"Eichmann in Jerusalem" Book Review: Can Evil be "Banal?"

Hannah Arendt's mind-bending, controversial, journalistic philosophy

Hannah Arendt,¹ a German-Jewish philosopher, historian, and journalist, flew to Jerusalem in 1961 to report on a historic trial for the New Yorker. Her provocative essays were promptly bound into the book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In this work, she coins the momentous phrase, “the banality of evil.”²

At the intersection of history, ethics, and politics, Eichmann in Jerusalem offers a comprehensive examination of Adolf Eichmann’s criminal trial.

So, it evil indeed banal? Should you read Eichmann in Jerusalem?

Let’s begin with some context.

Who is Adolf Eichmann?

In brief, Adolf Eichmann was an architect of the Holocaust. He initially supervised the logistics of deporting Jews to make Germany, Poland, and other territories judenrein (cleansed of Jews). His role transformed into overseeing the shipment of Jews to concentration camps as part of the Nazi’s so-called “Final Solution.”

After the war, Eichmann went into hiding. Eventually, the new state of Israel found and kidnapped him from Argentina. He was brought before the Jerusalem court, where he stood trial for several months. The court convicted him of an array of profound offenses, including “Crimes Against Humanity.”

Eichmann hung on June 1, 1962.

Arendt’s terrifying claim

Arendt reports on this trial with journalistic rigor and clarity.

She argues that Eichmann is primarily thoughtless, not wicked.

This makes his case more terrifying, not less.

Arendt assesses Eichmann to be, mostly, unconcerned with ideology or even anti-Semitism. Instead, Eichmann represents a new kind of mass-murderer: A boring pencil pusher who sits behind a desk, engaging in logistics rather than lethality, paperwork rather than violence, and deadlines rather than death.

Chiefly, then, she argues Eichmann is neither sadistic nor psychotic, but rather unthinking and unimaginative. She notes, for example, how he cannot escape using clichés and Nazi slogans, demonstrating a lack of critical thinking. In other words, he wholeheartedly absorbs Nazi propaganda without reflection on its consequences.

Take another example of his woeful shallowness. As part of his testimony, Eichmann gives a hilarious misinterpretation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative as meaning everyone must, with absolute finality, obey their nation’s laws, and, therefore, for him, Hitler’s decrees. This is almost funny, if it weren’t so appalling, because it’s precisely the opposite of Kant’s point, that each moral agent is the absolute ethical law unto himself by virtue of morality’s universality.

To Arendt, Eichmann seems most concerned about moving up in the ranks, evidenced by the fact that “memory functioned only in respect to things that had had a direct bearing upon his career.” (60)

Eichmann maintained a straightforward argument throughout: He swore loyalty to Hitler. His received orders from his superiors. He did them. Simple as that.

Eichmann never confessed guilt.

Eichmann in Jerusalem’s controversy

Eichmann in Jerusalem is unique because Arendt avoids abstraction. She explicitly does not conclude things about human nature in general, or about guilt or ethics broadly. She merely reports on, what she believes, to be the facts of this case and makes her judgment. From this, she thinks, we should draw lessons, but not overarching conclusions.

In this sense, Eichmann in Jerusalem is not really even philosophy, but assertions about a single person, Eichmann, the legal character of the criminal trial in Jerusalem, and the evidence of the case.

Although most concrete and rooted in facts, Arendt’s opinions are by no means uncontested.³ Eichmann in Jerusalem immediately received backlash for the following:

• Disputing the legality of the Jerusalem court

• Arguing that Eichmann was not very motivated by his personal anti-Semitism

• Exhibiting a sometimes ironic style of writing

• Critiquing Jewish-Nazi collaborators

As you read, keep in mind her general interpretation of Eichmann is disputed to this day. Is it really possible that a lead organizer of the Holocaust, wasn’t a monster, and wasn’t even a serious anti-Semite?

You can read and decide for yourself.

Should you read “Eichmann in Jerusalem?”

Hannah Arendt is an incisive, often sarcastic, writer, with a keen awareness of the human condition. Nevertheless, because she takes countless tangents on matters of fact, it’s also dry. I admit I had trouble finishing it. (I’m thankful I did, because the most illuminating section, for me, was the epilogue.)

The attention to details in her reporting reveals how political ethics is, in modern society, inseparable from its bureaucratic labyrinths. Without the nuance, Eichmann in Jerusalem wouldn’t be Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Nevertheless, if you’re interested in philosophy, you might want to skim some history and legal portions. If you’re interested in the historical elements, you might to skim other sections, etc.

And, if this book seems like too high an ask, I recommend watching The Zone of Interest. The film explores the chilling banality of the Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss.

You (and I) can be thoughtless and monstrous

Responsibility for opaque evil can be bound up in mounds of papers and correspondence, but that doesn’t deny the overwhelming weight of moral conscience. It confirms its importance.

We can either claim that no one is really morally corrupt, because anyone might do the same monstrously wicked thing if the roles were swapped, or everyone is, for precisely the same reason. I believe the latter makes more sense (although Arendt doesn’t argue for the former), on the grounds that Eichmann, the understated, boring, balding bureaucrat, was actually wicked.

In this sense, I want to disagree with Arendt. Just because Eichmann was a “clown” doesn’t mean he wasn’t a “monster.” I’ve also seen enough horror movies (and American politics) to know that those things aren’t a contradiction.

I agree broadly with Arendt, who expertly shows how simple shallowness, lack of empathy and self-awareness, can lead to catastrophic evil. After reading Wynn-William’s dynamite memoir, Careless People, an exposé that airs out Facebook’s dirty laundry, I wonder how many global tech powerhouse CEOs are “merely” careless.

But does that make them, or, more disturbingly, you and me, any less monstrous?

Thanks for reading.

Soli Deo Gloria

Notable Quotes:

[What Arendt thinks the judges should have said:] “There still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder… And just as you 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…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.” (278)

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal…” This “new kind of criminal… commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that what he is doing is wrong.” (275)

“It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this log course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” (251).

The “lesson” of the stories of resistance were this: “Politically speaking, it is that under 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 propose 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 palace fit for human habitation.” (Emphasis original, 232)

The witness stands revealed “how difficult it was to tell the story—that at least outside the transforming realm of poetry—it is needed a purity of soul, an unmirrored, unreflected innocence of the heart and mind that only the righteous process.” (229)

“[Denmark] is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the results seem to have been that those [Nazis] exposed to it change their minds.” (173)

“And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ even though man’s natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so that law of Hitler’s land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: ‘Thou shalt kill,’ although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it: the quality of temptation.” (148)

“Eichmann’s memory functioned only in respect to things that had had a direct bearing upon his career.” (60)

“[The] German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, stupidity which had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s mentality.” (50)

“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.” (47)

“[The judges could not] admit that an average, ‘normal’ person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinate nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong.” (24)

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A few related essays:

• A movie review of The Zone of Interest.

• A couple of essays on Martin Heidegger (whom Arendt had a brief love affair with.)

• An essay about the Nazi-resistant German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

1. A disclaimer: I have little academic familiarity with Arendt. I haven’t read her more famous works, like the The Origins of Totalitarianism or The Human Condition. I’m also not a political philosopher, but I can still speak from a reader’s, and philosopher’s, experience.

2. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 1964. Penguin Classics edition, 2022.

3. Reportedly, Arendt only attended the trial for a few days. For her research and reporting, she relied on the official English transcripts of the Hebrew trial, although she translated the German bits for herself.