词条 | Eichmann in Jerusalem |
释义 |
| name = Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil | image = Eichmann in Jerusalem book cover.jpg | image_size = | caption = Cover of the first edition | author = Hannah Arendt | language = English | publisher = Viking Press | media_type = Print (Hardcover, Paperback) | pages = 312 | isbn = | release_date = 1963 }} Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by political theorist Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on Adolf Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker. OverviewArendt's subtitle famously introduced the phrase "the banality of evil," which also serves as the final words of the book. In part, at least, the phrase refers to Eichmann's deportment at the trial as the man displayed neither guilt for his actions nor hatred for those trying him, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply "doing his job" ("He did his duty...; he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law." p. 135). EichmannArendt takes Eichmann's court testimony and the historical evidence available, and she makes several observations about Eichmann:
I sensed I would have to live a leaderless and difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me, no pertinent ordinances would be there to consult—in brief, a life never known before lay ahead of me.{{sfn|Arendt|1963}}
Arendt suggests that this most strikingly discredits the idea that the Nazi criminals were manifestly psychopathic and different from "normal" people. From this document, many concluded that situations such as the Holocaust can make even the most ordinary of people commit horrendous crimes with the proper incentives, but Arendt adamantly disagreed with this interpretation, as Eichmann was voluntarily following the Führerprinzip. Arendt insists that moral choice remains even under totalitarianism, and that this choice has political consequences even when the chooser is politically powerless: {{quote |[U]nder conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.}}Arendt mentions, as a case in point, Denmark: {{quote |One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence.It was not just that the people of Denmark refused to assist in implementing the Final Solution, as the peoples of so many other conquered nations had been persuaded to do (or had been eager to do) — but also, that when the Reich cracked down and decided to do the job itself it found that its own personnel in Denmark had been infected by this and were unable to overcome their human aversion with the appropriate ruthlessness, as their peers in more cooperative areas had.}} On Eichmann's personality, Arendt concludes: {{quote |Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a "monster," but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise [his trial], and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported (p. 55).}}Arendt ended the book by writing: {{quote|And just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.}}Legality of the trialBeyond her discussion of Eichmann himself, Arendt discusses several additional aspects of the trial, its context, and the Holocaust.
The banality of evilArendt's book introduced the expression and concept the banality of evil.[1] Her thesis is that Eichmann was not a fanatic or sociopath, but an extremely average person who relied on cliché defenses rather than thinking for himself and was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology. Banality, in this sense, is not that Eichmann's actions were ordinary, or that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of stupidity which was wholly unexceptional.[2] In his 2010 history of the Second World War, Moral Combat, British historian Michael Burleigh calls the expression a "cliché" and gives many documented examples of gratuitous acts of cruelty by those involved in the Holocaust, including Eichmann.[3] Arendt certainly did not disagree about the fact of gratuitous cruelty, but, she claims, "banality of evil" is unrelated to this question. Similarly, the first attempted rebuttal of Arendt's thesis relied on a misreading of this phrase, claiming Arendt meant that there was nothing exceptional about the Holocaust.[4][5] ReceptionArendt sparked controversy with Eichmann in Jerusalem upon its publishing and the years since.[6][7] Arendt has long been accused of "blaming the victim" in the book.[8] She responded to the initial criticism in a postscript to the book: {{quote|The controversy began by calling attention to the conduct of the Jewish people during the years of the Final Solution, thus following up the question, first raised by the Israeli prosecutor, of whether the Jews could or should have defended themselves. I had dismissed that question as silly and cruel, since it testified to a fatal ignorance of the conditions at the time. It has now been discussed to exhaustion, and the most amazing conclusions have been drawn. The well-known historico-sociological construct of "ghetto mentality"... has been repeatedly dragged in to explain behavior which was not at all confined to the Jewish people and which therefore cannot be explained by specifically Jewish factors ... This was the unexpected conclusion certain reviewers chose to draw from the "image" of a book, created by certain interest groups, in which I allegedly had claimed that the Jews had murdered themselves.{{sfn|Arendt|2006a|loc=pp. 283–284}}}}Stanley Milgram maintains that "Arendt became the object of considerable scorn, even calumny" because she highlighted Eichmann's "banality" and "normalcy", and accepted Eichmann's claim that he did not have evil intents or motives to commit such horrors; nor did he have a thought to the immorality and evil of his actions, or indeed, display, as the prosecution depicted, that he was a sadistic "monster".[9] (ch.1). Jacob Robinson published And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight, the first full-length rebuttal of her book.[4] Robinson presented himself as an expert in international law, not saying that he was an assistant to the prosecutor in the case.[5] In his 2006 book, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes and Trial of a "Desk Murderer", Holocaust researcher David Cesarani questioned Arendt's portrait of Eichmann on several grounds. According to his findings, Arendt attended only part of the trial, witnessing Eichmann's testimony for "at most four days" and basing her writings mostly on recordings and the trial transcript. Cesarani feels that this may have skewed her opinion of him, since it was in the parts of the trial that she missed that the more forceful aspects of his character appeared.{{sfn | Cesarani | 2006 | loc=pp. 15, 346}} Cesarani also presents evidence{{Citation needed|date=November 2013}} suggesting that Eichmann was in fact highly anti-Semitic and that these feelings were important motivators of his actions. Thus, he alleges that Arendt's claims that his motives were "banal" and non-ideological and that he had abdicated his autonomy of choice by obeying Hitler's orders without question may stand on weak foundations.{{sfn | Cesarani | 2006 | loc=p. 346}} This is a recurrent[10] criticism of Arendt, though nowhere in her work does Arendt deny that Eichmann was an anti-Semite, and she also did not claim that Eichmann was "simply" following orders, but rather had internalized the clichés of the Nazi regime.[10] Cesarani suggests that Arendt's own prejudices influenced the opinions she expressed during the trial. He argues that like many Jews of German origin, she held Ostjuden (Jews from Eastern Europe) in great disdain. This, according to Cesarani, led her to attack the conduct and efficacy of the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, who was of Galician-Jewish origin. In a letter to the noted German philosopher Karl Jaspers she stated that Hausner was "a typical Galician Jew... constantly making mistakes. Probably one of those people who doesn't know any language."{{sfn | Cesarani | 2006 | loc=p. 345}} Cesarani claims that some of her opinions of Jews of Middle Eastern origin verged on racism as she described the Israeli crowds in her letter to Karl Jaspers: "My first impression: On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below them, the prosecuting attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would obey any order. And outside the doors, the Oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country. In addition, and very visible in Jerusalem, the peies (sidelocks) and caftan Jews, who make life impossible for all reasonable people here."[11] Cesarani's book was itself criticized. In a review that appeared in the New York Times Review of Books, Barry Gewen argued that Cesarani's hostility stemmed from his book standing "in the shadow of one of the great books of the last half-century", and that Cesarani's suggestion that both Arendt and Eichmann had much in common in their backgrounds making it easier for her to look down on the proceedings, "reveals a writer in control neither of his material nor of himself."[12] Eichmann in Jerusalem, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, is deeply indebted to Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, so much so that Hilberg himself spoke of plagiarism.[13][14][15] The very points which Arendt borrows from Hilberg, were borrowed by Hilberg himself from H.G. Adler. {{Citation needed|date=January 2019}} Arendt also received criticism in the form of responses to her article, also published in the New Yorker. One instance of this came mere weeks after the publication of her articles in the form of an article entitled "Man With an Unspotted Conscience".[16] This work was written by witness for the defense, Michael A. Musmanno. He argued that Arendt fell prey to her own preconceived notions that rendered her work ahistorical. He also directly criticized her for ignoring the facts offered at the trial in stating that "the disparity between what Miss Arendt states, and what the ascertained facts are, occurs with such a disturbing frequency in her book that it can hardly be accepted as an authoritative historical work.".[16] He further condemned Arendt and her work for her prejudices against Hauser and Ben-Gurion depicted in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Musmanno argued that Arendt revealed "so frequently her own prejudices" that it could not stand as an accurate work.[16] Arendt relied heavily on the book by H.G. Adler Theresienstadt 1941-1945. The Face of a Coerced Community (Cambridge University Press. 2017), which she had read in manuscript. Adler took her to task on her view of Eichmann in his keynote essay What does Hannah Arendt know about Eichmann and the Final Solution (Allgemeine Zeitung der Juden in Deutschland. 20 November 1960). In more recent years, Arendt has received further criticism from authors Bettina Stangneth and Deborah Lipstadt. Stangneth argues in her work, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, that Eichmann was, in fact, an insidious antisemite.{{sfn|Stangneth|2014}} She utilized the Sassen Papers and accounts of Eichmann while in Argentina to prove that he was proud of his position as a powerful Nazi and the murders that this allowed him to commit. While she acknowledges that the Sassen Papers were not disclosed in the lifetime of Arendt, she argues that the evidence was there at the trial to prove that Eichmann was an antisemitic murderer and that Arendt simply ignored this.{{sfn|Stangneth|2014}} Deborah Lipstadt contends in her work, The Eichmann Trial, that Arendt was distracted by her own views of totalitarianism to objectively judge Eichmann.[14] She refers to Arendt's own work on totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, as a basis for Arendt's seeking to validate her own work by using Eichmann as an example.[14] Lipstadt further contends that Arendt "wanted the trial to explicate how these societies succeeded in getting others to do their atrocious biddings" and so framed her analysis in a way which would agree with this pursuit.[14] See also{{Portal|Books}}
References1. ^{{cite news |title=Hannah Arendt, Political Scientist, Dead |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1975/12/06/archives/hannah-arendt-political-scientist-dead.html |quote=Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher who escaped Hitler's Germany and later scrutinized its morality in "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and other books, died Thursday night in her apartment at 370 Riverside Drive. |work=The New York Times |date=December 6, 1975 |accessdate=2011-03-12 | first=David | last=Bird}} 2. ^{{cite news |title=Eichmann was Outrageously Stupid|url=https://www.amazon.com/Hannah-Arendt-Interview-Other-Conversations/dp/1612193110/ref=sr_1_1?#reader_B00DACWBOS|work=Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations |date=November 9, 1964 |accessdate=2014-04-21 }} 3. ^Burleigh, Michael, Moral Combat, Harper Press, 2010, pages 415–417. 4. ^1 {{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books/about/And_the_crooked_shall_be_made_straight.html?id=UaZBAAAAIAAJ |title=And the crooked shall be made straight |first=Jacob |last=Robinson |publisher=Macmillan |year=1965 |accessdate=26 June 2014}} 5. ^1 {{cite journal|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1966/jan/20/the-formidable-dr-robinson-a-reply/ |title="The Formidable Dr. Robinson": A Reply by Hannah Arendt |first=Hannah |last=Arendt |journal=The New York Review of Books |date=January 20, 1966 |volume=5 |number=12 |accessdate=26 June 2014}} 6. ^"Hannah Arendt," 300 women who changed the world, Encyclopædia Britannica Online Profiles. 7. ^"The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt And Her Critics", Democratiya Magazine, Vol 9 8. ^{{cite web | url=http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2009/10/the_evil_of_banality.single.html | title=The Evil of Banality | publisher=Slate | date=October 30, 2009 | accessdate=March 11, 2014 | author=Rosenbaum, Ron}} 9. ^{{Cite book|title = Obedience to Authority.|last = Milgram|first = Stanley|publisher = Harper|year = 1974|isbn = |location = New York|pages = Chpt. 1}} 10. ^1 {{cite web |url= http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/misreading-hannah-arendts-eichmann-in-jerusalem/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 |title=Misreading 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' |first=Roger |last=Berkowitz |work=The New York Times |date=July 7, 2013 |accessdate=June 26, 2014}} 11. ^Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969, p = 435, Letter 285. 12. ^{{cite news |url= https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/books/review/14gewen.html |title= The Everyman of Genocide |last= Gewen |first= Barry |date= 14 May 2006 |newspaper= The New York Times |accessdate= 27 April 2012 }} 13. ^Nathaniel Popper, 'A Conscious Pariah,' The Nation 19 September 2010:' "She acknowledges her debt," Trevor-Roper wrote, "but the full extent of that debt can be appreciated only by those who have read both. Again and again the arguments, the very phrases, are unconsciously repeated." Trevor-Roper's review was largely forgotten, as was his conclusion that "indeed, behind the whole of Miss Arendt's book stands the overshadowing bulk of Mr. Hilberg's.".' 14. ^1 2 3 Deborah E. Lipstadt, [https://books.google.com/books?id=cjjHQgjMiXQC&pg=PA219&lpg=PA219 The Eichmann Trial,] 2011 p.219, n.45. 15. ^Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory, Ivan R. Dee 1996 pp.147-157. 16. ^1 2 Musmanno, Michael. “Man With an Unspotted Conscience” New York: New Yorker, 1963. Bibliography{{refbegin|30em}}
External links
8 : 1963 books|Books by Hannah Arendt|Political books|History books about the Holocaust|Works originally published in The New Yorker|Cultural depictions of Adolf Eichmann|Holocaust trials|Viking Press books |
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