EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM
HANNAH ARENDT was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906. She studied at the Universities of Marburg and Freiburg and received her doctorate in philosphy at the University of Heidelberg, where she studied under Karl Jaspers. In 1933 she fled from Germany and went to France, where she worked for the immigration of Jewish refugee children into Palestine. In 1941 she went to the United States and became an American citizen ten years later.
She was a research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations, chief editor of Schocken Books, executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction in New York City, a visiting professor at several universities, including California, Princeton, Columbia, and Chicago and university professor at the graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952 and won the annual Arts and Letters Grant of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954.
Hannah Arendt's books include The Origins of Totalitariansim, Crisis in the Republic, Men in Dark Times, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercizes in Political Thought, and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. She also edited two volumes of Karl Jaspers's The Great Philosophers. Hannah Arendt died in December 1975.
AMOS ELON was born in Vienna, Austria, and has spent most of his adult life in Jerusalem. A frequent essayist, lecturer, and critic who is well known for his articles in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, he is the author of such bestselling works as The Israelis, Flight into Egypt, Founder, Herzel, and most recently The Pity of It Alclass="underline" A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch.
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HANNAH ARENDT
Eichmann in Jerusalem
A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL
Introduction by AMOS ELON
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1963
Revised and enlarged edition published 1965
Published in Viking Compass edition 1965
Published in Penguin Books 1977
This edition with an introduction by Amos Elon published in Penguin Books 2006
Copyright © Hannah Arendt, 1963, 1964
Copyright renewed Lotte Kohler, 1991, 1992
Introduction copyright © Amos Elon, 2006
All rights reserved
The contents of the original edition of this book, in slightly abbreviated and otherwise slightly different form, originally appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN: 978-0-14-193159-3
Contents
Introduction by Amos Elon
Note to the Reader
I: The House of Justice
II: The Accused
III: An Expert on the Jewish Question
IV: The First Solution: Expulsion
V: The Second Solution: Concentration
VI: The Final Solution: Killing
VII: The Wannsee Conference, or Pontius Pilate
VIII: Duties of a Law-Abiding Citizen
IX: Deportations from the Reich—Germany, Austria and the Protectorate
X: Deportations from Western Europe—France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Italy
XI: Deportations from the Balkans—Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania
XII: Deportations from Central Europe—Hungary and Slovakia
XIII: The Killing Centers in the East
XIV: Evidence and Witnesses
XV: Judgment, Appeal, and Execution
Epilogue
Postscript
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
THE EXCOMMUNICATION OF HANNAH ARENDT
In December 1966, Isaiah Berlin, the prominent philosopher and historian of ideas, was the guest of his friend, Edmund Wilson, the well-known American man of letters. An entry in Wilson's diary mentions an argument between the two men. Berlin “gets violent, sometimes irrational prejudice against people,” Wilson noted, “for example [against] Hannah Arendt, although he has never read her book about Eichmann.” In a memoir in the Yale Review in 1987, Berlin made exactly the same charge against Wilson and elaborated upon this in a 1991 interview with the editor of Wilson's diary.1 We don't know the outcome of this quarrel. One thing we do know: more than three years after the publication of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil first appeared in print, the civil war it had launched among intellectuals in the United States and in Europe was still seething. Describing the debate that raged through his own and other families in New York, Anthony Grafton later wrote that no subject had fascinated and aroused such concern and serious discussion as the series of articles Hannah Arendt had published in The New Yorker about the Eichmann trial, and the book that grew out of them. Three years after the publication of the book, people were still bitterly divided over it. No book within living memory had elicited similar passions. A kind of excommunication seemed to have been imposed on the author by the Jewish establishment in America. The controversy has never really been settled. Such controversies often die down, simmer, and then erupt again. It is perhaps no accident that at this time of a highly controversial war in Iraq, Arendt's books are still widely read and that, even though close to 300,000 copies of her book on Eichmann alone have so far been sold, this new edition is now published by Penguin.
Eichmann in Jerusalem continues to attract new readers and interpreters in Europe, too. In Israel, where the Holocaust was long seen as simply the culmination of a long unbroken line of anti-Semitism, from pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler and Arafat—David Ben-Gurion, the architect of the 1960 show trial wanted it that way—the growing interest among young people in this book suggests a search for a different view. A new Hebrew translation was recently published to considerable acclaim. In the past, the difficulty of many Israelis to accept Arendt's book ran parallel to another difficulty—foreseen by Arendt early on—the difficulty of confronting, morally and politically, the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians. The Palestinians bore no responsibility for the collapse of civilization in Europe but ended up being punished for it.