In my view, the Germans as a people aren’t especially brutal. In fact, I do not believe in such national characteristics… Still, the story I told just now, Jünger’s story, is specifically German. I mean this inability, as Kant says, if I can now really quote his own words, “to think in the place of every other person”—yes, the inability… This kind of stupidity, it’s like talking to a brick wall. You never get any reaction, because these people never pay any attention to you. That is German. The second thing that strikes me as specifically German is this frankly crazy way that obedience is idealized. We obey in this sense when we’re children, when it is necessary. Obedience is a very important matter then. But this should come to an end at the age of fourteen, or at the latest fifteen.
FEST: Don’t you think that behind the references to “oaths,” “orders,” “obedience” there’s more than a mere excuse? Eichmann was forever referring to these words. He explained that he’d been brought up to be obedient from an early age; he asked, “What advantage would I have derived from disobedience? In what respect would it have been of any use to me?” And then he stated that when, in May 1945, no more orders were reaching him, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that the world was coming to an end.
ARENDT: A life without a leader![b]
FEST: The problem of obedience runs like a leitmotif through his whole life—you can read it in the trial records, for instance, it’s forever cropping up. It’s really like the leitmotif of a completely sham existence.
ARENDT: Yes, this sham existence can of course be seen everywhere. But, you know, he wasn’t the only person to refer to all that, was he? To “orders,” “oaths,” “God,” “the duty to obey,” and “obedience is a virtue.” Also, Eichmann talked about “slavish obedience.” In Jerusalem he got into a terrible muddle and suddenly said it was just a question of obeying slavishly, there was nothing good about it at all, and so on. Right? So it’s forever whirling round and round in people’s minds. No, the reference to “oaths,” and the idea that responsibility has been taken from you, and so on—you don’t find this just with Eichmann, I’ve also found it in the records of the Nuremberg Trials—there’s something outrageously stupid about this too. You see, Eichmann produced these attacks of rage—as did the others—and said, “But they promised us that we wouldn’t be held responsible. And now we’re left holding the bag, aren’t we? And what about the big fish? They’ve evaded responsibility, of course—as usual.” Now you know how they evaded responsibility: either they took their own lives, or they were hanged. Not to remember this when you say something of the kind is grotesque. The whole thing is simply comical! Yes, in fact, they… they’re no longer among the living! When you’re unable to remember that all this is only relevant so long as people are still alive—well, in that case there’s no helping you.
FEST: But to what extent is there a deeper problem lurking here? To what extent can people living in totalitarian circumstances still be held responsible? This doesn’t apply just to the Eichmann type, it applies in the same way to the Judenräte on the other side.
ARENDT: Just a moment before I answer that question. Look, it’s a really amazing phenomenon: none of these people expressed any remorse. Yes, Frank[c] did, obviously; perhaps Heydrich[d] on his deathbed—so they say; Ley[e]…
FEST: Yes, in Frank’s case I’d say it was a purely emotional remorse. He then retracted it straightaway in his concluding speech to the court.
ARENDT: Yes!
FEST: It was a very ambiguous feeling.
ARENDT: So I can say, “No one expressed remorse.”
FEST: Basically, at any rate, it can’t be definitely proved in a single case.
ARENDT: And, as is well known, Eichmann said, “Remorse is for little children.” No one expressed remorse. On the other hand, we should imagine that when nobody expresses remorse, there ought to be at least one person who stands up for his actions and says, “Yes, actually, we did do it, for this and that reason, I still think the same way today. We lost. Whether we won or lost doesn’t affect the cause itself.” In actual fact, the case collapsed like a wet dishrag. And nobody did stand up. Nobody put forward any defense. And this seems quite crucial for the phenomenon you touched on just now—obedience. Don’t you think? In other words: they just wanted to go along. They’re ready to go along with everything. When someone says to them, “You’re only one of us if you commit murder with us”—fine. When they’re told, “You’re only one of us if you never commit murder”—that’s fine too. Right? That’s the way I see it.
FEST: That is so true—indeed, Eichmann stated, when he was imprisoned by the Americans, that he’d been glad to submit to somebody else’s leadership again. And the peculiar way he was ready to tell the court or rather the interrogation, the preliminary interrogation, everything he knew, is probably to be interpreted in the same way as his readiness to give absolute obedience to any current authority, right to the limit of what was possible—his readiness to submit to any authority.
ARENDT: Incredible. He felt wonderfully happy in Jerusalem. There’s no question about it, is there? The superior was Landau,[f] everyone could see that, and then came various other ranks down to Herr Captain Less,[g] whom he used—as Herr Mulisch rightly said[h]—as a father confessor. He said, “Captain, I’ll willingly say everything.” Of course, he wanted to cut a fine figure too. At any rate, tell his life story. Anyway, the question of responsibility—shall we get back to that?
FEST: Yes, please.
ARENDT: You see, when we put people on trial, we ascribe responsibility to them. And we have a right to do so, from the legal standpoint… We have the right, since the alternative was not martyrdom. There was an alternative, on both sides: you didn’t have to go along, you could make up your own mind. “Thanks anyway, but… I’m not going along. I’m not risking my life, I’m trying to get away, I’m trying to see if I can slip off.” Isn’t that right? “But I’m not going along with anyone. And if I should be forced to go along, then I’ll take my own life.” This possibility existed. It meant not saying “we,” but “I”—judging for oneself. And judging for oneself is what people did do, everywhere, at every level of the populace: religious people and nonreligious people, old and young, educated and uneducated, nobles and bourgeois and very many workers, an amazing number of workers, especially in Berlin, where I was able to watch it happening.
c
Hans Frank, the chief jurist of Nazi Germany and governor general of the “General Government” territory, which encompassed much of central and southern Poland as well as western Ukraine, during the war. He was tried at Nuremberg for war crimes and crimes against humanity, found guilty, and executed in 1946.
d
Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking Nazi official and one of the principal architects of the Final Solution. He was attacked in Prague on May 27, 1942, by a team of Czech and Slovak soldiers, sent by the Czechoslovak government in exile, and died from his injuries a week later.
e
Robert Ley, Nazi politician and head of the German Labor Front from 1933 to 1945. He committed suicide in 1945, while awaiting trial for war crimes in Nuremberg.
f
Moshe Landau, the presiding judge in the Eichmann trial, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany.
g
Captain Avner W. Less, a young Israeli police official who interrogated Eichmann for 275 hours in the pretrial interrogations in 1961.
h
Arendt is referring to Dutch journalist Harry Mulisch’s book on the Eichmann trial,