As Tony Judt wrote a few years ago in The New York Review of Books,8 Arendt made many small errors for which her critics will never forgive her. But she got many of the big things right and for this she deserves to be remembered. She would have been wryly amused by the reawakened interest in her work. She once said that the saddest form of fame was posthumous fame. At the height of the scandal over Eichmann in Jerusalem, Jaspers wrote to console her: a time will come, he wrote, which she will not live to see, when Jews will erect a monument to her in Israel as they were just then doing for Spinoza.9 This has not yet happened. But we could be getting there.
NOTES
1. Lewis M. Dabney, editor, and Edmund Wilson, The Sixties (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1993), pp. 560, 562. Also see Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996) and “Arendt in Zion,” a paper delivered at an international colloquium on Arendt at Potsdam by Idith Zertal of Tel Aviv University.
2. Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, 1926–1969, edited by Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, translated by Robert and Rita Kim-ber (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992); Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends, edited by Carol Brightman (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995); Hannah Arendt and Kurt Blumenfeld, “in keinem Besitz verwurzelt”: Die Korrespondenz, edited by Ingeborg Nordman and Iris Philling (Nordlingen: Rotbuch, 1995); Hannah Arendt and Hermann Broch, Briefwechsel 1946 bis 1951 (Frankfurt: Jdischer Verlag, 1996); Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, Briefe 1936–1968, edited by Lotte Kohler (Munich: Piper, 1996); and Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters: 1925–1975, edited by Ursula Ludz (New York: Harcourt, 2003).
3. See also the standard biography, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
4. The entry “Arendt, Hannah (1906-)” falsely states that in Eichmann in Jerusalem she had claimed inter alia that “the victims were partly responsible for the slaughter by their failure to resist.” Nowhere in the book does she make this claim.
5. A good, but by no means exhaustive, selection can be found in Ron H. Feldman, editor, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York: Grove Press, 1978), essays written by Arendt between 1942 and 1966. It also includes some of her letters to editors after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem as well as her famous exchange of letters on the book with Gershom Scholem.
6. “Zionism Reconsidered,” Menorah Journal, vol. 23, no. 2 (October–December, 1945), p.172.
7. Mary McCarthy would soon take her to task, and not for the first time vainly, for her use of the word Gedankenlosigkeit, which in English didn't mean what it means in German. In English “thoughtlessness” means forgetfulness or neglect. “Inability to think,” McCarthy suggested, would have been better.
8. The New York Review, April 6, 1995.
9. Jaspers to Arendt, October 25, 1963.
Note to the Reader
This is a revised and enlarged edition of the book which first appeared in May, 1963. I covered the Eichmann trial at Jerusalem in 1961 for The New Yorker, where this account, slightly abbreviated, was originally published in February and March, 1963. The book was written in the summer and fall of 1962, and finished in November of that year during my stay as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University.
The revisions for this edition concern about a dozen technical errors, none of which has any bearing on the analysis or argument of the original text. The factual record of the period in question has not yet been established in all its details, and there are certain matters on which an informed guess will probably never be superseded by completely reliable information. Thus the total number of Jewish victims of the Final Solution is a guess—between four and a half and six million—that has never been verified, and the same is true of the totals for each of the countries concerned. Some new material, especially on Holland, came to light after the publication of this book, but none of it was important for the event as a whole.
Most of the additions are also of a technical nature, clarifying a particular point, introducing new facts, or, in some instances, quotations from different sources. These new sources have been added to the Bibliography and are discussed in the new Postscript, which deals with the controversy that followed the original publication. Apart from the Postscript, the only non-technical addition concerns the German anti-Hitler conspiracy of July 20, 1944, which I had mentioned only incidentally in the original version. The character of the book as a whole is completely unaltered.
Thanks are due to Richard and Clara Winston for their help in preparing the text of the Postscript for this edition.
HANNAH ARENDT
June, 1964
O Germany—
Hearing the speeches that ring from your house, one laughs.
But whoever sees you, reaches for his knife. —Bertolt Brecht
I: The House of Justice
“Beth Hamishpath”—the House of Justice: these words shouted by the court usher at the top of his voice make us jump to our feet as they announce the arrival of the three judges, who, bare-headed, in black robes, walk into the courtroom from a side entrance to take their seats on the highest tier of the raised platform. Their long table, soon to be covered with innumerable books and more than fifteen hundred documents, is flanked at each end by the court stenographers. Directly below the judges are the translators, whose services are needed for direct ex-changes between the defendant or his counsel and the court; otherwise, the German-speaking accused party, like almost everyone else in the audience, follows the Hebrew proceedings through the simultaneous radio transmission, which is excellent in French, bearable in English, and sheer comedy, frequently incomprehensible, in German. (In view of the scrupulous fairness of all technical arrangements for the trial, it is among the minor mysteries of the new State of Israel that, with its high percentage of German-born people, it was unable to find an adequate translator into the only language the accused and his counsel could understand. For the old prejudice against German Jews, once very pronounced in Israel, is no longer strong enough to account for it. Remains as explication the even older and still very powerful “Vitamin P,” as the Israelis call protection in government circles and the bureaucracy.) One tier below the translators, facing each other and hence with their profiles turned to the audience, we see the glass booth of the accused and the witness box. Finally, on the bottom tier, with their backs to the audience, are the prosecutor with his staff of four assistant attorneys, and the counsel for the defense, who during the first weeks is accompanied by an assistant.