Analysis of book "Eichman in Jeruselum" by Hannah Arendt

University Degree Historical and Philosophical studies

Eichmann in Jerusalem

The ‘banality of evil’ and the concept of ‘thoughtlessness’ are used by Arendt to think about the nature of Eichmanns actions and aims, the state of his conscience and responsibility for the actions of criminal regimes in general. That Eichmann should not be seen as a monster is important to Arendt in the sense that Eichmann stated himself in the court that he had always tried to abide by Kant’s categorical imperative (1964, pp. 135-137). She argues that Eichmann had essentially taken the wrong lesson from Kant: Eichmann had not recognized the golden rule and principle of reciprocity implicit in the categorical imperative, but had only understood the concept of one man’s actions coinciding with general law. He attempted to follow the spirit of the laws he carried out, thinking that the legislator himself would approve it. According to Eichmann, the legislator was Hitler and so he claimed this changed when he was charged with carrying out the final Solution, at this point Arendt says “he had ceased to live according to Kantian principles, that he had known it, and that he had consoled himself with the thoughts that he no longer was master of his own deeds, that he was unable to change anything (1964, pp. 136).

In his entire life, Eichmann was a joiner, in that he joined organizations in order to define himself, and had difficulties thinking for himself without doing so. He belonged to the YMCA and he then moved to Wander Vogel. It’s so amazing that he did all this when he was still a youth. he failed in his attempt to join the a branch of Freemasonry, at that point a family friend who was to become a future war criminal Ernst Kaltenbrunner, encouraged him to join the SS. At the end of World War II, Eichmann found himself depressed because it then dawned on him that he would have to live without being a member of something or other (1964, pp. 32-33). Eichmann’s inability to think for himself was exemplified by his consistent use of stock phrases and self-invented clichés. This officialese demonstrated his unrealistic worldview and crippling lack of communication skills.

Arendt confirmed several points where Eichmann actually claimed he was responsible for certain atrocities, even though he lacked the power and or expertise to take these actions. Moreover, Eichmann made these claims even though they hurt his defense, hence Arendt’s remark that “Bragging was the vice that was Eichmann’s undoing” (pp. 46). She also suggested that Eichmann may have preferred to be executed as a war criminal than live as nobody. During his imprisonment before his trial, the Israeli government sent not less than six psychologists to examine Eichmann. Not only did these doctors find no trace of mental illness, but they also found no evidence of abnormal personality whatsoever. One doctor remarked that his overall attitude towards other people, especially his family and friends, was highly desirable, while another remarked that the only unusual trait Eichmann displayed was being more normal in his habits and speech than the average person (1964, pp. 25-6). Eichmann, in his peripheral role at the Wan see Conference, witnessed the rank and file of the German civil service heartily endorse Reinhard Heydrich’s program for the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe. Upon seeing members of respectable society endorsing Hitler’s most reprehensible crime, and enthusiastically participating in the planning of the solution, he felt that his moral responsibility was relaxed, as if he was Pontius Pilate.

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Despite his claims, Eichmann was in fact a highly unintelligent person. As Arendt described him in the second chapter, he was unable to complete either high school or vocational training, and only found his first significant job; traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company through family connections. Arendt noted that, during both his SS career and Jerusalem trial, Eichmann tried to cover his lack of skills and education up, and even blushed when these facts came to light. Arendt suggested that this most discredits the idea that the Nazi criminals were manifestly psychopathic and different from common people. 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. She insisted that moral choice remains even under totalitarianism, and that this choice has political consequences even when the chooser is politically powerless. Arendt said that 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 (pp. 54).

Arendt argues that in modernity, men are exceptionally a political, viewing their role in the life of their nation and communities as mere cogs in a power structure for which they bear not even the slightest responsibility. Within this structure, the task of thought, defined by Arendt as the ability to see from the vantage point of the other, is displaced onto a system, or worse, a leader figure that unburdens each man of his individual responsibility. She is scornful of Eichmann’s claim that he was simply following orders for which he had no choice, on threat of violence, to obey. Nevertheless, she recognizes in his defense a larger truth about the nature of responsibility in modernity: judgment and decision-making are always the responsibility of others, and thus, no one. Arendt is certainly interested in Eichmann’s mechanism and notes that relatively few still knew right from wrong under the Nazi regime, or were prepared at least to act upon the innate pity that humans feel in the face of suffering.

Arendt claims that the evil of Eichmann was his extreme careerism, which kept him focused on the monstrous and routine business of the Holocaust that rendered the lives of millions subservient to the utility of his prospects in the Nazi hierarchy (pp. 82). Eichmann’s evil, lies not in some Augustinian stain upon his soul, but rather in his so-called normality, his exceptional attention to being nothing other than normal within even the most extreme circumstances. The judges in the case, were too good, and perhaps also too conscious of the very foundations of their profession, to admit that an average, normal person, neither feeble minded nor indoctrinated, nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong. Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was no exception within the Nazi regime (pp. 26).

Arendt was struck at the trial, she said, “by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer … was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.” She knew that this formulation ran against an entire current of Western considerations of evil. Though she doesn’t find Eichmann to be monstrous, her depiction of his character is just as chilling:

When I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to the phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III to prove a villain. Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. (pp. 287).

In other words, Eichmann’s evil manifested itself in very particular ways, one that does mesh with the thorough-going ruthlessness and pathology of an Iago or Macbeth. Arendt notes, for example, that Eichmann’s wish for personal advancement would not be exercised in any criminal way: “he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing” (287). This is the great ethical problem of modernity, Arendt says: “That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in men” (pp. 288). She claims that Eichmann is a symptom of a wider problem in modernity that needs to be thought, the way in which one’s normal aversion to pity can be occluded through the mediation of new technologies and bureaucratic language rules.

Despite the very banality of Eichmann, Arendt does not claim that he was without responsibility. She later argued that, “the question to be raised is no longer, how did this system function, but why did the defendant become a functionary in this organization”. To explain Eichmann’s behavior is not to excuse him ethically or judicially and I quote “We heard the protestations of the defense at the trial that Eichmann was after all only a tiny cog in the machinery of the Third Reich. … If the defendant excuses himself on the ground that he acted not as a man but as a mere functionary whose functions could just as easily have been carried out by anyone else, it is as if a criminal pointed to the statistics on crime, which set forth that so-and-so many crimes per day are committed in such-and-such a place, and declared that he only did what was statistically expected, that it was mere accident that he did it and not somebody else, since after all somebody had to do it. We have grown used to explaining away the responsibility of the doer for his deed in terms of this or that kind of determinism. No judicial procedure would be possible on the basis of them.” (1964, pp. 289-90).

Thus, if it is true that those few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really only by their own judgments, and did so freely, the reverse is also true: Eichmann, even against a backdrop where the law and general consensus of his society was murderous, was left to his own judgment, the kind of judgment that needs to valorized even in an era Arendt sees has reacted coldly to the traditional idea of judging others (1964, pp. 295-6). What is often missed in Arendt’s analysis is the way in which Eichmann still retains a measure of Kantian freedom to self-legislate. In his household use of Kant’s categorical imperative, all that is left of Kant’s spirit is the demand that a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call of obedience and identify his own will with the principle behind the law. That Eichmann did not allow, as he admitted, any exceptions to this law, that he acted freely against his inclination, is a proof. Eichmann argued that he was merely doing what he took to be his duty.

But, whatever the perversity of his modes of thinking, Eichmann never lost the capacity to judge, to say what was and was not in accord with duty, even if his notion of the latter was tragically skewed. It is at this point that needs to be underscored. Critics of Arendt too often highlight her strong account of the rampant conformism of modern society and the crushing oblivion of Nazi totalitarianism to suggest that she believed that Eichmann bore no responsibility for his crimes that the usurpation of his practical reason by Hitler’s edicts was inevitable given the time and place in which he lived.

Arendt claims Eichmann is a symptom of a wider problem in modernity that needs to be thought, the way in which one’s normal aversion to pity can be occluded through the mediation of new technologies and bureaucratic language rules. She worries that past is prologue in the Eichmann case, that it is quite conceivable that in the automated economy of a not to a distant future, men may be tempted to exterminate all those whose intelligence quotient is below a certain level (1964, pp. 289); what worries Arendt, then, is the continued privileging of the technical reasoning of the bureaucrat over the thinking and judging of practical reason.