowledge of himself. Different philosophical and complicated questions disturb the reader as how such a mundane person could give a bad example of humanity. This is left to the reader to judge and assess the wicked and bad performances of Eichmann. Arendt, who was strictly sticking and clinging to the mode of thinking presented by the father of Greek philosophy, Socrates, firmly believed that such thinking could be so helpful to anyone; it could have helped Eichmann avoid evil and made of him a good man. For that reason, and not for that reason, Arendt sought to demonstrate that evil occurred because Eichmann was thoughtless. Even if Arendt thought that Eichmann’s deeds were inhumane, she went so far to put this character’s actions within a rational context and an understandable framework. However, it should be underlined that Arendt was severely criticized because she was not present during the trial of Eichmann. In his book, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the life, Crimes and Trial of a “Desk murderer”, David Cesarani, a Holocaust researcher, cleverly remarked that Arendt attended only part of the trial of Eichmann. She thus did not witness Eichmann’s testimony and defense of himself. Besides, Cesarani introduced concrete evidences that Eichmann was verily highly anti-Semitic and that evil was an important motivator of his action. This is why he rejected Arendt’s claim that Eichmann’s motives were banal and non-ideological and that he was only executing and blindly obeying Hitler’s commands. Opposed to that, Eichmann said at the court that he was viewing himself as a friend of the Jews. He helped them abdicate a culture which they were unsuited for and shift to better lives elsewhere. As a result, he regarded himself an ally of Zionists. At the end of Eichmann’s trial, Hannah Arendt, who had watched him for almost fourteen weeks, depicted the prisoner’s personality this way: “Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.”7 Also, the transcript of Eichmann’s examination by an Israeli police agent while awaiting trial urged Arendt to note that “the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny”8. Accordingly, Arendt dwelled on his shallow intellect, his clichéd speech, his infinite ability for self-deception, and his profound detachment from reality. For her, the great failure of Eichmann’s trial is that it failed to strengthen International Law. Why should this happen? Arendt explains the reasons as follows: “It is essentially for this reason: that the unprecedented, once it has appeared, may become a precedent for the future, that all trials touching upon ‘crimes against humanity’ must be judged according to standard that is today still an ‘ideal.’ If genocide is an actual possibility of the future, then no people on earth--least of all, of course, the Jewish people, in Israel or elsewhere--can feel reasonably sure of its continued existence without the help and the protection of international law. Success or failure in dealing with the hitherto unprecedented can lie only in the extent to which this dealing may serve as a valid precedent on the road to international penal law.” 9 To crown it all, no matter how debatable and disputable are the themes subsumed into Eichmann in Jerusalem, we can frankly say that the entire book leaves us wondering not only if justice was achieved in Eichmann’s case, but also whether the moral lessons Arendt believes the trial has taught will make a difference in the future and help the coming generations avoid carnages and another holocaust. Works Cited Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), p.3. Hannah, Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem. 1963. Kohn, Jerome. “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York, 2003) Rassinier, Paul. “The Adolf Eichmann Trial: The New Meistersingers of Nuremburg”. From http://greyfalcon.us/Eichmann.htm. Read More