Eichmann in Jerusalem

"I hadn’t read Eichmann in Jerusalem until very recently. Obviously, I’d heard about it. I knew the gist of it. But it’s only recently that I’ve come to see what all the fuss is about. “Evil is often a result of recognising another’s humanity, which is pretty much the opposite of the usual view.” It’s a controversial book, of course, and very provocative. Arendt explains her famous idea of the banality of evil in relation to Eichmann and what he said at his trial. She suggests that the Nazis, like Eichmann, who were responsible for such evil acts were stupid, short-sighted and ordinary. They were clownish. Rather than reflecting malevolence, their actions were unthinking and routine. But she also makes claims about the complicity of Jews and others working with the Nazis, some of whom may have thought they were doing the best they could to rescue people, others who were acting out of self-interest and personal gain. She thought many more could have been saved if they hadn’t played along with the Nazis. And she also fumed against the hypocrisy of the Israelis, as with their outrage against the Nuremberg Laws, when their own laws didn’t recognise a marriage between a non-Jew and a Jew. No wonder her book provoked such a furious reaction. Eichmann may not have been typical. Arendt may have put too much weight on his case. And there’s been recent research which suggests that he might not have been as stupid as he appeared at his trial—that this was in some way an act. So yes, the banality claim may have been overstated. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In many ways, Arendt reminds me of Noam Chomsky , the way she puts her case so forcibly, not sparing anyone. Chomsky always comes out fighting, and Arendt is like that. And, like him, she puts her case too strongly at times. But I’d definitely recommend reading this book."

"She was not a psychoanalyst at all but she shared Freud’s basically tragic view of man divided against himself and of suffering that cannot be transcended. I find her writing totally consonant with a psychoanalytic understanding of the world. She reported on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for the New Yorker and she had her finger on the pulse of seeing Eichmann not as evil but as manifesting a particular aspect of culture. She was interrogating him in her mind and asking: What can you tell me about myself and my culture? So he was not an evil monster for her but a caricature of a mode of existence that has become part of our culture. His motives were not derived from passion. He was a functionary, trying to get the job done well. Understanding what he was doing was not instrumental to his reasoning, the amount of gas needed, the disposal of a certain number of bodies. What Arendt says is that this kind of mass destruction could only happen in our age: the factories, the calm logic with which it was carried out. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman said, the peasant farmer is to the lynch mob what the factory is to the concentration camp. The concentration camp carries to an extreme the logic of industrialisation and Arendt resists the wish to project unwanted aspects of herself into Eichmann. She saw the phenomenon of Nazism as developing out of colonialism, starting with the Boer War and the beginnings of racism as an ideology used to justify the imperial endeavour. She emphasises what she calls ‘thinking’ and it is close to what pychoanalysis means by thinking, that is, the capacity to reflect on oneself and the world without succumbing to the tendency to simplify. Racism creates a binary world, a binary way of thinking. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . She thought the political arena should be the arena for engagement and thinking more deeply about ourselves and society but she saw instead the degradation of politics. Politics now is not about engagement, but about control, the wish to control the way we vote. It has become advertising. She was interested in citizens being involved in local politics, on the streets and she thought that the more an individual withdraws to look after his own garden the more a vacuum is created into which destructive forces can seep."

"Yes, she sat in on some of the trial in Jerusalem. I should say, however, that she has been criticised for not sitting through the whole of it – she only observed parts and drew her conclusions from those, and some feel she did so too avidly and partially. I chose this book because the Eichmann trial was such an important chapter in the history of the pursuit of the Nazi mind, not simply because the background circumstances, involving Eichmann’s seizure in Latin America by Israeli agents, and the fact of his being put on trial in Jerusalem rather than in an international court were so controversial. The trial focused public attention on the individual high bureaucrat who had such personal responsibility in the Final Solution. There was, in a way, this enigma of what went on in Eichmann’s mind. Arendt writes about some of the psychiatrists who encountered Eichmann. What’s fascinating in her account is this sense of the clinicians being very puzzled by him. One of them talks about the strange unconscious impact Eichmann has on him – in short, who uses his own feelings of disturbance as part of his “material” or at least response to the man. I wanted to highlight this book, however, partly because it’s provoked a number of other books about the Nazi mentality, and also because it marks a different moment in the literature. The most famous phrase here was “the banality of evil”. Arendt doesn’t mean, of course, that the outcomes were banal or that Nazism was banal, but she’s interested in a state of apparent inner emptiness, inside the mind of officialdom. It’s what some people think of as a state of so-called “bureaucratic automatism”. That’s controversial and some people have reinterpreted Arendt’s report and wondered if behind this apparent blankness and moral vacuity there’s something characterised by massive hatred and sadism that masquerades as something else. Post-war, one strand of thinking continued to present the Nazi decision-makers as a crowd of freaks or madmen, late exemplars of what Michel Foucault once traced as the psychiatric discourse of the “abnormal”. Here the war criminals are presented as aberrant monsters, exceptional sadistic individuals, who stand apart from the rest of us. Another strand focuses much more on the mass psychology we discussed earlier. Then there is another tradition still, which is alarming in a different way, which is about a more blind and subservient evacuation of the mind itself into what Arendt calls this banality, when you will just do what you are told or even gleefully take a lead role, as if you are on autopilot and ordinary morality or humanity have no purchase, or at least shrink inwards in mad ways. An obscene form of officialdom to be sure, but it is the world of “just doing my job”. That’s not an exhaustive list of the strands of thought, of course, but it does suggest some of the ways the discussion about Nazi mentality developed. Each of these strands was to produce debate and critique. She’s interested in the utter dehumanisation that could lead to such absorption in the logistical details – for instance, the concentration upon the smooth running of the trains [to the concentration camps]. Claude Lanzmann caught that horror all too well in his remarkable film Shoah . Arendt did not confine her attention to Nazism, to be sure, but it represented a kind of limit case of what was possible. Arendt is not really a psychoanalytical writer – on the contrary, she has no truck with Freudianism as such. Yet there are some considerable affinities between her attempt to understand the psychosocial dimension of fascism and totalitarianism, and the contemporaneous psychoanalytical literature. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s also worth mentioning that Arendt’s account came out in roughly the same period that the American psychologist Stanley Milgram had been conducting experiments in New Haven. Milgram was a researcher at Yale University and concocted a famous experiment in which volunteers take part in an exercise in which they are required to turn up the pain levels on a subject – in fact, for the purposes of his experiment, an actor – behind a glass screen. He published it later as Obedience to Authority . The volunteers are told to do it when an authority figure tells them to turn the dial, and very many of them chose not to question the order, happy to oblige. What he alarmingly finds is how many people – albeit to various degrees of extremity – will simply obey orders despite the consequences."