The rising popularity and subsequent election of populist leaders worldwide have sparked a conversation both within the academic and the wider public world. These conversations involve the rise of authoritarian regimes, majoritarian ideology, jingoistic nationalism, and state repression. However, these can also be seen as symptoms of a deeper ‘moral collapse’, as Hannah Arendt puts it in her controversial work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. At this juncture, her work and hypothesis ‘banality of evil’ during the Nazi regime merit a revisit.

In 1961, Adolf Eichmann, a Schutzstaffel (SS, in common parlance) official, was tried in the District Court of Jerusalem for his role in executing and facilitating the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish question’. In charge of transportation and the logistics that enabled the mass deportations of Jews to ghettos and concentration camps, Eichmann stood accused of organising the holocaust. The first of its kind since the Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial received immense media coverage and international attention.

Hannah Arendt noted political philosopher and a German Jew herself, also covered The New Yorker’s trial in a five-part article series. She later expanded it into her most controversial work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It upturns the very conceptions of evil, guilt, and justice. She also critiques and questions the court proceedings and the prosecution’s argument – a choice which does not go down well, especially with those who lived through the holocaust. Here I will try to look at the Eichmann trial through the lens of Arendt’s work and her radical understanding of evil and her idea of justice.

On the fifteen counts Eichmann was accused of – all of them liable to the death penalty under the Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Act of 1950 – he pleaded ‘not guilty in the sense of the indictment’ to all. The defence lawyer argued that Eichmann felt guilty before God, not the law. He pleaded not guilty because, under the then existing Nazi legal system, he was simply a law-abiding citizen who had not done anything wrong, that what he was accused of were not crimes but “acts of state” (Arendt, 1963: chapter 2).

Coming to Eichmann, Arendt shows how utterly ‘normal’ he was – in his demeanour, family life, mental capacity and imagination. Far from the monster everyone expected, this was a man who was perfectly ordinary and commonplace, but somehow incapable of telling right from wrong. A bureaucrat, Eichmann was put in charge of voluntary Jewish emigration. Over the years, with the increasing radicalisation of Hitler’s policies, Eichmann’s job gradually evolved to ‘forced emigration’ – the expulsion of the Jews (Arendt 1963: chapter 3). However, organisationally, Eichmann’s position was not very high. His post acquired greater importance with each passing day of the war for purely ideological reasons – its role in the Jewish question.

Did Eichmann know what was happening in the camps, and did he willfully and willingly send people to their deaths? Eichmann argued that he never belonged in the Higher Party circles, and he only knew enough to do a specific, limited job. Furthermore, there existed “language rules” to refer to the Final Solution used in all official and unofficial correspondence, which normalised the holocaust. Explicit words such as ‘extermination,’ or ‘killing’ were never used. The official code names for killing were ‘final solution,’ ‘evacuation,’ and ‘special treatment.’ Arendt argues:

For whatever other reasons, the language rules may have been devised. They proved enormous help in maintaining order and sanity in the various widely diversified services whose cooperation was essential in this matter. Moreover, the very term “language rule” (Sprachregelung) was itself a code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie (Arendt 1963: chapter 6)

Eichmann emphasised that he did his job because it was expected of him, and everyone he deemed admirable did the same. The most potent factor in his conscience’s soothing was the simple fact that he did not encounter anyone who was against the Final Solution. Thus, while he was initially disturbed by what he saw in the camps, his conscience irrevocably began to move in the other direction with ideology normalised by the party administration and German society at large.

The judges ultimately convicted Eichmann on all fifteen counts of the indictment, and he was sentenced to death. While Arendt does agree with the final judgement, she questions the way the judgement was reached. She argues that by solely framing the crime of the holocaust in the narrative of the historical discrimination of the Jewish people, the fact that the scale and the horror of the holocaust was a crime against humanity itself (rather than only the Jewish people) gets overlooked.

Arendt also brings out the fundamental complication in the entire proceeding – the helplessness and the judges’ inability to understand the criminal they had to judge. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him. Eichmann and his ilk were not monsters – they were neither sadistic nor perverted, but rather they were utterly normal. And this very normality was terrifying as it implied a new type of criminal, who commits their crimes under circumstances that make it impossible for them to know or feel that they are doing something wrong.

This ‘banality of evil’ presented a significant moral and legal challenge. This was because of the primacy accorded in all modern legal systems to the intent to do wrong while considering an action to be criminal per se. In the absence of this intent and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, the crime commission comes into question. While concluding, Arendt attempts to provide an alternative reasoning to reach the death sentence, where she lists out and accedes all arguments that may be used to acquit Eichmann’s guilt – retroactive law, the show trial, the ‘collective guilt’ of the Germans, and even the fact that it may have been sheer misfortune that he was a willing instrument in of mass murder. However, she accuses Eichmann directly in the end arguing,

…here still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder…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. (Arendt 1963: epilogue)

With this final line, she concludes her account of the trial. Subsequently, she came under immense fire for this work. The very term ‘banality of evil’ was seen to be light-hearted and its underlying philosophy shallow. Arendt was faulted for lack of historical nuance and assuming her observations and experiences as complete and entirely accurate in judging the larger picture (Benhabib 1996). But Arendt remains one of the first to encourage facing all the naked horrors and facts of the Nazi regime and the holocaust, forcing the confrontation of the Germans’ ‘collective guilt’ and the crimes committed by ‘ordinary people.’ Simultaneously, she also refuses to paint all Germans with the same brush, and Eichmann is also peppered with instances of Germans belonging to an ‘other Europe’ and actively spoke up and stood for the Jews. Rather than placing the burden of crime on a single individual, she blames the systemic erosion of an entire people’s morality.

In the last pages of her earlier work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt wrote of the holocaust and the concentration camps as the appearance of “radical evil” on earth. She renounces this claim after the Eichmann trial and develops the theory of its banality instead. Thus, Eichmann is riddled with complex contradictions of moral philosophy and action that Arendt herself grappled with and could not resolve entirely (Benhabib 1996).

It is a book which merits a rereading and reflection. None of Arendt’s arguments, at first glance, are palatable. She takes the idea of evil from the sinful, radical, ‘Other’, and brings it into the realm of humanity – something everyone is susceptible to and capable of. Following Arendt, the capacity to be and do evil is ultimately dependent on one’s empathy (or imagination as Arendt calls it), or the lack thereof. In this understanding, evil is shallow, as love and goodness cannot be. Doing the right thing necessitates an active and robust exercise of critical and empathic reflection.

However, while Arendt’s underlying principle of the ‘banality of evil’ stands, she seems to fall prey to the same fallacy of which she accuses the trial’s general proceedings – she had made up her mind that Eichmann deserved to die before the trial began. Despite the apparent discrepancy of her theorisation and observations with the final judgement, she scrambles to justify Eichmann’s death sentence. It can be argued, and scholars have, that Arendt’s unwillingness to let go of either one of the above claims is due to the personal nature of this project for her. As a German-Jew who lived through the horrors of the holocaust, Arendt struggled to be ‘objective’ and distance herself from her theorisation. Hence, one must take Eichmann in Jerusalem and the arguments within the context of Arendt’s background to identity, philosophy and politics. For one, I believe such context only makes the work richer and for a more nuanced understanding of the same.

References:

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1963.

Benhabib, Seyla. “Identity, Perspective and Narrative in Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem”.” History and Memory 8, no. 2 (1996): 35-59.

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Sharayu Shejale is pursuing an integrated MA in Development Studies from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.