2.
Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 as a reporter for The New Yorker. The idea was not The New Yorker's but her own. She felt she simply had to attend the trial, she owed it to herself as a social critic, displaced person, witness, and survivor. She had never seen a Nazi butcher like Eichmann, she wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation, “and this was probably [her] only chance.” To attend this trial was an obligation she owed her past. She was interested, as she put it, in understanding Eichmann's mind (if he had one) and, through the testimonies at the trial, to explore “the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society.”
The result, as it first came out in The New Yorker and later in expanded form in the book, was largely the report of a trial, an attempt to examine the extent to which the court, confronted with a crime it could not find in the law books, succeeded in fulfilling the demands of justice. The book combines philosophy and day-to-day observation and is reminiscent, not only in its suggestive style but in its sarcasms and ironies, of Karl Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon III.
The resultant storm broke out mainly because of Arendt's portrait of Eichmann as a diligent yet “banal” bureaucratic criminal. (The term “banality” actually appears only on the last page but is implicit throughout the entire book.) Eichmann's mediocrity and insipid character struck Arendt on her first day in court. Her initial reaction, expressed in letters to Jaspers, McCarthy, and Blücher, was impressionistic. He isn't even sinister, she wrote (Arendt used the common German term unheimlich, which can also be translated as “uncanny”). He was like a “ghost in a spiritualist sauce.” What was more, he had a cold and was sneezing inside his bullet-proof glass cage.
She ought to have known better. Hitler would not have cut a better figure under the circumstances. Out of power, most tyrants and serial murderers seem pathetic or ordinary, harmless, or even pitiful, as Saddam Hussein did coming out of his rathole with an unkempt beard. Was she perhaps, at this early stage, a victim of what might be called the Fallacy of Physiognomy? We all succumb to it at times. Arendt was interested not only in physiognomy but also in graphology. The “science” of physiognomy was a popular intellectual pastime during her youth in Germany. (Her teacher Martin Heidegger, according to Karl Jaspers, imperiously dismissed Jaspers's terror at watching a man like Hitler seeking to be Germany's chancellor, with the exclamation “Just look at his hands!”) A few days into the trial, however, Arendt consciously moved away from exteriors. “[Eichmann] is actually stupid,” she wrote Jaspers, after listening to one of Eichmann's exhortations “but then, somehow, he is not” (Er ist eigentlich dumm aber auch irgendwie nicht). Her private letters from Jerusalem enable us to trace the slow development of her thesis. She plowed through the 3,000-page transcript of Eichmann's pretrial interrogation by the Israeli police captain Avner Less and gradually came to think that it was mostly, as she first put it, a kind of brainlessness7 on Eichmann's part that had predisposed him to becoming the faceless bureaucrat of death and one of the worst criminals of all time. She emphasized Eichmann's moral and intellectual shallowness, his inner void. He was probably not lying when he told Less that he could never be a doctor because he could not bear the sight of blood.
She concluded that Eichmann's inability to speak coherently in court was connected with his incapacity to think, or to think from another person's point of view. His shallowness was by no means identical with stupidity. He personified neither hatred or madness nor an insatiable thirst for blood, but something far worse, the faceless nature of Nazi evil itself, within a closed system run by pathological gangsters, aimed at dismantling the human personality of its victims. The Nazis had succeeded in turning the legal order on its head, making the wrong and the malevolent the foundation of a new “righteousness.” In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm. Conventional goodness became a mere temptation which most Germans were fast learning to resist. Within this upside-down world Eichmann (perhaps like Pol Pot four decades later) seemed not to have been aware of having done evil. In matters of elementary morality, Arendt warned, what had been thought of as decent instincts were no longer to be taken for granted.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism she still held on to a Kantian notion of radical evil, the evil that, under the Nazis, corrupted the basis of moral law, exploded legal categories, and defied human judgment. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, and in the bitter controversies about it that followed, she insisted that only good had any depth. Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet—and this is its horror!—it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
Eichmann was ambitious and eager to rise in the ranks, but he would not have killed his superior to inherit his job. Nor did he display any distinctive thought of his own. It was his “banality” that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of his time, Arendt claimed. She complained that while in the trial Eichmann had been accused, absurdly she thought, of having been the very architect, the brain, behind the Holocaust, his essential brainlessness was never even brought up or discussed. It wasn't discussed partly because it was so hard to grasp. But it also was left unmentioned because Eichmann's trial was a show trial, staged by Ben-Gurion at least partly for political reasons to prove conclusively that the Holocaust had simply been the largest anti-Semitic pogrom in history.
Eichmann's alleged banality was the main reason the book provoked such a storm. Most people still assumed that murder was committed by monsters or demons. Another reason was a brief comment on the Nazi-appointed “Jewish Councils” (Judenräte). Unable to see through the Nazi scheme, acting in the vain hope that they were serving the best interests of local Jews, the distinguished notables of the Judenräte had inadvertently become instruments of Nazi determination to eliminate a maximum number of Jews with a minimum of administrative effort and cost. Neither of the two points, of course, was new. Dostoevsky would not have regarded Arendt's “banality of evil” as a cheap catchword, as Gershom Scholem did in an open letter to Arendt accusing her of heartlessness. When the devil visits Karamazov, he turns out to be a shabby, stupid, and vulgar lout. Before Arendt, others had emphasized the discrepancy between the personal mediocrity of monsters like Hitler or Stalin and the horrendous evil they unleashed on the world. Nearly everybody who attended the trials of mass killers after the war, some of them respected doctors and pharmacists, came away with the disconcerting impression that the killers looked pretty much like you and me. The Israeli court psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a “completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him,” the implication being that the coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty explodes our ordinary conceptions and present the true enigma of the trial. In a similar vein, Simone de Beauvoir said that at his trial after the war the French Nazi Pierre Laval seemed commonplace and inconsequential, an unimaginative and feeble little fellow.