Ron Rosenbaum, a journalist who wrote a rather disorganized book about Hitler nearly 20 years ago, has a lot of scorn for Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem…but he also has a mistaken idea of its contents. Maybe if he’d read it more attentively he’d have less contempt for it.
I’d been asked to write an introduction to a fiftieth-anniversary edition of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a longtime bestseller first published in 1961, a book that had shaped my and subsequent generations’ picture of Hitler and the war for some time thereafter. I don’t think I would have reread it if I hadn’t been asked by its publishers to contribute an introduction, but I found myself impressed with Shirer’s reporter’s eye. For Hitler. For the still inexplicable power of the “spell.”
Shirer, who had been stationed in Berlin during Hitler’s rise, also had a take on Eichmann before he became Eichmann, the icon of evil, and of controversy over evil. Shirer’s book had been completed before Eichmann’s capture, when he was known to Shirer as Karl Eichmann — his rarely used first name. Shirer had his number in a way Hannah Arendt never would. He found the key damning document — the testimony of a fellow officer who quoted the Chief Operating Officer of the Final Solution toward the end of the war. Here was Eichmann not experiencing any regret or any of the misattributed “banality.” Instead, with a vengefully triumphant snarl (he knows who’s really won the war), Eichmann declared “he would leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.” O happy Eichmann.
This, of course, is not the Eichmann of Hannah Arendt (“the world’s worst court reporter,” as I’ve described her), who credulously bought into his “poor schlub,” pen pusher trial defense…
Cool story, except for one thing: Arendt includes that declaration of Eichmann’s as a central part of her analysis of him. Her analysis was nothing like “poor schlub, pen pusher” – that’s the hostile version of Arendt’s book, it’s not the book itself.
This, of course, is not the Eichmann of Hannah Arendt (“the world’s worst court reporter,” as I’ve described her), who credulously bought into his “poor schlub,” pen pusher trial defense — just following orders, moving things along deep within the bureaucracy, “nothing against the Jew” facade.
That misrepresents her analysis. She wasn’t defending him or minimizing him; she was pointing out that it doesn’t take a thrillingly evil genius to do what the Nazis did, because dim-witted conformist self-admiring bureaucrats will do just as well. The point wasn’t that Eichmann was innocent or morally neutral, it was that he wasn’t special.
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10 responses to “Read it again”
Okay, I’ve never read the book, but I also never once interpreted the phrase “banality of evil” to contain any sort of sympathy for Eichmann; it drips, not only with horror, but also contempt.
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I apologize for being this far off-topic, but I tried to find an item in the blog of a similar nature just recently, but the ‘big issues’ have been dominating lately (understandably), and really, this is at least in the theme of the ‘banality of evil’–it’s a team of coaches tormenting teenage girls, on the orders of their boss; it can’t get much more banal than that:
http://nypost.com/2017/08/24/cheerleading-squad-from-hell-busted-for-forcing-team-into-painful-splits/
In my opinion, the “banality of evil” is such an important concept, and so little understood. I think it scares people. It suggests that ordinary people can actually be evil in one setting, then go home and kiss the wife and kids, pet the dog, and barbecue the steak with the neighbors, then settle in for a half hour of Lucy and Desi. Something all too true.
I find a lot of people wanting evil people to look evil. They want them to be unloved, and unlovable. They want them to be monsters, so we can see them and avoid them…and, I suspect, so we can believe we could never be them. I was reading a book where a man got a chance to interview a ruthless corporate mogul, and when he discovered the guy had a wife and kids, and had their pictures on his desk, and that he had taken in an orphan boy and made him one of the family, he decided he was wrong about him – he wasn’t a ruthless corporate mogul. We assume that all men like that will be like Ebenezer Scrooge, living a lonely life in a lonely, cold room, and walking home alone at night to nothing but his own company.
Ron Rosenbaum might be doing that. He might want evil to look evil, to ooze evil out every pore, and not to be some ordinary guy you wouldn’t look twice at on a street but who puts human beings in an oven for a living.
We don’t want evil to look like us.
Freemage @ 1 – I then read an earlier piece he wrote for Slate pouring more contempt on her, and downright feverish contempt on the phrase “banality of evil” and people who use it. Tough. Sometimes it’s relevant, and I’m going to use it. Look at Trump – his evil is out of all proportion to his nature or character or intellect. It’s hard to imagine anyone more shallow, but he’s evil to. Sue me.
The splits story – yes I saw that yesterday. I considered posting about it but decided not to…not sure why.
iknklast – yes. It’s like the way most people who hear about the Milgram experiment are very sure they would never keep pushing the button while the “victim” screamed and begged them to stop. Most people are very sure and yet most people did.
Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men is another. At first the reservists balked at killing Jews…so then the officers came up with ways to make it less gruesome and hey presto, no more balking.
One day, i will have to write about my father. It’s not.. difficult as such. My father, as I knew him, was a good man. It’s just hard to explain outside of conversation. Maybe Twitter, for once, is the best medium…
Arnaud, well, now you’ve got me curious.
We’ll have to agree to disagree about Arendt. I read her in university (and later) but am no longer a fan. There’s too much that’s – um, what’s the kindest word I can use in this context? – distasteful about her writing. A kind of upper-class, intellectual German-Jewish disdain, if not outright contempt, for the “Ostjuden” (the poor, “shtetl” Jews of Eastern Europe). And then there’s her short affair with (but life-long public defence of) a man whom we now know was a notorious and unreformed Nazi, Martin Heidegger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger
As for Eichmann, recent coverage of his writings and recorded interviews in Argentina belie the idea that he was a mere cog in the wheel of genocide. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/books/review/eichmann-before-jerusalem-by-bettina-stangneth.html
Oh I don’t defend her infatuation with Heidegger. I think I blogged about it years ago when the letters were published.
Hmm. Reading the link. It seems to me yet another misreading of Eichmann in Jerusalem.
I’m not sure Arendt claimed he was “nonideological.” It was more that he wasn’t very good at it. He wanted to be a good Nazi but he was half-assed about it. And the boasting about his achievement is exactly the Eichmann she described – I think she talks about a surreal moment in court when he went into rhapsodies about his accomplishments in the way of genocide, without even realizing how that might play with the audience.
I was more mystified by Heidegger than repelled. “Continental philosophy” to me always smacked too much, at best, of woolly metaphysics (and I quickly progressed from logical-positivism to linguistic or common-sense philosophy) or, at worst, of post-modernism. So Heidegger, for me, was in the same bag as Lacan or De Man (btw another notorious Nazi sympathizer).
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/13/martin-heidegger-black-notebooks-reveal-nazi-ideology-antisemitism
Few people knew Heidegger as well as Arendt. And she defended him to the end. Of course, “Le cœur a ses raisons”, yet I can’t but see certain parallels between Arendt’s philosophy and Heidegger’s. I sometimes felt that her contempt for Eichmann (was there ever any real revulsion or abhorrence?) had less to do with what he did than her disdain for a mere oil-salesman-turned-civil servant. By contrast, I can see Julien Benda’s “Trahison des clercs” (i.e. intellectuals) applying to Heidegger… and, in a roundabout way, even Arendt.