Arendt’s Eichmann revisited: comedy, conscience and banality
The genocidal wars in the Sudan and in Burma continue to be a crucial humanitarian concern. So it’s worth taking a closer look at Hannah Arendt’s book on one man’s role in the Holocaust, paradoxically titled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). It was one of the most controversial books of the twentieth century and in the last fifty years has unleashed an intellectual firestorm of a thousand published articles.
Arendt argued that atrocious crimes could be committed not only by villains like Richard III and Iago, but also by ambitious, mindless and obedient bureaucrats. She made Adolf Eichmann look better, not worse, than he actually was: pitiful, not horrific. Her old friend, the distinguished Israeli scholar Gershon Shalom, called her book “flippant,” “heartless,” “sneering and malicious,” and deeply flawed by a “demagogic will-to-overstatement.” Though Arendt had always been respected and admired in America as an Old World sage, she was personally attacked and publicly condemned as “Hannah Eichmann,” a “pathological, self-hating, anti-Semitic Jew.”
Commentators, focusing on the role of the Jewish Councils who helped the Nazis, have often ignored the radically defective aspects of Arendt’s book: her repetitive portrayal of Eichmann as a comic character and as a man without a conscience, and her flawed concept of the banality of evil. The initial attacks on Arendt’s book by New York intellectuals, especially by the Jewish critic Lionel Abel, and its defense by Arendt’s Gentile friend, the novelist Mary McCarthy, set the stage for the torrential outpour that followed. There are intriguing but hidden reasons for Arendt’s weak and even perverse conclusions.
Arendt’s book was originally serialized in five New Yorker articles that appeared from February 16 to March 16, 1963, for which she received the enormous fee of $20,000 plus expenses. Despite the scrutiny of the magazine and book editors, her style is leaden and verbose. She includes many serpentine Germanic sentences, two-page-long paragraphs and awkward phrases: “Be that as it may, as I have said earlier, because of the…” Some serious errors also survive from the magazine to the book. She states, “only in Israel could a Jew be safe,” though history opposes her argument. Israel fought four wars from 1948 to 1967 that threatened its very existence and has resisted dangerous Palestinian attacks since then. She also claims that German soldiers “carried out orders that were clearly criminal in nature,” though they were actually legal during the Nazi regime.
Arendt, like Eichmann, was born in Wilhelmine Germany in 1906, but he was not the nonentity portrayed by Arendt. He had great responsibilities, did his difficult job all too well and was able to disconnect his administrative duties from their genocidal results. Though he collected and transported Jews to the extermination camps, he did not actually kill them himself. He began as a humble traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company in prewar Austria and, during his successful military career, was promoted from private soldier to lieutenant-colonel without any combat experience.
Nevertheless, Arendt tries to make Eichmann more weirdly interesting by turning the villain into a comical character. His initial examination by the Israeli police is “so funny” because he seeks sympathy for his hard-luck story. She seems to expect a poetic and tragic speech on the gallows and remarks on the “grotesque silliness” of his last words before he is hanged. She falsely claims that everybody in the courtroom “could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.” She insists that “the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny, [though] some of the comedy cannot be conveyed in English,” (my italics). But his self-pity, poor language and intellectual limitations are not at all comic, and her German gallows humor (Galgenhumor) is very different from the American sense of what is funny. She does not describe Eichmann as the mass murderer, but as the pitiful defendant in the glass booth in Jerusalem.
McCarthy notes that the troublesome question of “Eichmann’s conscience is the center of her book,” and Arendt repeatedly wonders if he ever had a conscience (Gewissen), an inner moral awareness. She concedes that he might once have had a conscience (but how does she know this?), which was extinguished. She variously guesses that Eichmann’s conscience got lost in Germany, or that the Nazis solved his moral problem by implementing the Final Solution, commending his action and setting his conscience at rest.
Eichmann testified that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not followed orders, a failure that would have ended all possibility of promotion and, if he’d been dispatched to the Russian front, might also have ended his life. Arendt asks, “had the killing of Jews gone against his conscience?” and then clearly answers her own question by quoting Eichmann’s speech to his men during the last days of the war: “I will jump into my grave laughing because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.”
This perverse concept of conscience is indeed real morbid gallows humor. But Arendt’s emphasis on conscience is pointless. The subjective and unprovable question of whether or not Eichmann had a conscience is based on speculation, not fact, and, as she admits, is not “legally relevant.” Arendt should have paid attention to Hitler’s notorious assertion that the moral concept based on the Old Testament did not exist in Nazi Germany: “Conscience is a Jewish invention.”
Arendt’s most serious tactical and intellectual error was putting “The Banality of Evil” in her subtitle and printing it in italics as the last words in her main text. There was a fatal contradiction between her ostensibly factual “Report” and her subjective interpretation of banality. Minor vices like competitiveness, jealousy and malice are obvious, boring and banal. Mass murder is not. Arendt could more profitably have written “A Report on the Nature of Evil” to describe what she herself calls Eichmann’s “certain knowledge that he was sending his victims to death,” his “fanatical zeal and unquenchable blood thirst.”
Instead of judging Eichmann as the Israeli court did, Arendt states, against all her own evidence, that “except for… his personal advancement, he had no motives at all” and “never realized what he was doing” (her italics). She concludes that “one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann.” But this conclusion does not follow emotionally or logically from the argument in her book. By making Eichmann comic and banal, and bringing in the irrelevant theme of conscience, she outraged her readers by reducing the guilt of the Nazis and by increasing the responsibility of the Jews, diminishing the horror of the Holocaust and suffering of the victims. Arendt meant to be provocative, but overreached herself and provoked an intellectual bloodbath. It’s quite surprising that none of her friends or editors ever warned her of the dire consequences of her argument.
The first devastating blow, from which Arendt never recovered, was struck by a distinguished expert. Michael Musmanno was a retired navy rear admiral, influential judge at the Nuremberg trials, justice on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and witness for the prosecution at Eichmann’s trial. In the New York Times Book Review (May 19, 1963) he stated that Arendt’s book contains so many factual errors that “it can hardly be accepted as an authoritative historical document.” He accused Arendt of excessive sympathy for Eichmann and of coldness toward “the screams of horror-stricken women and terrorized children.” His final judgment declared that Arendt was motivated by “purely private prejudice” and that her “attacks on the state of Israel, its law and institutions, [were] wholly unrelated to the Eichmann case.”
Another unexpected and bitter blow came from Lionel Abel’s attack in the Partisan Review (Spring 1963), a magazine in which Arendt had been a frequent contributor and member of the inner circle. Abel’s argument, like Arendt’s, was beset by serious errors. He wrote that in “August of 1944 the war was almost over,” though it was not over until May 1945, nine months later. He overstates his case by claiming that Eichmann “was in charge of execution,” though he was actually in charge of deporting the Jews. Abel doesn’t distinguish between the eastern war zone in the battle against Russia, where there was no civilian government or organised population, and the Nazi-occupied territories in western Europe where they controlled the puppet states and used the Jewish Councils to do their work.
Arendt states the painful facts about the participation of the Councils; Abel explains their mitigating motives. He correctly states that Arendt “maximizes the role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of European Jewry,” that they “found rational grounds for collaborating” and thought they would save some Jews as well as themselves — though most Jews in Nazi territories, including members of the Councils, were finally killed. Abel argues that the Councils could not “have chosen between good and evil,” that “we cannot today criticize the Jewish leaders for [failing] to help the Jews survive.”
But they could have refused to cooperate with the Nazis in rounding up the Jews and Arendt does criticize their behavior. If the Jewish Councils had not cooperated, it would have been more difficult for the Nazis to kill the Jews. They would have needed more military manpower and taken longer to identify, round up, rob, terrify and deport them. If the Councils had not cooperated, more Jews could have escaped during this delay, but for most victims the disastrous results would have been the same.
Abel also states that “instead of depicting Eichmann as an ideological [Nazi], Miss Arendt insists on describing the man as a comical, mediocre, and dutiful servant of Hitler.” He convincingly argues that Eichmann was a “moral monster,” not an insignificant and commonplace official, and proves his point by quoting Eichmann’s horrific statement that he laughed and was satisfied after killing five million Jews.
Abel himself and the Jewish New York intellectuals would have been Nazi victims if their families had not emigrated to America, and these survivors felt guilty and morally obliged to defend the real victims. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League even instructed rabbis to preach against Arendt after the New Year’s Service. Irving Howe, a leading intellectual, asserted that Arendt “breathed hostility toward established institutions, especially Zionist ones,” and he condemned “the surging contempt with which she treated almost everyone and everything connected with the trial, the supreme assurance of the intellectual looking down upon those coarse Israelis.” Howe joined his journal Dissent to Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary in opposing Arendt and formed the lethal union of Dissentary. When Arendt met her old friend Howe at a party, she refused to shake hands, cut him dead and badly wounded his feelings.
The most interesting condemnation came from Saul Bellow. In 1961 he described Arendt, his colleague on the prestigious University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, as “a very good friend of mine.” After the Eichmann imbroglio, he called her “that superior Krautess.” Bellow’s friend Delmore Schwartz satirised her as “that Weimar Republic flapper!” Twenty years later, on a furious letter of March 1982, Bellow wrote that Arendt was in thrall to theory, ignored simple facts, had stunted imaginative faculties, lacked human understanding, and was blind to Jewish suffering and death. In a brilliant passage in Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1969), Bellow’s hero and Holocaust survivor refers to Arendt and attributes her inflammatory phrase to the Nazis: “The idea of making the century’s great crime look dull is not banal. Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage.”
“What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring or trite?”
In his book And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (1965), the international lawyer Jacob Robinson exposed a multitude of Arendt’s factual errors and demolished her book. In her definitive study, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (1975), Lucy Dawidowicz agreed with Musmanno and Robinson. She drove another nail into Arendt’s coffin by declaring, “Arendt’s penchant for grand philosophic schemata flourishes on her disdain for… and total ignorance of the historical evidence.”
Robert Lowell, Arendt’s loyal and devoted friend, led the Gentile defenders just after the early articles had appeared in the New Yorker by praising her scholarship and accuracy: “I think your first two Eichmann pieces are an almost miraculous job of accumulation, narration and sifting of truth. To have collected so much and to have told it plainly would have been enough, but you have morally lived through it all and separated all the varied shadings of truth and lies.” Lowell’s fulsome praise made her expect a favorable reception, lowered her guard and eventually caused an even greater shock. Early in 1964 Lowell added, in a misleading letter to the editors of Partisan Review, that Arendt did not pity Eichmann and only sought veracity: “Her portrait of Eichmann, far from being lenient, is a masterpiece in rendering the almost unreadably repellent. I never felt she was condescending, or hard, or driven by a perverse theory, or by any motive except a heroic desire for the truth.”
Mary McCarthy, partly provoked by Norman Mailer’s simultaneous attack on her contentious novel The Group, closed ranks with Arendt and attacked Lionel Abel in the Partisan Review (Winter 1964). In December 1963 McCarthy had apologetically told Arendt that her diplomat husband James West “did not like [my essay]; he thought it was too long and too emotional. Probably he is right.” In encouraging letters to McCarthy, Arendt (twice invoking God) admitted her superior humane sympathy for the comical monster and portrayed herself as a truth teller, not a provocateur:
“Of course, there is a trace of pity for Eichmann, at least of outrage when I read Martin Buber’s statement that he feels ‘no common ground of humanity’ with these people — a theologian! The point of the whole business was that we were supposed to look upon a human being (not upon the ‘Eichmann in us,’ God forbid), and to look upon him as human did not mean: There but for the grace of God [go I]…”
“The hostility against me is a hostility against someone who tells the truth on a factual level, and not against someone who has ideas which are in conflict with those commonly held.”
The title of McCarthy’s essay “The Hue and Cry,” in the Partisan Review (Winter 1964), suggests that hostile critics have tried to pursue and capture Arendt as if she were a criminal. McCarthy notes that most attackers, except Michael Musmanno, were Jewish; most defenders, like Lowell, were Gentile. Dwight Macdonald and Karl Jaspers supported Arendt but were not energetic advocates. Though McCarthy was usually a fierce polemicist, her defense mostly repeated Arendt’s views and was surprisingly weak. She maintained that the Jewish leaders were dead and beyond being hurt by slander, though their defenders felt they had been hurt. She wrote that in a book of 260 pages, only eight pages were devoted to Jewish cooperation with Eichmann, though the inflammatory content, not the number of pages, was most important.
McCarthy merely accepted, rather than questioned Arendt’s unconvincing picture of Eichmann: “What is horrible in Eichmann is his ordinariness… The criminal seemed grotesquely small and insignificant… Eichmann was a fool.” McCarthy wrote that rich, well connected, “privileged Jews, entitled to special treatment, endowed with power over others, they in effect were ‘Gentiles.’” But these Jews were not comparable to the Gentiles. The few who managed to escape lost almost everything they owned and could not save all members of their families. She also claimed that in the German-Russian war zone, where “the Einsatzgruppen shot masses of victims on the spot, there was no transportation problem, no question of selection, and no need for Jewish organizations, even if they had existed.” But in that battleground the entire social structure had collapsed and there was nothing, a social void — very different from western Europe. On the Ostfront the Nazis could kill without restraint and even photograph their atrocities: their hangings and mass graves.
Eichmann’s motives, like his conscience, were perfectly clear: he wanted to perform his job efficiently and get promoted. Arendt’s motives were more opaque. The philosopher William Barrett incisively observed that “she could not quite get used to the idea that the worst persecutions in modern history had broken out in Germany… This pride in her origins as a German Jew — and indeed a very Germanic German Jew — led, understandably enough, to a certain arrogance… This sense of intellectual superiority got into the way of her insight.”
Arendt identified with Germany rather than with Israel. Her mitigation of German guilt also redeemed herself from guilty involvement with her teacher and lover, the anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger. As Rebecca West truly observed in A Train of Powder, her account of the Nuremburg trials, “It is unfair, not only to Germans, but to all the world, if the vileness of the Nazis be extenuated.”
