Arendt After Jerusalem

THE ARENDT PROJECT

David Luban

For the summer workshop

Dear colleagues,

As many of you know, I have begun work on a book about the moral and legal philosophy of Hannah Arendt, tentatively entitled Arendt After Jerusalem. I’ve completed a draft of the first chapter, which is attached. It’s a lot to read, and I don’t expect you to read it all (although it is not at all technical, and if I did it right it should read easily). Let me give you a quick guide to what follows, to help you decide which bits to read.

First, for those who have no time to read any of the chapter, I provide a very brief overview of the central issue the book addresses.

The chapter itself deals with a turning point in Arendt’s thinking: the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and Arendt’s famous thesis that Eichmann exemplified “the banality of evil.” It was the Eichmann trial, my book will argue, that got Arendt interested in moral philosophy and moral judgment, and also interested in law, so it is important to see exactly what prompted her to go to Jerusalem, what she took away from the trial, and whether she “got Eichmann right.” The chapter is divided into six sections.

§1 sets out the background and basic themes. §2 analyzes what Arendt meant by “banality of evil” and summarizes her evidence that Eichmann embodied it. §3 is my own speculation about why she chose the word “banality,” an aesthetic concept that I connect with the theory of kitsch. This is a section about which I have some doubts; I would love to get your reactions.

§§4-6 discuss the vexed question of whether Arendt got Eichmann right, in the face of recent historical scholarship that argues that Eichmann flat-out fooled her. In §4 I ask what turns on this issue, and argue that it would affect at least some of her theoretical conclusions. In §§5 and 6 I address the criticisms. §5 discusses and rebuts three common criticisms that I think are the result of careless reading: that Arendt underestimated Eichmann’s intelligence, that she underestimated his initiative and agency, and that she wrongly bought into his “I was only a petty bureaucrat doing paperwork” defense. I show that all of these are mistaken. Finally, in §6, I tackle what in my view is the most serious challenge to Arendt’s interpretation of Eichmann, Bettina Stangneth’s recent, and authoritatively researched, Eichmann Before Jerusalem. Stangneth believes that Eichmann was far from banal, but rather a rabid Nazi and anti-Semite. I would be especially interested in whether you find §§5 and 6 persuasive.

ARENDT AFTER JERUSALEM: THE MAIN ISSUE

Read this, or this plus §1, if you don’t have time to read anything else.

A character in one of C. S. Lewis’s novels says of the protagonist, “even if the whole universe were crazy and hostile, Ransom was sane and wholesome and honest.” In her final decade, Hannah Arendt strove to understand how some people stay sane and wholesome and honest when their universe turns crazy and hostile. In Arendt’s terminology, this is the problem of moral judgment, and it was the heart of her moral philosophy. I call it the problem of moral compass. Arendt also identified a complementary problem of legal judgment: how should the law judge the crimes of those who fail to stay sane and wholesome and honest, and seemingly lack awareness of the elementary immorality of what their criminal state tells them to do?

Arendt After Jerusalem is a study of Arendt’s moral and legal philosophy, and the problems of moral and legal judgment are its main focus. The book is broader than those two problems, though: it will critically examine her moral and legal philosophy as a whole. Perhaps unusually, I want to bring it into conversation with some strands in contemporary Anglophone philosophy that I find particularly salient: important work by Robert Brandom, Stuart Hampshire, and Richard Rorty. The book aims to fill two gaps: first, Arendt’s moral philosophy and legal theory are often neglected in favor of her political and social theory; second, she is almost never treated as a potential contributor to current debates in legal theory or Anglophone philosophy.

The moral and legal discussions mesh with each other. Both arise from the central question posed above: How can we judge right and wrong when the standards those around us embrace cannot be trusted? The question grows naturally out of Arendt’s reflections on totalitarianism. When murderous ideologies reign supreme, and the state itself embraces criminality, millions will fall in line with the program—some from conviction, some from fear, some from opportunism, some from thoughtless conformity, and some from the “mere habit of holding fast to something.” In such dark times, it is morally fatal to take our bearings from those around us; we are thrown back on our own moral compass. How do we keep our moral compass true?

That is the problem of moral judgment; “judgment” is Arendt’s name for what I have called “moral compass.” Moral judgment is “an independent human faculty, unsupported by law and public opinion, that judges in full spontaneity every deed and intent anew whenever the occasion arises.” The problem lies in understanding how moral judgment so defined is even possible, given that ordinarily we do not judge in full spontaneity and unsupported by public opinion. Just the opposite: from childhood on, we develop judgment through the company and examples of others, and we take our initial bearings from the conventional wisdom of those around us. How is judgment in Arendt’s more demanding sense possible? How are we able to break from conventional wisdom in dark times when, as Arendt liked to say, the chips are down? For Kant, breaking from conventional wisdom—thinking for yourself—is the very definition of enlightenment. Kant attributed the failure to think for yourself to laziness and cowardice. Arendt, living through the collapse of enlightenment in nations not notably lazy or cowardly, diagnosed

the failure differently. She offered a paradoxical conjecture: the inability to judge for yourself is connected with the inability to think from the standpoint of others. Her moral philosophy is an effort to make good on that conjecture.

As Kant and Wittgenstein argued, judgment is never a matter of mechanical rule application. For then we would need rules about how to apply those rules, and rules about how to apply those, in a vicious infinite regress. Somewhere we must reach bedrock, where the spade turns. That is Wittgenstein’s metaphor; in the imagery Arendt preferred, ultimately we must think and judge “without a bannister.”

Our usual name for the bedrock of judgment is common sense. The words themselves suggest that common sense is cultivated in common with others. Arendt wants to know what happens when common sense itself becomes uncommon, and what commonly passes for sense turns out to be unreliable or even criminal.

At one point in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt remarks in passing that the assumption that ordinary people can distinguish right from wrong lies at the very foundation of law. She offers no argument for this conclusion, but it is not difficult to see why it might be true. There is no such thing as self-interpreting law, and – as the Kant-Wittgenstein regress argument shows – the law itself cannot say how it should be interpreted, without falling into a vicious regress. The very possibility of law, therefore, rests on shared linguistic and inferential practices that the law presupposes without specifying them. In Anatomy of Law, Lon Fuller calls these shared practices the “implicit morality of law”; he describes them as “shared standards of legal sanity.” They belong to what Arendt calls common sense. What I will call the “Arendt-Fuller thesis” is precisely that law as a form of social ordering cannot exist without shared practices of judgment that cannot themselves be codified within the law. The possibility of shared judgment thus turns out to be important for legal theory as well as moral philosophy. The book will discuss other distinctive Arendtian ideas about law – not all of which I agree with – but the Arendt-Fuller thesis is the one that most directly connects with the central inquiry of most of the book: how does moral compass remain true even in dark times when civilized standards of right and wrong seem to collapse?

Chapter One

Arendt at Jerusalem

§1. Judgment as Moral Compass

In May 1960, Israeli agents kidnapped Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and brought

him to Jerusalem to stand trial for crimes of the Holocaust. A month later, Hannah Arendt

wrote to her friend Mary McCarthy, “I am half toying with the idea to get some magazine

to send me to cover the Eichmann trial. Am very tempted. He used to be one of the most

intelligent of the lot.”1 Arendt approached William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker. A

bit diffidently, Shawn accepted her proposal.2 As Arendt explained to her friend and

mentor, the philosopher Karl Jaspers, “I would never be able to forgive myself if I didn’t

go and look at this walking disaster face to face in all his bizarre vacuousness.”3 Readers

who know nothing else about Arendt are likely to know the name she gave the “bizarre

vacuousness” she saw, or thought she saw, when she looked at Eichmann: the banality of

evil.

As we will see later in this chapter, that phrase prompted grave misunderstandings

of Arendt’s views. There is no denying that Arendt’s powerful phrase is slippery. Its

wording suggests that “banality” refers to evil rather than to Eichmann, and “banal” can

1 Hannah Arendt to Mary McCarthy, June 20, 1960, in Carol Brightman (ed.), Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975 (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1995) p. 81. Henceforth BF. 2 Arendt to McCarthy, Oct. 8, 1960, BF, pp. 98-99; cf. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (Yale University Press, New Haven,1982) p. 328. Three years later Eichmann in Jerusalem appeared as a five-part New Yorker series as well as in book form. It is her best-known book and has sold more than 300,000 copies. 3 Arendt to Jaspers, Dec. 2, 1960, in Kohler and Saner, pp. 409-10.

mean “uninteresting” as well as “shallow,” although the latter is what Arendt had in

mind. On that misreading, “banal evil” means “uninteresting evil.” No wonder, then, that

at least one critic complained that Arendt was slighting the importance of the Holocaust

by downplaying its evil.4

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Arendt called the Holocaust “the

unprecedented crime, … the crime against humanity – in the sense of a ‘crime against the

human status’, or against the very nature of mankind” – just the opposite of denigrating

its importance.5 As for the wording, Arendt clearly used “banality” to describe

Eichmann’s person, not his deeds. Other critics got this point, but accused her of

underrating Eichmann’s intelligence and diminishing his role. This too was mistaken, for

in her eyes Eichmann was “one of the greatest criminals of that period.”6

Unfortunately, Arendt failed to define the banality of evil until 1971, when she

finally explained that the phrase refers to

no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil

deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any

particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the

doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary

4 Richard Wolin, “The Banality of Evil: The Demise of a Legend,” Jewish Review of Books, fall 2014, attributing to Arendt “the idea that the execution of the Nazis’ diabolical plans for an Endlösung to the ‘Jewish Question’ could be considered ‘banal’.” Available at http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1106/the-banality-of-evil-the-demise-of-a-legend/. Wolin repeats this misreading in “Thoughtlessness Revisited: A Response to Seyla Benhabib,” Jewish Review of Books, Sept. 30, 2014: “if Eichmann was banal, then the Holocaust itself was banal.” Available at http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1287/in-still-not-banal-a-response-to-seyla-benhabib/. 5 EJ, p. 268. What she means by these labels will be the subject of Chapter __. 6 EJ, p. 288.

shallowness. However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither

monstrous nor demonic ….7

Presumably she neglected to define the banality of evil because it did not

represent a theory or doctrine. To McCarthy, Arendt wrote, “As I see it, there are

no ‘ideas’ in this Report, there are only facts with a few conclusions, and these

conclusions usually appear at the end of each chapter.”8 Two weeks later, she

followed up in another letter to McCarthy:

My “basic notion” of the ordinariness of Eichmann is much less a notion

than a faithful description of a phenomenon. I am sure there can be drawn

many conclusions from this phenomenon and the most general I drew is

indicated: “banality of evil.” I may sometime want to write about this, and

then I would write about the nature of evil, but it would have been entirely

wrong of me to do it within the framework of the report.9

So “banality of evil” is a pre-theoretical general description of a

phenomenon. Arendt labels it a conclusion because to claim that a phenomenon

falls under a concept is a conclusion; she does not mean it is the conclusion of a

theoretical argument. Near the end of Eichmann in Jerusalem, she calls that

conclusion “the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us –

the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought defying banality of evil.”10 This is

the only place in the text where the famous phrase appears, and unfortunately 7 Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, Responsibility and Judgment, p. 159. She added that Eichmann’s “extraordinary shallowness … was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.” The distinction between stupidity and inability to think is not obvious, but it proves to be very important in Arendt’s theorizing. See §5 and Chapter __. 8 She adds: “The only exception to this is the Epilog, which is a discussion of the legal aspect of the case.” HA to MM, Sept. 20, 1963, 147-48. In Chapter __, I will discuss the Epilogue in some detail. 9 HA to MM, Oct. 3, 1963. 152. 10 EJ, 252.

Arendt fails to spell out what the lesson is. If we take her at her word, at the time

she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem Arendt had no theory that might articulate the

lesson—indeed, she explicitly warns that the lesson is “neither an explanation of

the phenomenon nor a theory about it.”11 All she had were observations.

Should we take her at her word, or did she come to Jerusalem theory in

hand? After all, her phrase “bizarre vacuousness” to describe Eichmann comes

from a letter written months before the trial. Furthermore, ideas clearly

anticipating the banality of evil crop up in her writings and correspondence as

early as 1945 (more about this later), including in The Origins of Totalitarianism

and The Human Condition.12

Arendt had done her homework on Eichmann, and “bizarre vacuousness”

suggests she went to Jerusalem primed for his banality, in the sense that it did not

take her by surprise. (Her first impression of him on Day One of the trial is

already disdainful: “a ghost that happens to have a cold …. Not even eerie. His

only concern, not to lose his composure.”13) When she wrote to Jaspers about

Eichmann’s bizarre vacuousness, she was probably reacting to the sensational

two-part interview with Eichmann – the “Sassen interview” – published in Life

magazine a few days earlier.14 There Eichmann indeed sounds bizarrely vacuous:

11 EJ, 288. Arendt wrote to Arthur Hertzberg, “If I am under attack [about the big issues] I answer: this was not my job, this was only a report -- which is partly true. But the whole truth is that I did not know the answers myself when I wrote the book.” Letter, April 8, 1966, quoted in Young-Bruehl, p. 367. 12 In OT she remarks on the “nihilistic banality” of adherents to totalitarian movements, p. 459. In a 1963 letter to the journalist Samuel Grafton, Arendt remarks that she had been thinking about the nature of evil for thirty years. Jerome Kohn & Ron H. Feldman, (eds.), Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings (Schocken, New York, 2007), p. 475. 13 Letter to Heinrich Blücher, April 15, 1961, in WFW, p. 355. 14 Adolf Eichmann, “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story,” part 1, Life, November 28, 1960, pp. 19-24, 101-12; “Eichmann’s Own Story: Part II,” Life, Dec. 5, 1960, pp. 146- 61. Both are available on Google Books, Part 1 at

he recounts deporting a million Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in the same flat

way that he recalls sharing a grilled bacon and onion snack with a Hungarian

colonel, as if both were equally noteworthy.15

But there is no reason to doubt her disclaimers of having a theory, because

Eichmann in Jerusalem caused her to abandon a theory she unquestionably held,

her analysis of “radical evil” in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt herself

thought the ideas of radicality and banality are flatly inconsistent.16 Later I shall

argue that she was mistaken about the inconsistency, but what matters for now is

that in Arendt’s own mind, the Eichmann trial required her to discard one of her

signature ideas. That suggests she was not using Eichmann merely as a stalking

horse for a pet theory, nor that she was seeing in Eichmann only what she wanted

to see.

This book will argue that her offhand remark to McCarthy – “I may

sometime want to write about this, and then I would write about the nature of

evil” – in fact anticipated a turn in her thinking provoked by the Eichmann trial, a

turn toward what became the central preoccupation of Arendt’s final decade:

moral philosophy. The turn is especially striking because in her earlier writing she

seldom mentioned moral philosophy, and when she did it was usually with

offhand disdain. Why the change? In Arendt’s last, incomplete, book, she quotes

https://books.google.co.il/books?id=0U0EAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false and Part 2 at https://books.google.com/books?id=900EAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=life+5+dec+1960&hl=en&sa=X&ei=8UxeVZ_CDcnAtQXuhIDgBw&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=life%205%20dec%201960&f=false. As explained below, these were merely excerpts from a much longer document. For the background of these interviews, see §6 below. 15 “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story,” p. 110. 16 Arendt to Scholem, July 24, 1963, in The Jewish Writings. See also her letter to McCarthy, Sept. 20, 1963, BF, pp. 147-48.

Kantian language to explain that “after having been struck by a fact that, willy-

nilly, ‘put me in possession of a concept’ (the banality of evil), I could not help

raising the quaestio juris and asking myself ‘by what right I possessed and used

it.’”17

Eventually, Arendt did write about the nature of evil, in two series of

classroom lectures from the mid-1960s, published posthumously under the title

“Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.” But mostly her final-decade investigation

turned out not to be about the “the nature of evil” as such – at least not directly.

Rather, it was an investigation of judgment – specifically, of the kind of

disastrously bad moral judgment she saw in Eichmann, as well as the miraculous

moral clarity that a few resisters and rescuers displayed even in the darkest

moments of the Holocaust.

The latter, for her, was at least as important as the former. As she put it

rather dramatically, the fact that under conditions of terror “most people will

comply but some people will not” is what allows “this planet to remain a fit place

for human habitation.”18 She cites a few examples, prompted by testimony at the

Eichmann trial about an ordinary German sergeant, Anton Schmid, who over a

period of months rescued 250 Jews from destruction, until he was caught and

executed. Thom Gunn’s poem about Schmid that is the epigraph of this book

captures in a metonym what Arendt found so thought-provoking: it was Schmid’s

“unusual eyes” with their power “not to mistake the men he saw for gods or

vermin.” That perceptual power is the power of moral judgment, and for Arendt

17 LM/T, p. 5. 18 EJ, p. 232. Her emphasis.

as for Gunn it kept Schmid “breathing the cold air of his freedom/ And treading a

distinct direction.”19

It is important to dispel a possible misunderstanding. In our everyday

language practice, “bad judgment” is a mealy-mouthed excuse politicians trot out

when they get caught doing something potentially career-ending, like corruption

or sexual misbehavior. Grim-faced before the microphones, stoical wives by their

sides, they apologize for their bad judgment (not their cheating). What they mean

is: “I’m really a person of good character and sound principles. I’m not a

scoundrel; I didn’t mean to do wrong. I merely had a lapse in judgment.” In the

lexicon of damage control, bad judgment – mere bad judgment – counts as a

lesser evil.

That is decidedly not what Arendt means when she talks about bad

judgment, because for her, there is nothing “mere” about it. Judgment, as Arendt

thinks of it, is the ability to tell right from wrong non-inferentially, that is, without

deducing it from rules.20 In other words, judgment is what we sometimes call

moral compass.21 Functioning properly, our moral compass keeps pointing north

even in a tempest, when nothing visible to the eye offers a clue to the right course.

To have bad judgment means to have a defective moral compass. Viewed this

19 Thom Gunn, “Epitaph for Anton Schmidt” (§11 of “Misanthropos”)(1965), in Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), pp. 143-44. Gunn evidently used Eichmann in Jerusalem as his source. Both he and Arendt misspell Schmid’s name by adding a ‘t’ at the end. 20 “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and Judgment, p. X (446 in original); “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” p. 41. 21 This is not a term Arendt uses, although she notes that Kant described his categorical imperative as a “compass … to distinguish what is good, what is bad.” “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” RJ, p. 62, quoting Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Arendt, as we shall see, did not regard the categorical imperative as a moral compass, and her focus on judgment as a faculty quite different from practical reasoning based on principles indicates that in her view the categorical imperative is not even the right kind of thing to serve as a moral compass.

way, the politician’s excuse “I have a good character, but bad judgment” makes

no sense: defective moral compass is defective character. Bad moral judgment, as

Arendt understands it, is one of the most serious accusations we can make.

Arendt’s conviction that Eichmann’s crimes could not be traced to malice,

pathology, or ideology seemingly left bad moral judgment as the most plausible

alternative. Eichmann’s moral compass was disastrously faulty, easily deflected

by the local forces of his immediate environment. Eichmann exemplified

something truly momentous: “an average, ‘normal’ person, neither feeble-minded

nor indoctrinated nor cynical” who nonetheless “could be perfectly incapable of

telling right from wrong.”22

For now, I postpone discussing the implications she drew from this

observation, including the problems she thought it poses for legal systems. Here I

note only that her conjecture, reflected in the definition of “banality of evil”

quoted above, seems to be that when an average, “normal” person commits

extraordinary evil, unprompted by malice, pathology, or ideology, the evil arises

from defective moral judgment: the wrongdoer simply failed to recognize (=

misjudged) that the conduct was evil. Arendt’s decade-long investigation of the

human faculty of judgment explores that conjecture and aims to supply a theory to

anchor it.

Two important cautions must be emphasized here, to avoid serious

misunderstanding. First, to attribute evil deeds to the perpetrator’s defective moral

compass is not to let the evil-doer off the hook either morally or legally. Whether

defective moral judgment counts as an exculpating excuse (akin to a defense of 22 EJ, p. 26.

diminished mental capacity) or a condition of blameworthiness depends on other

theoretical commitments. Arendt’s commitments point unequivocally in the

direction of blameworthiness; for her, the excuse “don’t blame me, blame my bad

judgment” is absurd. Certainly she never let Eichmann off the hook: remember

that she labeled him “one of the greatest criminals of that period,” and she called

him and those like him enemies of all mankind (hostis generis humani). Contrary

to complaints by her critics, she repeatedly, emphatically, and elaborately rejected

Eichmann’s “I was just a cog in a machine” defense, and she accepted the

Jerusalem court’s conclusion that Eichmann deserved to be executed.23

Second, a theory of moral judgment of the kind Arendt hoped to develop

will be only a fragment of a theory of evil, because it does not cover the evils that

are committed from malice, sadism, or fanaticism – in other words, evil arising

from something more diabolical (though perhaps no more alarming) than bad

moral judgment. Those who object that Arendt wrongly downgraded evil from

“radical” to “banal” overlook the important point that the evil associated with

banality is only one species of evil.24 Arendt never denies that some evil-doers act

out of fanaticism or a depraved heart – indeed, she explicitly contrasts

Eichmann’s banality with the pride of Lucifer, the resentment and self-loathing of

Richard III, the envy of Cain, the weakness of Macbeth, the depraved hatreds of

Iago and Claggart, and the covetousness and cupidity we are told is the “root of

23 EJ, 288 (greatest criminals), 282 (hostis generis humani), 279 (“This is the reason … you must hang.”) Her rejection of the “cog in the machine” is in EJ, 289; more elaborately, in “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” in RJ, 29-32; also in “Collective Responsibility,” in RJ, 148, and in an interview with Joachim Fest published in The Last Interview and Other Conversations, 58. 24 I will subsequently argue that Arendt herself mistook this point in her letter to Scholem cited in note 16.

all evil.”25 Elsewhere, she distinguishes the evil of the “‘bourgeois’ with all the

outer aspect of respectability” within the Nazi movement from the perversions

and fanaticisms displayed by others among the Nazi elite, naming Hitler,

Goebbels, Göring, and Streicher.26 Their evil was, in her view, anything but banal.

What about an alternative diagnosis of Eichmann that also accepts his

ordinariness? Perhaps there was nothing wrong with his judgment, but he chose to

continue in his horrifying job, knowing how evil it was, out of ambition and

opportunism. Before he joined the SS, Eichmann, who never finished high school,

was a traveling salesman with middling prospects. His SS job allowed him to

discover, and make the most of, hitherto-unsuspected talents for negotiation and

organization; and of course he wielded the power of life and death over the Jews,

which could not help but gratify his thirsty ego.27 He could have quit without

physically imperiling himself, but then he would have no career, or at least not a

career that made him a somebody. He would once again be a mediocrity. (And

indeed, in his exile he worked in low-level managerial jobs, the best of which was

managing a rabbit farm.) Couldn’t it be that he knew full well the evil of what he

was doing but lacked the courage to quit, not out of physical fear but merely out

25 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Part One: Thinking, one-volume ed., (Harcourt Brace, New York,1978) pp. 3-4. 26 Hannah Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” in Essays in Understanding 1930-1954 (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1994), p. 128. 27 This is precisely the portrait of Eichmann that Bettina Stangneth paints in the opening chapter of Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, trans. Ruth Martin (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2014)(published in German in 2011). She demonstrates in detail Eichmann’s driving ambition to advance in the ranks of the SS, his self-aggrandizement and self-promotion, his myth-making about being born in Palestine, knowing Hebrew and Yiddish, and being personal friends with the grand mufti of Jerusalem (all falsehoods), the pleasure he took in foreign news stories describing him as “czar of the Jews,” and his vanity.

of reluctance to accept demotion? Arendt herself remarked on his unusual

diligence in advancing his own career.28

There is much to be said for this diagnosis, and §6 takes it up in greater

detail. But, taken by itself, it downplays one of the chief characteristics Arendt

spotted in Eichmann: a desire to be thought respectable by the worthies of society.

There is no reason to believe Eichmann would have joined the mafia (for

example) if that was the only way to get ahead. A successful SS career was

appealing precisely because, within the morally perverted world of the Third

Reich, it was a respectable career. Not to have seen through this veneer of

respectability was itself catastrophically bad moral judgment. And so, even a

diagnosis of Eichmann’s evil that attributes it to raging ambition has explanatory

power only if we can understand how Eichmann’s moral judgments about the

Nazi hierarchy he inhabited could be so utterly wrong.

To recapitulate the main points so far: Arendt’s concept of banality of evil

is more than an observation, but less than a theory. It is a summary interpretation

of her observations, and Arendt claims that its observational base makes it

“something quite factual,” “a faithful description of a phenomenon,” not a

philosophical construction. Theory would come later, and Arendt devoted her

final decade toward developing that theory. And, as she came to view things, what

that theory needed to explain was how an ordinary person could be wholly

lacking in elementary judgment – moral compass.

This, clearly, is a question of far broader moral and philosophical

significance than exclusive focus on Eichmann, the Nazis, and the Holocaust 28 EJ, 287.

suggests. We exercise moral judgment in matters great and small, and “banality of

evil” might apply in less extraordinary and world-shattering settings.

In line with this thought, suppose we revise Arendt’s definition of the

banality of evil quoted above: “the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a

gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness.”

Let’s delete the italicized phrase, which limits the definition to a tiny handful of

cases. That limitation needlessly robs the concept of more general significance,

and it also implies something false: that the characteristic motivational structure –

evil deeds coupled with a lack of commensurably evil motivations – can be found

only among mass criminals. It seems unlikely that Arendt meant to limit the

concept this way, and the better way to read “committed on a gigantic scale” is as

an elliptical version of “evil deeds, even including some committed on a gigantic

scale.”

Whatever she intended, “banality of evil” has entered the working

vocabulary of public discourse to describe many kinds of wrongdoing, not all of

them momentous. It often seems apt to describe a certain kind of organizational

wrongdoing, be it in corporations or law firms or government agencies, whenever

the perpetrators seem like ordinary people acting in accordance with prevailing

organizational culture without seeming to grasp how corrupt that culture is and

how much harm they are doing.

Of course, condemning the perpetrators of, say, a large-scale financial

swindle as exemplifying banality of evil is not meant to imply that a financial

swindle is like the Holocaust, or that the bankers and lawyers who engineered it

are Eichmanns. Those would be shocking, silly, and deeply offensive moral

equivalences. (Godwin’s Law decrees that anyone who ventures Nazi analogies in

an argument about something else automatically loses the argument.) The point is

rather that “banality of evil” often seems like the right way to describe

perpetrators who appear to be ordinary, non-diabolical people whose main sin is

to have lost their moral bearings and who seem clueless about the wrongness of

what they’ve done.

Steven Miller warns that “the phrase banality of evil has slipped easily

into the language, becoming a commonplace, almost a banality itself. Journalists

and others freely apply it as an all-purpose explanation.”29 It is precisely the

danger of using it as an all-purpose explanation (which therefore explains

nothing) that makes Arendt’s philosophical quaestio juris of whether we are

entitled to the concept an urgent one, entirely apart from Eichmann.

Recall as well that Arendt is interested not only in bad moral judgment,

but in good moral judgment as well. Inquiry into the workings and failings of

moral judgment is a central topic of moral philosophy, going back to the Socratic

question “Can virtue be taught?”. Arendt’s inquiry opens onto several important

philosophical issues:

1. One traditional approach to moral philosophy, which today goes by the

name “virtue ethics,” analyzes right and wrong, good and evil, in terms of the

virtuous or vicious character of the actor. Virtue ethics presupposes a kind of

congruence between character and act that the banality of evil calls into question.

29 Stephen Miller, “A Note on the Banality of Evil,” The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn, 1998, http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/sites/default/files/articles/WQ_VOL22_A_1998_Article_02.pdf.

If evil deeds sometimes cannot “be traced to any particularity of wickedness,”

then the distinction between good and evil must, in some way, swing free of the

virtues and vices of the wrongdoer.

Virtue ethics can avoid that result by arguing that good practical judgment

is itself a virtue. Aristotle classified it among the intellectual virtues, under the

name phrónesis, and in one essay Arendt uses Aristotle’s word to denote political

judgment.30 Nevertheless, a robust virtue ethics would presumably prefer to

assign diabolical deeds to diabolical vice rather than absence of phrónesis. So the

banality of evil does pose a puzzle for virtue ethics – call it the problem of

incongruity between person and act, or just “the problem of incongruity” for

short.

2. Arendt’s focus on judgment also raises the question whether reasoning

from principles or judging particulars is more basic to moral life – whether, in

other words, moral reasoning is generalist and top-down or particularist and

bottom-up. Kant’s categorical imperative procedure – about which, as we shall

see, Arendt entertained serious reservations – may stand as a paradigm of the

former; contemporary moral particularism, which emphasizes the variability of

moral reasons among contexts, may stand as a paradigm of the latter. Arendt leans

in the latter direction; yet she also argues that action springs from principles, and

she explains that principles are criteria of judgment and standards of right and

wrong.31 Working out the relationship between principles and particulars,

30 “The Crisis in Culture,” in BPF (Viking ed.), p. 221. She translates phrónesis “insight.” 31 Action springs from principles: “What Is Freedom?” in BPF (Viking ed.), p. 152; principles as criteria of judgment: “Montesquieu’s Revision of the Tradition,” in The Promise of Politics, p. 65; principles as

between reasoning and judging, is one of the major theoretical problems implicit

in Arendt’s diagnosis of Eichmann as an ordinarily intelligent man incapable of

distinguishing right from wrong – a man who could calculate but not judge. Call

this the problem of principles and particulars.

3. The most basic question is how judgment is supposed to work.

“Judgment,” understood as non-inferential knowledge of particulars, is not merely

a philosopher’s term of art: saying that someone has or lacks good judgment is

perfectly ordinary language. But talk about judgment raises its own quaestio juris

of what entitles us to invoke a distinct faculty for knowing particulars non-

inferentially. The sailor’s compass is explained by the Earth’s magnetism; what

explains moral compass? Call this the problem of judgment.

4. Finally, we might ask what entitles us to suppose that there is some

moral counterpart to magnetic north – some right direction whose rightness is

independent of the observer’s subjective convictions. This, of course, is the

problem of moral realism.

Arendt’s quaestio juris raises these and other philosophical issues, which

are independent of the Eichmann case. It also raises significant issues in legal

theory, which I set out in Chapter Two – for of course, judgment and judging are

central to the law. But Eichmann and the banality of evil were the proximate

causes of Arendt’s inquiry. So, although this is not a book about Eichmann in

Jerusalem, it must begin there. Before turning to broader questions, we need to

understand what the phenomenon was that Arendt thought her concept “banality

standards of right and wrong: “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding,” in Essays in Understanding, p. 335.

of evil” described. What observations generated the concept? What exactly did

Arendt think she saw in Eichmann?

§2. What Arendt Saw in Jerusalem

Arendt gives us two answers:

(1) She saw someone who could not think, by which (she immediately explains)

she means that he could not think from the standpoint of somebody else.32

(2) She saw someone who could not speak in words of his own, only in clichés,

bureaucratese (Amtssprache), and phrases that, if they were Eichmann’s own,

he repeated so often and so literally that they became self-made clichés.33

Of course, thinking from the point of view of someone else is not the standard meaning

of what it is to think; but in Arendt’s systematic philosophy of mind, inner dialogue is

what distinguishes thinking from other cognitive abilities and operations, and her usage is

consistent. (This book will have much more to say about her conception of thinking.)

To Arendt, (1) and (2) are connected.34 The inability to think and inability to

speak are the core of what she meant by Eichmann’s banality. From these twin

observations, she will eventually draw two conclusions:

(3) Eichmann lacked a moral personality of his own. He was a moral chameleon –

my term, not hers – whose moral convictions came from those around him,

and especially from those he looked up to because of their superior social

status.

32 EJ, 48, 49. 33 EJ, 48. She describes Eichmann’s “heroic fight with the German language, which inevitably defeats him” as “a defect … that amounted to a mild case of aphasia” (EJ 48), although this pseudo-medical description is unfortunate given her basic point that Eichmann’s evil did not arise from any pathology. 34 EJ, 49.

(4) Because Eichmann could not think from the standpoint of someone genuinely

other (most obviously, his Jewish victims), nor put his convictions into words

of his own, he simply lacked moral judgment, what I have called moral

compass.

Other observations than (1) and (2) might also have fed into her diagnosis of Eichmann’s

banality. For example: “In court, Eichmann gave the impression of a typical member of

the lower middle classes, and this impression was more than borne out by every sentence

he spoke or wrote while in prison” – although she immediately notes that the impression

is misleading, because in fact Eichmann was “the déclassé son of a solid middle class

family.”35 Again: “Servatius [Eichmann’s lawyer] himself had declared, even prior to the

trial, that his client’s personality was that of ‘a common mailman’” – a judgment Arendt

seems to endorse.36 Again: “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.”37

Sarcasms like these can make it sound as though Arendt’s “banality” diagnosis

was little more than the snobbish contempt of an aristocrat of the mind toward an

intellectual and social inferior. Now, Arendt was by no means immune to elitism and

snobbery, and her letters occasionally express cringe-making prejudices and stereotypes.

But observations like those I’ve just quoted are throw-aways, and she draws no

conclusions from them. Only the two fundamental perceptions mentioned above – about

Eichmann’s inability to speak and his inability to think (from the standpoint of somebody

35 EJ, 31. 36 EJ, 145. Arendt notes that the defense team’s “feeling of social superiority to Eichmann was more than once in evidence,” quoting Servatius’s assistant who referred to Eichmann as “small fry” (Würstchen, literally ‘little sausage’). EJ 145. 37 EJ, 54.

else) – play a significant role in the conclusions that matter: Eichmann’s nature as a

moral chameleon and his lack of independent moral judgment.

Some examples illustrate what she has in mind. After his arrest, Eichmann was

interrogated at length by an Israeli police captain named Avner Less.38 Eichmann, who

spent many hours with his interrogator, seemed to bond with him, and at one point found

himself complaining to Less about his professional hard luck. As a bureau head, he could

never be promoted beyond lieutenant colonel; and when he wanted to transfer to the

Einsatzgruppen, the killing units in the east, which he regarded as a pathway to

promotion, his request was denied.39 Eichmann unburdened himself as though he

expected Less to commiserate. Less, unsurprisingly, did not. He was, after all, an Israeli,

a German Jew by birth, and – as Eichmann knew – his father had been murdered in the

Holocaust. It just never crossed Eichmann’s mind that any of that might matter.

A second example concerned Eichmann’s solicitude for one of the Jewish leaders

with whom he had worked in Vienna, a man named Berthold Storfer. During the war

Eichmann protected Storfer, but Storfer tried to escape and was caught and sent to

Auschwitz. Somehow, he got a message to Eichmann, who actually traveled to

Auschwitz to gain Storfer’s release. When he got there, Eichmann was told that no one

could be released from the camp. Next Eichmann tried to get Storfer excused from work,

but the camp commandant refused. Finally, Eichmann was able to secure relatively light

work for Storfer, “whereupon” (Eichmann recollected) “he was very pleased.”40

Eichmann left feeling happy about this “normal, human encounter.... It was a great inner

38 Excerpts were published in German in 1982 and in English translation a year later. In this book, I use the English version: Jochen von Lang with Claus Sibyll, eds., Ralph Manheim, trans., Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983). 39 Eichmann Interrogated, 82-83, 167. 40 EJ, 51.

joy to me ... that we could speak with each other.” Arendt comments acidly: “Six weeks

after this normal human encounter, Storfer was dead.”41

A third example is Eichmann’s curious attitude toward his Viennese duties as the

“expert” on Jewish emigration, what today we call ethnic cleansing. As Arendt describes

it, Eichmann seemed to see the Jewish leaders and himself as something akin to

colleagues in a collective task, “‘pulling together’.”42 It was almost as if Eichmann

thought they were all part of the same enterprise, the great enterprise of rendering Austria

Judenrein. Only if they all worked tirelessly together could they get the ethnic cleansing

done.43

Arendt might have cited additional examples. During his police interrogation,

Eichmann exclaims, with outraged horror, that he would have been “a devil” if he had

allowed “cases of typhus or any other contagious diseases to be included in a shipment” –

of Jews to Auschwitz.44 Apparently it didn’t occur to Eichmann that it was the shipments

themselves that were diabolical, nor that his interrogator would think so. Historian

Deborah Lipstadt offers several other instances drawn from Eichmann’s testimony in 41 Ibid. Eichmann’s recollection of his encounter with Storfer at Auschwitz is in Eichmann Interrogated, 150-51. A recent biographer celebrates Storfer as a rescuer of thousands of Jews, whose reputation was unjustifiably tarnished by his association with Eichmann. Gabriele Anderl, 9096 Leben: Der unbekannte Judenretter Berthold Storfer (Rotbuch Verlag, 2012). 42 EJ, 48. 43 She was probably also thinking of Eichmann’s description (in the Sassen excerpt published in Life magazine that she read) of his dealings with one of the leaders of the Hungarian Jewish community: “‘We were political opponents trying to arrive at a settlement, and we trusted each other perfectly.” “Eichmann’s Own Story: Part II: ‘To Sum It All Up, I Regret Nothing’,” p. 146. Or perhaps the portion of Eichmann’s interrogation in which he described his “emigration” activities in Vienna. “One day Dr. Löwenherz [leader of the Viennese Jewish community] and some of his associates … suggested that I should … arrange to make things easier for Jewish petitioners. … The Israelite community was also present at the conveyor belt [that Eichmann devised to expedite emigration], represented by six to fourteen delegates, depending on the amount of business to be handled. … And I sent Dr. Löwenherz and other gentlemen, I don’t remember their names, abroad at regular intervals to work out new avenues of emigration and to bring back foreign currency by giving lectures, which they did.” Eichmann Interrogated, pp. 52-53. Again: “I had no difficulty with the Jewish functionaries… I just want to say that our collaboration at the Central Office was decently businesslike.” Ibid., p. 57. Again, referring to Storfer: “The man has always been decent, we worked together … we both held up our end.” Ibid., p. 150. 44 Eichmann Interrogated, p. 162.

which he said things that it should have been obvious would horrify and infuriate the

judges and onlookers – obvious, that is, had Eichmann been able to hear what he was

saying through their ears.45

Notice that this inability to think from others’ point of view has nothing to do

with whether Eichmann was lying. Even if we suspect he was lying about trying to rescue

Storfer from Auschwitz, the fact that he would call their last conversation a “normal

human encounter” and expect Israelis to agree shows incredible obtuseness. If, as some

believe, his trial testimony was from start to finish a calculated misdirection to save his

neck, it only reinforces Arendt’s conclusion that being clever and calculating is entirely

consistent with the inability to think. Of course, if his Storfer story was true, he was

doubly thoughtless: first by believing that Storfer in Auschwitz was “very pleased” with

the outcome of Eichmann’s intervention, and second by believing his Israeli interrogator

might sympathize with him because he tried to rescue Storfer.

These examples illustrate quite clearly what Arendt means by Eichmann’s

inability to think from the point of view of others. Recall, though, that she also connects

his inability to think with an inability to speak. What most struck her about Eichmann’s

testimony was his unbearable incapacity to employ anything other than slogans,

bureaucratic jargon, clichés, and expressions repeated so often and so literally that they

became the functional equivalent of clichés. “‘Officialese is my only language’,” he

apologized at one point.46 Eichmann described the “extraordinary sense of elation” one of

his slogans gave him, and Arendt remarks that “you could almost see what an

‘extraordinary sense of elation’ it gave to the speaker the moment [any cliché] popped out

45 Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, pp. 110-12, 163-64. 46 Ibid.

of his mouth.”47 Each period of Eichmann’s life had its own stock phrases to elate him,

and it never bothered him if the phrases contradicted each other. During his interrogation,

Eichmann explained melodramatically that he would never, ever again take an oath,

including the witness’ oath in a courtroom – and then, when the judges gave him the

choice of whether or not to testify under oath, he promptly chose the oath.48 When the

Nazi journalist Sassen interviewed him before his capture, Eichmann recalled his end-of-

the-war farewell speech to his men in which he declared that he would jump into his

grave laughing at the thought of the five million Jews he had shipped to their death (a

horrifying comment that Arendt, rightly or wrongly, dismisses as “sheer

rodomontade”).49 Then, in Israeli custody, he announced, “I shall gladly hang myself in

public as a warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth.”50 Arendt remarks with

some astonishment, “In his mind, there was no contradiction between ‘I shall jump into

my grave laughing,’ appropriate for the end of the war, and ‘I shall gladly hang

myself...’, which now, under vastly different circumstances, fulfilled exactly the same

function of giving him a lift.”51

47 EJ, 47, 53. 48 EJ, 54-55. Eichmann’s insistence that he would never take an oath, including a witnesses’ oath in court, is in Eichmann Interrogated, p. 198. In addition to the contradiction Arendt noticed, Eichmann had earlier told his interrogator that he would swear an oath that he never discussed gassing Jews with the commandant of Auschwitz, contrary to the latter’s assertion. Ibid., p. 86. 49 EJ, 46. This, in fact, was the phrase that gave Eichmann his extraordinary sense of elation. “Eichmann’s Own Story: Part II,” p. 150. Arendt seems to take Eichmann’s own explanation at face value: when his interrogator confronted him with these words from his farewell speech to his men as the Third Reich collapsed, Eichmann stammered out: “That is … theater, theater! … That was my … my, my last speech, my last speech to my men … my … my summation in the … in the … how shall I put it … in the apocalyptic situation.” Eichmann Interrogated, p. 164. Earlier he had also called it “my brief – hmm, how shall I put it? – apocalyptic speech.” Ibid., p. 110. Characteristically, Eichmann then proceeds to deny he ever said it. “That sentence is not at all my style. … My men would have taken me for a megalomaniac, because they knew I hadn’t killed five million Jews.” Ibid., p. 165. Yet the sentence is a direct quote from Eichmann in his interview with Sassen. 50 EJ, 53. 51 EJ, 53-54. The “lift” is not only Arendt’s perception; Bettina Stangneth also notes occasions when Eichmann “writes himself into a state of euphoria.” Eichmann Before Jerusalem, p. 204. See §6 below for further discussion.

Even at his execution, Eichmann's “grotesque silliness” stayed with him; as

Arendt bitingly puts it, “He was in complete command of himself, nay, he was more: he

was completely himself.”52 First he announced that he was a Gottgläubiger, Nazi jargon

for a deist who doesn’t believe in the afterlife, and then he continued, “After a short

while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again.” He concluded with a peroration: “Long live

Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.” Arendt

comments:

In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the

gallows, his memory played him the last trick; he was “elated” and he forgot that

this was his own funeral.

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that

this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome,

word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.53

But what does Eichmann’s penchant for “elating” clichés have to do with inability

to think from another’s point of view? Arendt’s idea is this: “No communication was

possible with him, not because he lied [although she recognized that quite often he did]

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.”54

Eichmann, in her diagnosis, was something akin to a solipsist of the present

moment. Self-insulated from the reality of others, all he could immediately call on was

the stream of his own affects — and that is why, in altered circumstances, contradictory

phrases could “fulfill exactly the same function of giving him a lift.” Lift trumped logic.

52 EJ, 252. 53 EJ, 252. 54 EJ, 49.

Arendt observes that Eichmann’s memory of the major events in the war was

conspicuously faulty, except when he could associate them with major events in his own

career, events that elated him.55 Eichmann’s memory was little more than the memory of

his personal milestones, and he could articulate these only through the stock phrases he

associated with them at the time. His inability to speak was a symptom of a lack of

psychological integrity, and Arendt’s thesis is that unless an individual can think from the

standpoint of somebody else, the individual has no psychological integrity. It is precisely

the ability to place ourselves as just one self among many that allows us to differentiate

the self from its momentary affects.

Oddly enough, to be one individual, a person must be capable of becoming two.

As she argued in a 1971 essay, “For myself, articulating this being-conscious-of-myself, I

am inevitably two-in-one....”56 She exploits the etymological relationship between

“conscience” and “consciousness”: both derive from “con-scientia,” to know-with. The

etymology itself recognizes that conscience and consciousness take the form of an inner

dialogue, a division of the self into two distinct voices. The inability to speak with

oneself and the inability to speak with others both arise from the fundamental inability to

“think, namely, ... think from the standpoint of somebody else.”57

It is easy to see why Arendt would conclude that Eichmann was a moral

chameleon. Whatever situation he was in, he made the slogans and opinions of those

above and around him his own convictions. Apart from “an extraordinary diligence in

looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all” – by which she

55 EJ, 53, 81-82. 56 “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” p. 442. I examine this idea in greater depth in Chapters 3 and 5. 57 EJ, 49.

evidently means motives arising from deep-seated convictions.58 To switch metaphors,

Eichmann’s personality was fundamentally invertebrate, and the convictions of those

above and around him provided the exoskeleton that held it intact. (Whether Arendt got

any of this right is deeply contested, and I consider the question in §5 and §6.)

“No motives at all” is hyperbole even by Arendt’s own account, for she

emphasizes that Eichmann took his oath of loyalty to the Führer very seriously, and

indeed believed that his faithfulness to the oath redeemed him as a moral man.59 But in

fact even this motive mirrors a cliché he got from others – for it happens to be the motto

of the SS: “My honor is named loyalty” (meine Ehre heißt Treue). Recognizing this

reinforces Arendt’s conclusion that Eichmann drew his convictions entirely from the

social world he inhabited at any given time.

§3. Banality and Kitsch

Why call this complex of traits “banality”? It is not the most obvious word to

describe inability to speak in one’s own words and to think from the standpoint of others.

Arendt was convinced that these two failings were crucial to Eichmann’s moral

psychology. Yet labeling Eichmann “banal” sounds like an aesthetic judgment and not a

moral or psychological one.

Perhaps Arendt remembered a line from Joseph Conrad, a writer she admired.

Commenting on one of his own fictional Russian terrorists, Conrad wrote, “What

troubled me most in dealing with him was not his monstrosity but his banality.”60 Even

more likely, Arendt may have recalled a letter Jaspers wrote her in 1946, in which he

58 EJ, 287. 59 EJ, 146-49. In his prison cell, Eichmann wrote a lengthy memoir, which he titled Götzen (idols), the theme of which is that he swore loyalty to gods, only to discover they were mere idols. 60 Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1921): lxi.

protested attributing any kind of demonic greatness to the Nazis. Jaspers wrote, “we have

to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what

truly characterizes them. Bacteria can cause epidemics that wipe out entire nations, but

they remain bacteria.”61 Jaspers’s diagnosis and his word may well have lodged in

Arendt’s memory.

I think her word choice is less fortuitous than these suggestions suppose. One

fruitful way to connect banality with Eichmann’s thoughtlessness and cliché-ridden

speech is by focusing on a particular verbal tic of Eichmann’s that caught Arendt’s

attention. Eichmann used the idiom “winged words” (geflügelte Worte) — meaning

famous sayings that have passed into common speech—to refer to stock phrases and

slogans.62 This misuse of the idiom is, among other sins, an aesthetic misjudgment. To

mistake political slogans for literary epigrams shows – to put it mildly – bad taste. It

exemplifies bad judgment in the realm of aesthetics rather than morality or politics.

There is a name for this aesthetic phenomenon: kitsch. Slogans are to genuine

epigrams as kitsch is to art, and Eichmann’s use of “winged words” to describe slogans is

itself linguistic kitsch. Eichmann’s own memoir style was notably kitschy. He wasn’t

born – he “entered life on earth in the aspect of a human being”; and “in the hour of my

birth the Norn of misfortune, to spite the Norn of good fortune, was already spinning

threads of grief and sorrow into my life.”63 “How much time fate allows me to live, I do

61 Jaspers to Arendt, October 19, 1946, in Arendt-Jaspers Correspondence, p. 62. 62 EJ, 48. Arendt called Eichmann’s mistake “funny” – but only because “the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny.” The phrase “geflügelte Worte” became common when the 19th century philologist Georg Büchmann published a handy “treasury” of literary quotations entitled Geflügelte Worte, Der Zitatenschatz des Deutschen Volkes (1864). 63 Quoted in EJ, 27-28, from excerpts of Götzen published by Harry Mulisch. When Arendt wrote, Götzen had not yet been released by the Israeli authorities. It is now available on the Internet.

not know.”64 “The voice of my heart, which no man can escape, constantly whispered the

search for peace to me.” “I am beginning to tire of living between worlds, as an

anonymous wanderer in a ‘submarine.’”65 Kitsch is clichéd sentiment that presents itself

as deep and important. Understood this way – and this understanding is common ground

among all aesthetic definitions of kitsch – kitsch is a conspicuous form of banality, so

much so that “banal” and “kitschy” are often interchangeable descriptions of art works. In

Eichmann’s musings, and his perception of political slogans as literary quotations, we

have textbook manifestations of banality.

In itself, banality in aesthetic taste hardly qualifies as banality of evil. Who cares

if Eichmann had kitschy taste? The bridge between the aesthetic and moral comes when

we remember that the kitsch that elated Eichmann was not innocuous mass-produced

porcelain Pietàs or Maxfield Parrish prints. It was Nazi agitprop and SS catchwords:

“finance Jewry,” “endurance,” “harshness!” (as Eichmann explained, “an SS man was

expected to be harsh on himself and others”). Eichmann described all of these as “winged

words.” (He also called them “proverbs” (Sprüche).66) Of course slogans, like rallies,

pageantry, and other political kitsch were a deliberate and much-remarked Nazi

propaganda strategy. In Nazi hands, kitsch became an instrument of evil.

64 “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story,” Life 49, no. 22 (Nov. 28, 1960), p. 21 (quoting Eichmann from the Sassen interviews). 65 These last two are quoted in Stangneth, pp. 199, 200, from Eichmann’s 1956 notes. Stangneth observes that Eichmann had “an astonishing talent for nonsensical mixed metaphors.” Ibid., p. 199. 66 Finance Jewry (Finanzjudentum): Götzen, p. 101. This is a phrase of unusually sinister history: Hitler, in a Reichstag speech of January 30, 1939, said, “If international Finanzjudentum in and outside Europe should succeed in once again plunging the nations into a world war, then the result will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” Harshness (Härte) and endurance (Durchhaltevermögen, ability to hold out): Eichmann Interrogated, p. 157. As Eichmann explained, “these maxims (Sprüche) – as we called them – of Himmler’s, usually made their appearance around the turn of the year. At that time, new winged words always caught on.” Ibid. (Here I have substituted “winged words” – the literal text – for the translator’s “catchwords.”)

This would come as no surprise to the major theorists of kitsch, all of whom

viewed kitsch as a moral and political phenomenon, not only an aesthetic one. For

Hermann Broch, “the evil in art is kitsch,” and Clement Greenberg declared that kitsch

represents “all that is spurious in the life of our times.”67 Theodor Adorno objected to pop

music that its song forms are completely standardized, so every detail (the hook, the

chorus, the bridge, the changes, the words) becomes an interchangeable “cog in a

machine” (Adorno’s phrase). The result is a listening experience “manipulated … into a

system of response mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a

liberal, free society.”68

The outlier among these moralistic critics of kitsch was Walter Benjamin, who

rejected the nineteenth century contrast between high and low art, and who thought the

energy in kitsch might provide mass access to repressed experiences.69 But for Benjamin

too, the phenomenon of kitsch was political as much as aesthetic; and his famous

description of fascism as politics made aesthetic was his horrified realization that it was

Nazi propagandists, not socialist revolutionaries, who were successfully using kitsch to

mobilize mass political support. Nazi kitsch, including the “fascist sublime” in the mass

rallies that gave participants the thrill of losing themselves in something great and vast

was not, to say the least, the kind of repressed energy Benjamin hoped low art might

arouse.

67 Hermann Broch, “Evil in the Value-System of Art,” in Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age (Counterpoint, 2003), p. 5; Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture (Beacon Press: 1961), p. 10. 68 Theodor W. Adorno, with the assistance of George Simpson, “On Popular Music,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, New York: Institute of Social Research, 1941, IX, 17-48; available at http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/SWA/On_popular_music_1.shtml. 69 Benjamin wrote about kitsch in several places; for references and helpful discussion, see Winfried Menninghaus, “On the ‘Vital Significance’ of Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of Bad Taste,” in Andrew E. Benjamin & Charles Rice (eds.), Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity (re.press, 2009), pp. 39-58.

Adorno, Benjamin, Broch, and Greenberg were the pioneering theorists of kitsch,

and Arendt was intimately familiar with their ideas. Arendt and Greenberg belonged to

the same circle of New York intellectuals, and Benjamin and Broch were close friends of

hers, about whom she wrote perceptive appreciations.70 As for Adorno, she had known

(and disliked, and mistrusted) him since they met in Frankfurt in 1929.71

Arendt offers her own views on kitsch in “The Crisis of Culture.” Unlike

Greenberg and Adorno, she has no objection to the mass entertainment industry, and she

accuses intellectuals who deny they enjoy the same entertainments as the masses of

deluded snobbery. But she fears that when objects of high culture are “rewritten,

condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies,”

the result is “culture … being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.”72

This matters not because of some supposed political danger in entertainment, but

because artworks serve a political purpose that their reduction to kitsch jeopardizes. By

its nature, good art poses challenges to its audience that invite discussion with others.

Doing so, it creates a miniature society of plural opinions, when we discover through give

and take with others that we don’t all respond to the same plays and novels in the same

way. For Arendt, discussion with others whose opinions differ from ours, including

discussion of art and matters of taste, is the vital political activity. What bothers her about

kitschified versions of high art is their instant emotional availability, which takes away

the need for arguing with others about artworks. Kitsch simplifies to allow only one 70 Included in Men in Dark Times. Indeed, it was Arendt who edited the volume of Broch’s complete works that included his essays on kitsch; she also edited the first English-language anthology of Benjamin’s essays. Hermann Broch, Dichten und Erkennen: Essays I, ed. and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, in Broch’s Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6 (Zürich: Rein, 1955). Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969). 71 Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 80, 82, 166-67. 72 BPF, p. 204.

response; here, at least, she agrees with Adorno. The kitschification of culture is at once

culture-destroying and plurality-destroying.

Her essay on culture is one of the earliest places where Arendt works out ideas

about the close connection between aesthetic judgment and other forms of judgment. One

unorthodox claim she advances there, that Kant’s book on aesthetics forms the core of his

political philosophy, became central to her later thinking. It was in the Critique of

Judgment that Kant set out what he called the three “maxims of common human

understanding”: to think for oneself, to think “from the standpoint of everyone else,” and

to think consistently.73 The second, which Kant called the maxim of “enlarged thought,”

especially caught Arendt’s attention – and of course, her diagnosis of Eichmann’s

thoughtlessness is precisely that he seemed incapable of enlarged thought in Kant’s

sense. Discussing artworks – say, the movie you and your friends have just seen together

– not only gets us to notice things we missed, it also gets us to appreciate that other

people don’t see things the same way we do. Furthermore, in those animated and highly

enjoyable arguments about novels and plays and movies we can never compel others to

agree with us. Rather, “the judging person—as Kant says quite beautifully—can only

‘woo the consent of everyone else’ in the hope of coming to an agreement with him

eventually.”74 Wooing rather than proving is a kind of persuasion, “the typically political

form of people talking with one another … where it is not knowledge or truth which is at

stake, but rather judgment and decision.”75 Complex art invites multiple interpretations

and therefore multiple opinions; wooing the consent of others requires give and take; and

the give and take of opinions hones our own judgment.

73 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, §40. 74 “The Crisis in Culture,” p. __, quoting §19 of the Critique of Judgment. 75 Ibid.

Kitsch, manipulating all of us to experience the same emotions, reduces that

plurality of opinion and erodes human difference. The taste for kitsch is a taste for

uniformly shared pleasures marching in lock-step. It provides the undeniable lift of

having others reinforce our own experience, but by doing so it takes away the need to

think for ourselves (in violation of Kant’s first maxim, to think for yourself, which he

labeled the “maxim of unprejudiced thought” and which in his view is the very definition

of enlightenment); and that lift, or group emotional high, stimulates unthinking

conformism. That was the overt aim of the Nuremberg rallies so memorably captured in

Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda documentary Triumph of the Will. In that way, the

banality of kitsch provides the raw material for the banality of evil.

It matters for Arendt, as it did for Kant, that judgments of taste are cognitive, but

cannot be proved. As we shall see, she identifies the faculty of moral judgment as the

ability to discern right from wrong non-inferentially, and in her view aesthetic judgments

of taste are a paradigm example of non-inferential judgments that nevertheless lay claim

to general validity – one of the cornerstone claims of Kant’s aesthetic theory.76

Of course, the analogy between aesthetic and moral judgment cannot be pushed

too far. Moral judgment is not the same thing as aesthetic judgment, and later we will

have to consider their similarities and differences with care. But Kant’s three maxims

don’t by their terms limit themselves to aesthetic judgment, and it’s the maxims that

matter. Thinking for yourself, thinking from the point of view of others, and thinking

76 The fact that a judgment is non-inferential – in the literal sense that we form it without reasoning our way to it – does not mean it can’t be argued about. Even perceptual judgments can be challenged, and when someone challenges a non-inferential judgment we can respond by citing reasons (“I was looking right at it and the light was good”). In the aesthetic realm, providing reasons to back our judgments is the characteristic function of art criticism.

consistently turn out to be intellectual virtues central to moral judgment – or so she hopes

to show.

All of which is to say that talking about the banality of evil is not simply the

category mistake of judging morality through the lens of aesthetics, undoubtedly a

common failing among intellectuals. Arendt chose the word because the particular kind

of banality she saw in Eichmann was a symptom of traits that made him a moral

chameleon and undermined his moral compass.

§4. How Much Would It Matter if Arendt Got Eichmann Wrong?

From the beginning, Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann was controversial, and many

commentators think Eichmann completely fooled her into believing he was something

other than he was: a devoted Nazi fully committed to the mass murder of the Jewish

people. Eichmann offered an “I was only a cog in the machine” defense, and while

Arendt steadfastly rejects the defense, she appears to think Eichmann believed it. What if

it turns out that Eichmann cynically contrived the defense for trial purposes, and in reality

never saw himself as a mere cog in a machine? What if the Eichmann Arendt saw in

Jerusalem was a clever façade adopted purely for the trial? That is the diagnosis of

Bettina Stangneth, in her deeply researched Eichmann Before Jerusalem:

Hannah Arendt read about Adolf Eichmann in the newspapers for the first time in

1943 at the latest, and eighteen years later she was familiar with all the research

on him. … She read the transcripts of his hearing and the trial more thoroughly

than almost anyone else. And for this very reason, she fell into his trap:

Eichmann-in-Jerusalem was little more than a mask. She didn’t recognize it,

although she was acutely aware that she had not understood the phenomenon as

well as she had hoped.77

In their own book-length studies, historians David Cesarani and Deborah Lipstadt

concur that Arendt was deeply mistaken about Eichmann.78 Suppose they are right. (I

take up that question in the next two sections.) What difference would that make?

Obviously, it would immeasurably weaken Eichmann in Jerusalem as a reliable piece of

Holocaust history. Arendt’s narrative of the trial itself would remain valuable as a

contemporaneous account by a reporter with, in Stangneth’s words, “a gift for acute

observation”;79 but Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann would matter only as a cautionary

lesson that skillful acting can fool even an acute observer.

But Eichmann in Jerusalem is not only a historical work. It is also a study in

moral psychology, and it was the genesis of the moral and legal philosophy Arendt

developed in her final decade. How would those be affected if Arendt got Eichmann

wrong?

One answer is: not at all. Arendt’s investigations of moral phenomena may have

been inspired by the Eichmann case, but it is silly to think they rest on it, or indeed on

any single case. Tellingly, Eichmann receives no attention in The Life of the Mind or the

key essays “Thinking and Moral Considerations” and “Some Questions of Moral

Philosophy”; she mentions him only incidentally, to explain what got her thinking about

77 Stangneth, pp. xxii, xxiii. The “hearing” Stangneth refers to is Eichmann’s 275-hour interrogation by the Israeli police captain Avner W. Less, from which Arendt draws throughout EJ. See Eichmann Interrogated.

Stangneth knows that Arendt had heard of Eichmann by 1943 at the latest because that year Arendt wrote a letter to the editor responding to a newspaper story about Theresienstadt that named Eichmann as the “Gestapo Kommissar who terrorized the Jewish community in Prague.” Stangneth, pp. 36-37. 78 David Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer” (2006); Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial. 79Stangneth, p. xxiii.

the philosophical themes these works pursue. None of her arguments rest on Eichmann,

as, in philosophy, none of them should. Philosophy stands or falls on the strength of its

insights and arguments, not on whether some particular individual exemplifies them.

Although that answer is fundamentally right, it is not fully satisfying. The

philosophy, remember, represents Arendt’s effort to answer the Kantian quaestio juris of

what entitles her to the concept “banality of evil,” given that she has encountered it as a

fact. If the fact is no fact, the urgency of the question recedes; perhaps, indeed, there is no

question that needs to be answered.

Of course, even if Eichmann was not the banal evildoer Arendt thought he was, it

may well be that others were (and are). But then we would need to know whether those

others shared the trait Arendt singled out in Eichmann: the inability to think from the

standpoint of others, generating the “moral chameleon” phenomenon and loss of moral

compass. Part of her philosophical proposal is that these phenomena hang together in an

intelligible moral structure; and while that proposal draws on philosophical materials

other than the Eichmann case, her diagnosis of Eichmann undeniably helps anchor the

argument by keeping it real. Furthermore, the claim that even a high-level active overseer

of the genocidal enterprise – “one of the greatest criminals of that period”80 – might

exemplify banality of evil has independent interest, because on its face it seems so

unlikely. Maybe it seems unlikely because it’s wrong.

The discovery that Arendt got Eichmann wrong would be even more damaging to

one of her legal conclusions, namely that the ground of his culpability cannot lie in his

awareness of wrongdoing (his mens rea). Her proposition is that “this new type of

criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under 80 EJ, p. 288.

circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is

doing wrong.”81 Recall that she describes Eichmann as “an average, ‘normal’ person,

neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical” who nonetheless “could be perfectly

incapable of telling right from wrong.”82 If it turns out that Eichmann was indoctrinated

and cynical, the challenge to fundamental principles of culpability that reflection on his

case discloses may not be as urgent as she believes.

In sum: if it turns out that Eichmann fooled Arendt, it would make little difference

to her philosophical arguments, but it would weaken some of her most striking ancillary

conclusions.

With these thoughts in mind, consider four possible readings of Eichmann in

Jerusalem (which I list from the least to the most sympathetic):

1. Arendt got Eichmann thoroughly wrong, and that invalidates – or, at the very

least, fails to confirm – the ideas in the book.

2. Even if her diagnosis of Eichmann was wrong, it is right about enough other

perpetrators that the banality of evil idea remains singularly important. Perhaps

Eichmann was not the “ordinary man” Arendt thought he was; plenty of other

génocidaires were.83 And not only in Nazi Germany: legal scholar Mark Drumbl

has argued in an Arendtian vein that a great many of the perpetrators of the

Rwanda genocide were “good citizens” doing what their leaders told them was

their patriotic duty.84 Or, to take another example, it is hard to see the murderous

81 EJ, p. 276. 82 EJ, p. 26. 83 The reference, of course, is to Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 84 Mark Drumbl, Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law (Cambridge University Press: 2007). For a more skeptical view of Arendt’s sociology of mass atrocity, see Mark J. Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Ordinary Evil, and Hannah Arendt: Criminal Consciousness in Argentina’s Dirty War (Yale University Press, 2001).

protagonists in Joshua Oppenheimer’s astonishing documentary The Act of

Killing, about the mass exterminations in Indonesia in 1965, as anything more

than the banality of evil brought to life – in Arendt’s terms, not monsters but

clowns.

3. Arendt got Eichmann largely right. She may have underestimated his vainglory

and ambition as well as his Nazi outlook, but these are mistakes of emphasis in a

moral-psychological portrait that is fundamentally sound.

Perhaps the most interesting reading is this:

4. Whether Arendt got Eichmann right is unknowable for a reason she got right.

Under her diagnosis, Eichmann was a moral chameleon. When he was in the

company of Nazis, including the Nazi ex-pat community in Argentina, his colors

turned toward vicious anti-Semitism. He drew his self-recognition from their

recognition, and that is why he puffed up his ideological boasting, including his

momentary commitment to what he was saying, when he gave the notorious and

damning interviews to SS journalist Willem Sassen in Buenos Aires. But that

does not imply that the Eichmann of the Sassen inteviews was the “real”

Eichmann while the Eichmann-in-Jerusalem was an imposter. Both were equally

real or, perhaps more accurately, equally unreal.85

I suspect that (2) is correct: even if Eichmann turns out not to be the stereotypical

“desk criminal” (Schreibtischtäter), there were and are plenty of desk criminals in the

world, committing greater and lesser crimes. (Arendt, by the way, never uses the terms

“desk criminal” or “desk murderer”). But, as noted earlier, one would also want to know

85 The unabridged Sassen transcripts are Stangneth’s chief trove of evidence; Arendt knew of their existence, but she was able to read only the excerpts printed in Life magazine in 1960.

whether a significant number of them display the constellation of traits Arendt thought

she saw in Eichmann and called “banality of evil”; and this is something nobody has

investigated and would be empirically challenging to investigate. If Arendt’s philosophy

is sound, that might itself offers reasons for accepting (2) – and that would not be a

circular argument, precisely because Arendt does not rest the philosophy on the

Eichmann case. Reading (2) would be enough to make the philosophy worth studying

regardless of whether Arendt got Eichmann right or wrong.

My own assessment combines elements of (3) and (4). For reasons set out in the

next two sections, I think Arendt very likely got Eichmann right on the most significant

points, notwithstanding errors in emphasis; but at the very least, she makes out a strong

enough case for the “moral chameleon” diagnosis to conclude there may be no “true

Eichmann” to get right. And that itself would support the concept “banality of evil.”

§5 How Banal Was Eichmann?

Eichmann may be a riddle, but he was no Sphinx. As Stangneth explains,

Eichmann was acutely logorrheic; he produced reams of memoirs, self-vindications,

philosophical pronouncements, even theological forays. In prison, his output sometimes

reached eighty pages a day, and he was still writing letters on the day of his execution.

His oral style, Stangneth reports, was incessant monologue, and even his German lawyer

found his German hard to follow; his written style was convoluted and packed with

clumsy, “elevated” mixed metaphors (which I described earlier as kitsch).

His memoirs, interrogation, and testimony remain a riddle because Eichmann was

the ultimate unreliable narrator. Before and during the war, he inflated his own

importance; in Jerusalem, for obvious reasons, he minimized it. Sometimes he did both at

once. Thus, in his Argentinian conversations with Sassen and his Nazi circle, we find

Eichmann voicing eternal devotion to the war of extermination against the Jewish enemy,

using undiluted Nazi rhetoric, yet simultaneously insisting that he was merely a little cog

in the machinery.86 Did he call himself a cog because he was already laying the

groundwork for a future defense, or because he believed it? Were his vicious racial views

puffery for the imagined readers of the Nazi publication Sassen had in mind, or did he

really see himself as an all-out warrior against the Jews? In Jerusalem, he denied that he

was an anti-Semite, and likened his attitude as a “warrior” to that of a combat soldier who

has nothing personal against the enemies he is ordered to kill. Could there possibly be

any truth to that? His various versions of his story are replete with factual errors; which

ones are deliberate lies and which are honest mistakes is sometimes hard to say.87 And

the versions contradict each other.

As for his lies, they are frequent and mostly obvious, and they were obvious to

Arendt as well as the Jerusalem judges. Others were more subtle and went undetected

until Stangneth smoked them out.88 His prison memoir Götzen (Idols) laments that he had

served false gods – just the opposite of his declarations of Nazi devotion in Argentina.89

Is Götzen a last-ditch fiction to wrest a merciful decree from his judges or a genuine

86 “In actual fact, I was a little cog in the machinery that carried out the directives and orders of the German Reich. I am neither a murderer nor a mass-murderer. I am a man of average character, with good qualities and many faults. I was not the ‘Czar of the Jews,’ as a Paris newspaper once called me, nor was I responsible for all the good [sic] and evil deeds done against them. Where I was implicated in the physical annihilation of the Jews, I admit my participation freely and without pressure. After all, I was the one who transported the Jews to the camps. If I had not transported them, they would not have been delivered to the butcher.” “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story,” part 1, p. 21. 87 For example, in his interrogation he refers to Benjamin Murmelstein, one of the Jewish leaders in Vienna, as a rabbi in Prague. Eichmann Interrogated, p. 58. Eichmann had no obvious reason to lie; nothing of consequence turned on whether Murmelstein was from Prague or Vienna. Did Eichmann misremember? Misspeak? Or was he deliberately seeding random factual errors into his story to maximize confusion? 88 For example, when Eichmann was asked who was present at the Sassen conversations, he covered for his old comrades by giving the names of people who weren’t there in place of those who were. 89 Stangneth notes that Götzen “reads like a counterargument” to one of his Argentine memoirs. P. 232.

change in outlook, and if the latter, how long had he harbored it? Were his invocations of

Kant at his trial a revealing window into his conception of duty, as Arendt thought, or a

confession that he always knew he was doing wrong, as Lipstadt concludes, or an out-

and-out lie, as Stangneth argues?90

Or did he, as Arendt would have it, say and write whatever gave him a lift at each

moment, indifferent to its truth — changing his chameleon’s colors and scattering truth

and lies in response to his surroundings and whatever he imagined were his audience’s

expectations? In Harry Frankfurt’s memorable definition, bullshit is speech in which the

speaker doesn’t care if it is true or false.91 Was Eichmann bullshitting as well as lying,

and if so at what points? Might he have been bullshitting himself as well as others? For

that matter, Eichmann’s views may have changed over three decades – most people’s do

– with his latter-day views distorting his memories. Distinguishing truth from falsehood

is hard enough; discriminating within the category of the false to sort out deliberate lies

from boasting, unconscious memory revisions, errors, changes in view, and sheer bullshit

is harder still. It is an interpretive and not purely investigative challenge.92

Compounding the problem, Stangneth and Lipstadt emphasize that those who

worked with Eichmann during the Nazi years were also unreliable narrators. Even before

the war ended they realized that the more they could distance themselves from Eichmann

and pin every crime on him, the better their own chances for post-war rehabilitation (not

to mention survival). Their testimony cannot be trusted. Nor can other sources. Sassen

90 EJ, 135-36; Lipstadt, p. 135; Stangneth, pp. 217-18. 91 Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 47. 92 For example, Stangneth regards Götzen as a ruse designed to convince the Jews that Eichmann had converted to humanitarianism (Eichmann Before Jerusalem, p. 367), whereas Lipstadt does not find Götzen humanitarian at all. Quite the contrary, she sees it as a damning piece of evidence against Eichmann. The Eichmann Trial, p. 164. This disagreement between two careful historians (who both think Arendt got Eichmann wrong) illustrates that Eichmann’s texts are anything but self-interpreting.

had his own agenda of denying the “myth of six million” in order to further a Nazi

renaissance and Fourth Reich. Presumably, Eichmann’s family had ulterior agendas as

well, financial and otherwise. (They are still hanging on to one of his Argentina

manuscripts until someone meets their sale price.)

For an example of the difficulty, Eichmann’s wife Vera recalls that when she

arrived in Argentina in 1952 with German news clippings describing her husband as a

mass murderer, Eichmann exclaimed “They’ve gone mad, I’m not a murderer, I won’t

stand for it. I’m going to go back to Germany.”93 This excited utterance might bolster

Arendt’s case that Eichmann could not tell right from wrong. But Vera Eichmann’s

recollection comes in a 1962 interview she gave to Paris Match. There is no way we can

know whether Eichmann really thought he was no murderer, nor whether Vera accurately

remembered his words ten years later, nor whether she was lying outright about what he

said, to burnish her husband’s image.

Those who conclude that Arendt got Eichmann wrong point to four issues: first,

that Eichmann gulled her into thinking he was stupid when he was anything but. Second,

that Arendt bought into his “I was only following orders” defense, when in fact he was an

active agent and tireless initiator of anti-Jewish horrors. Third, that Arendt portrayed

Eichmann as a petty bureaucrat and “writing desk murderer,” as he misleadingly

portrayed himself. Fourth, that Arendt wrongly believed Eichmann when he said he was

no anti-Semite; in reality, he had quaffed deeply from the cup of Nazi eliminationist anti-

Semitism. Even if Arendt drew reasonable conclusions from the information available to

her at the time of the trial, half a century of additional research has unearthed a great deal

more that establishes Eichmann’s true ideological colors as a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi. The 93 Stangneth, p. 121.

new information includes, in particular, the tapes and unabridged transcripts of the Sassen

conversations, a large chunk of a 1956 autobiographical manuscript, and a great deal

more information about his continuing involvement in Nazi circles during his years in

hiding. I consider the first three points in this section, and the final point, which requires

lengthier treatment, in the section that follows.

The first criticism, that Arendt thought Eichmann was stupid, is one I alluded to

earlier as a misunderstanding; but it is so persistent, and seeing it is wrong is so central to

understanding Arendt’s philosophy, that I take it up again. The source of the error lies in

Arendt’s crucial description of Eichmann’s affliction as inability to think, which may

easily be mistaken for charging him with low intellect. Mary McCarthy, who often

advised Arendt on English usage, warned her that “thoughtlessness … doesn’t mean what

you want it to mean in English.”94 Remember that what Arendt means by thinking is not

computational power, but the ability to think from the standpoint of others, and therefore

to engage in inner dialogue and reflection.

McCarthy rightly guessed that Arendt’s word choice would mislead her readers.

Amos Elon, in an otherwise-accurate summary of Arendt’s views, equates

“thoughtlessness” with “brainlessness.”95 Richard Evans refers to “Arendt’s belief that

Eichmann was unintelligent.”96 Richard Wolin complains that “[b]y underestimating

Eichmann’s intellect, Arendt also misjudged the magnitude of his criminality.”97 As

brilliant a scholar as Tony Judt wrote that “she argues that evil comes from a simple

failure to think. If this implies that evil is a function of stupidity, then Arendt is merely

94 McCarthy to Arendt, June 9, 1971, in BF 296. 95 Amos Elon, “The Case of Hannah Arendt,” New York Review of Books, Nov. 6, 1997, pp. 25-29. 96 Richard J. Evans, “ ‘Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer’ review, The Guardian, Oct. 17, 2014. 97 Wolin, “The Banality of Evil: The Demise of a Legend.”

indulging a tautology of her own making.”98 But the implication is not there, and neither

is the tautology.

Examples could be multiplied. That this criticism misunderstands Arendt is

already clear from Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she insisted that Eichmann “was not

stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness — something by no means identical with stupidity —

that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.”99 In

subsequent writing she repeats the point that “absence of thought is not stupidity; it can

be found in highly intelligent people.”100 This is plain text. Perhaps Arendt’s critics

overlook it because it seems counterintuitive: what could absence of thought mean if not

stupidity? Much of Thinking is an effort to answer that question and justify the distinction

between thinking and other intellectual powers; examining this answer will be the job of

Chapter Five below.

98 Tony Judt, "At Home in This Century," New York Review of Books, April 6, 1995, p. 10. 99 EJ, 277-78. 100 Arendt, Thinking, vol. 1 of The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), p. 13. Wolin appears to be misled by a 1964 interview in which Arendt referred to Eichmann’s “outrageous stupidity” (or, in Wolin’s translation of empörender Dummheit, “revolting stupidity”). But he overlooks her next sentence: “Eichmann was perfectly intelligent, but in this respect [i.e., inability to think from another’s point of view] he was stupid. It was this stupidity that was so outrageous.” “Eichmann Was Outrageously Stupid”: Interview by Joachim Fest, Das Thema, SWR TV, Germany, Nov. 9, 1964, trans. by Andrew Brown, in Hannah Arendt, The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Melville House: 2013), p. 48. Wolin also misses the fact that when Arendt asks, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, whether Eichmann was afflicted with “outrageous stupidity”(EJ, 51), her answer is no. Rather, “Eichmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and that he was not deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony. And that German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s mentality.” EJ, 52. Obviously, she is not suggesting that all eighty million Germans were of sub-par intelligence – rather, that “the practice of self-deception had become … almost a moral prerequisite for survival” in the Third Reich, so much so that “it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.” Ibid. A few years after this interview, McCarthy wrote to Arendt that, while she agrees that “stupidity is not the same as having a low I.Q.,” nevertheless “I would have said that Eichmann was profoundly, egregiously stupid...” (McCarthy to Arendt, June 9, 1971, BF, 296). McCarthy explains:

Here I rather agree with Kant...that stupidity is caused, not by brain failure, but by a wicked heart. Insensitiveness, opacity, inability to make connections, often accompanied by low ‘animal’ cunning. One cannot help feeling that this mental oblivion is chosen, by the heart or the moral will -- an active preference, and that explains why one is so irritated by stupidity... (BF, 296).

What about the criticism that Eichmann exhibited a level of agency and initiative

that belied his “I was only following orders” defense (which he repeated ad nauseum in

both his interrogation and trial)? David Cesarani attributes to Arendt the view that

Eichmann engaged in “robot-like obedience to orders.”101 In the same vein, Lipstadt

writes that Arendt “saw an automaton who was just passing on information.”102

Actually not. Arendt’s view about Eichmann’s obedience to orders is substantially

more subtle, and more interesting, than that, and it emphasizes that obedience can involve

high levels of agency and initiative. What prompts her discussion is Eichmann’s

remarkable claim, in both his police interrogation and the trial, that he had tried to live his

life by Kant’s principles. He explained that he had read the Critique of Practical Reason,

and astonished the judges even further by quoting the categorical imperative more or less

correctly: “I meant by this that the principle of my volition and the principle of my life

must be such that it could at any time be raised to be the principle of general legislation,

as Kant more or less puts it in his categorical imperative.”103

Arendt notes how outrageous it was to invoke Kant in defense of blind obedience,

and suggests that in his own mind Eichmann had distorted the categorical imperative to

Hans Frank’s Nazi version: “Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action,

would approve it.”104 In Eichmann’s self-proclaimed version of the categorical

imperative “for the little man,” she explains,

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

101 David Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann, p. 12. 102 Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, p. 115. 103 Trial transcript, session 105, July 20, 1961, available at http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-105-04.html. 104 EJ, 135. Arendt says she is quoting from Frank’s 1942 Die Technik des Staates.

principle behind the law – the source from which the law sprang. In Kant’s

philosophy, that source was practical reason; in Eichmann’s household use of

him, it was the will of the Führer. Much of the horribly painstaking thoroughness

in the execution of the Final Solution … can be traced to the odd notion, indeed

very common in Germany, that to be law-abiding means not merely to obey the

laws but to act as though one were the legislator of the laws that one obeys. Hence

the conviction that nothing less than going beyond the call of duty will do.105

If she is right, there is no real contradiction between Eichmann’s admission that “I did my

job with unusual zeal. I’ve never denied that. I regarded my work as a binding duty” and

his insistence that he was only following orders – specifically, the Führer’s orders which,

as Eichmann correctly pointed out, had the force of law in the Third Reich.106

This conception of obedience as identification of one’s will with the superior’s is

perfectly consistent with active agency and initiative. Indeed, for someone in an

executive position it demands active agency and initiative. In this respect, at least,

“obedience to orders” differs decisively from the low-level execution of mechanical tasks

that was the subject of Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments, although those

may shed light on the behavior of low-ranking perpetrators.107

105 EJ, 136. Eichmann’s “categorical imperative for a small man’s domestic use” reads: “True to the law, obedient, a proper personal life, not to come into conflict with the law.” Trial transcript, session 105. 106 The quote about zeal is in Eichmann Interrogated, p. 156. For Eichmann’s invocation of the Nazi legal maxim Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft – the Führer’s words have the force of law -- see Eichmann Interrogated, p. 124; EJ, 148. Arendt fails to mention the source of this legal maxim, which Nazi lawyers took from the constitutional doctrine of the Roman empire: “What the Emperor has determined has the force of a statute” (quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem). Barry Nicholas, An Introduction to Roman Law (Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 17. 107 Cesarani complains that “Arendt’s assessment possessed almost scientific status thanks to Stanley Milgram’s ‘research’ on the propensity for obedience to orders.” P. 11. He is doubtless right that many writers conflate Arendt and Milgram – I have made that mistake myself – but it is a mistake. I am uncertain why Cesarani uses scare-quotes to refer to “Milgram’s ‘research’.” It obviously is research, and it is tremendously important. My point is simply that the kind of obedience Milgram studies is not the kind of obedience Arendt ascribes to Eichmann.

Whether or not Arendt is right that this conception of obedience as identification

with the superior’s will is common in Germany, it is certainly not unique to Germany, or

even unusual. Robert Jackall, in his sociological classic about American corporate

culture, explains that managers quickly learn the corporate adage that orders should be

followed in advance – precisely the model of obedience under discussion. The result is a

system where “even the CEO’s wishes and whims are taken as commands by close

subordinates on the corporate staff, who turn them into policies and directives....‘When

he sneezes, we all catch colds’.”108 In one sense, the manager is “just obeying orders”: he

has his mission, and his own inclinations are beside the point. But foot-dragging

acquiescence, or grudging, passive obedience won’t do. Ambitious managers don’t

merely work to rule; they aggressively pursue their bosses’ ends. That is why “overly

conscientious managers are particularly useful at the middle levels of the structure.

Upwardly mobile men and women...who find themselves in higher status milieux, seem

to have the requisite level of anxiety, and perhaps tightly controlled anger and hostility,

that fuels an obsession with detail.”109 (Let me repeat my earlier caution: this comparison

is not intended to suggest a moral equivalence between corporate managers and

Eichmann. The point is simply that the conception of obedience as active identification

with the leader’s will is not a quirky one.)

This is not to deny that Eichmann may also have had a predisposition to

obedience in the more familiar passive sense. When the Israelis captured him, he

requested permission to use the toilet; from behind the closed door he called out “May I

108 Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 21-22. 109 Ibid., p. 21. There is evidence of “tightly controlled anger and hostility” in Eichmann; see Lipstadt, pp. 116-17.

begin?” and waited for his captors’ go-ahead before moving his bowels.110 But there is no

inconsistency between this jaw-dropping deference and the active agency with which he

served Hitler’s will during the war.

As for the claim that Arendt wrongly believed that Eichmann was no more than a

petty bureaucrat and “writing desk perpetrator,” the simple answer is that she never

suggests anything of the sort.111 To be sure, Eichmann described himself this way as part

of his defense strategy.112 But remember that Arendt, by contrast, described him as one of

the greatest criminals of the period. She frequently mentions evidence at the trial about

Eichmann’s travels and negotiations, his activism, and his leadership of an “Eichmann

Commando” – evidence that clearly makes his insistence that “all our work was

paperwork” absurd.113 No wonder, then, that she never labels him a mere functionary or

petty bureaucrat, and never uses the phrase “desk perpetrator” or anything like it. She

does insist that his role in the Holocaust was not nearly as central as the prosecution

asserted, or that his own boasting made it out to be – but here the historians agree with

her. Eichmann (a lieutenant colonel) was five steps down the chain of command: Hitler,

Himmler, Heydrich, Müller, Eichmann. That is high enough to make him much more

than a mere accomplice (as he described himself), but not one of the architects of the

Holocaust. He was upper management but not leadership.

§6 How Banal Was Eichmann? (2): The Argentina Papers

110 Lipstadt, p. 17. This anecdote is oddly consonant with a vulgar corporate adage Jackall reports, used by managers to describe “how the power of CEOs … affects them. … ‘When he says “Go to the bathroom,” we all get the shits.’” Jackall, p. 22. 111 Even Lipstadt, mostly a careful reader and reliable reporter of Arendt’s views, errs on this point, writing “she declared him a desk-level bureaucrat who showed little initiative and had few talents.” The Eichmann Trial, p. 163. Arendt highlighted Eichmann’s special talents at organization and negotiation. EJ, 45. 112 Eichmann Interrogated, pp. 83, 113. 113 Ibid., p. 113.

The final doubt about Arendt’s conclusions is that Argentine documents

unavailable to Arendt unmistakably reveal Eichmann as a fanatical Nazi and unrepentant

anti-Semite. This is the most serious challenge to the banality of evil. Bettina Stangneth,

in particular, has done a remarkable job of assembling all the scattered evidence into a

single picture of an unapologetic Nazi with remarkable abilities to deceive people.114

Stangneth shows, first, that Eichmann planned his initial escape into hiding (in

northern Germany) with extraordinary cunning, including planting false information that

he had escaped to the Middle East. Second, she shows that he had extensive and

continuous involvement with Nazi networks that helped him escape to Argentina, and,

further, that during his Argentina years he was a familiar and well-known habitué of Nazi

circles who welcomed him, and were themselves welcomed by Argentinian leader Juan

Perón.115 Eichmann was anything but the lonely fugitive. These Nazi circles did more

than reminisce about the good old days: they discussed German politics and, fantastical

as it sounds, dreamed of resurrecting National Socialism back home. Some hoped to

return to Germany, serve what they assumed would be short sentences, and enter

electoral politics in coalition with far right parties – the first step toward a putsch.116 (The

far-right parties were soon outlawed.)

Among this Argentine circle were the Dutch journalist Willem Sassen, an SS man

during the war, and Eberhard Fritsch, an Argentinian of German extraction and an

enthusiast for National Socialism, who ran a small neo-Nazi publishing house. Fritsch

114 For a detailed and helpful summary of Stangneth’s long book, see Tom Teicholz, “The Liar: The Four Personas of Adolf Eichmann,” L.A. Review of Books, April 18, 2015. Stangneth’s research is actually on multiple subjects: not only Eichmann himself, but also the tangled tale of how he was captured – and, more to the point, the Realpolitik story of why he was not captured sooner – and a lengthy saga of the Sassen manuscripts. 115 Stangneth, pp. 121-22. 116 Ibid., pp. 134-37.

produced books and a newspaper for distribution in Germany – a “pulpy magazine …

with its Nazi ideology (including nightmarish racial theory) and fascist nostalgia – a

combination of Alpine kitsch, sentimentality, and Teutonic romanticism, like a lace doily

with a swastika pattern.”117 In 1956, Sassen and Fritsch signed a contract with Eichmann

to produce a book of his memoirs, and to that end Sassen proposed taping and

transcribing a series of conversations that would systematically review histories of the

war.118 To prepare for the sessions, Eichmann wrote a manuscript titled The Others

Spoke, Now I Want to Speak!119

The Sassen conversations took place in periodic gatherings over nearly six

months, and involved a rotating cast of characters, with as many as six different voices

audible on some of the tapes. Eichmann himself reviewed, corrected, and commented on

the transcripts. Sassen eventually sold publication rights to Life magazine, which

published the two excerpts Arendt read. In a tortuous tale Stangneth reconstructs in

detail, other versions of the manuscript, some more fragmentary than others, wound up in

a variety of hands; one incomplete version was in possession of the prosecutor, but

Eichmann’s defense team successfully blocked its introduction as evidence.

The Others Spoke plus the Sassen transcripts plus a few other writings are what

Stangneth refers to collectively as the Argentina Papers. The crux of the issue is how to

evaluate them. In Jerusalem, Eichmann claimed the published interviews were

fabrications and dismissed the conversations as mere drunken ramblings. Stangneth, who

listened to all the tapes, shows that both claims were lies. The discussions were sober,

117 On Fritsch, see Stangneth, pp. 235-37; on Sassen, pp. 238-41. The quote is from pp. 111-12. 118 Stangneth, pp. 185-86. 119 Ibid., p. 196. He also wrote an autobiographical novel which remains in the hands of his family and has never been released.

systematic, and serious. The question is whether the Eichmann of the most damning of

the Argentina Papers was the real Eichmann.

The Argentina Papers include philosophical musings that directly contradict

Eichmann’s professed allegiance to Kant and Kantian principles. In The Others Spoke, he

doubts that Kant had “a clear German orientation,” and is suspicious of philosophy more

generally because it is “international.” In reality, every group has its own philosophy, and

“the more I listened to the natural world, whether microcosm or macroscosm, the less

injustice I found. … Everyone was in the right, when seen from his own standpoint.”

Therefore “what is right, is what aids the people,” by which Eichmann meant the German

people. Waging war against those the German state deemed enemies was thus his moral

duty. Moreover, even Socrates, the humanists, and the church preached obedience to the

state and its law. “From the tellurian worldview of Copernicus and Galileo to the hyper-

galactic worldview of Homo sapiens today: the law creates and expects order.”120

Whatever Sassen and Fritsch might have thought of Eichmann’s hyper-galactic

hodgepodge, they were entirely on board with him so long as his conclusions were race

war ideology and paeans to power and obedience. But they didn’t stay on board for long.

Their political project of rehabilitating National Socialism in post-war Germany required

unmasking the “myth of six million” as propaganda by the world Jewish conspiracy.121

Eichmann, to their dismay, would not play along. As it dawned on him where the

conversations were heading, he decided to set the record straight. In a dramatic set of

“Concluding Remarks” he wrote out in advance (although he inadvertently presented it

120 Ibid., 216-17. 121 Ibid., p. 142, describing the peculiar mix of Jew hatred and paranoia that composed their world view – paranoia in that apparently Sassen and Fritsch actually believed their own propaganda about an all-powerful Jewish conspiracy that had persuaded the world of the Holocaust “myth.”

before the sessions had actually concluded, to the embarrassment of himself and his

audience), he let loose. Stangneth quotes the Concluding Remarks in their awful entirety,

but an excerpt will have to do here.

EICHMANN: Before my people bite the dust, the whole world should bite the dust,

and then my people. But only then!

I said this. I – and I tell you this as a conclusion to our matters – I, the

“cautious bureaucrat,” that was me, yes indeed. But I would like to expand on the

issue of the “cautious bureaucrat,” somewhat to my own detriment. This cautious

bureaucrat was attended by a … a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of

my blood. …

No, I have to tell you quite honestly that if of the 10.3 million Jews that

Korherr identified, as we now know, we had killed 10.3 million, I would be

satisfied, and would say, good, we have destroyed an enemy.122

And on in this vein. After that damning confession, Sassen became decidedly cooler

toward Eichmann, and a few sessions later the conversations petered out.

The heart of Stangneth’s argument is that Eichmann’s “real convictions are to be

found in the Argentina Papers.”123 They are “conclusive proof” of the insincerity of his

Israel writings; they “allow us to see behind the mirror.”124 When his Israeli interrogator

confronted Eichmann with the Sassen documents, he disowned them as “the old song-

and-dance” that he had outgrown; but that shows only that Eichmann was trying to save

his neck, contrary to Arendt’s idea that these “telltale signs of an unregenerate Nazi

122 Ibid., pp. 303-04. 123 Ibid., p. 221. 124 Ibid., pp. 366, 367.

outlook”125 (her words, not Stangneth’s) were a mere relapse to the clichés of an earlier

phase of his life. Stangneth insists they are the real Eichmann.

To be sure, in the voluminous memoir Götzen (written after the trial but before

the verdict) he insisted that in his innermost self he had never been a Nazi fanatic. “I

could not summon up an unconditional inner receptiveness and a fanatical wish for all the

National Socialist goals, because a heart full of doubt is never able to do that.”126 To

Stangneth, Götzen is more blue smoke. “We can avoid falling into Eichmann’s ‘Götzen’

trap only by keeping a wary eye fixed on the perfidious philosophical swamp of the

Argentina Papers.”127

Yet there are several difficulties with the conclusion that the Argentina Papers are

the true Eichmann. First of all, as Stangneth herself notes, the Argentina Papers are

hardly models of candor. Eichmann deliberately injected a “catalog of lies” into The

Others Spoke. He also minimized his role in exactly the same way he did in Jerusalem.

He said he was a little cog in the machine; that he merely passed along evacuation and

deportation orders received from above, and oversaw compliance; that he had no idea

which of the people he deported were actually killed; that obedience was a duty; that he

was at worst an aider and abettor. These became the pillars of his defense in Jerusalem,

both in his interrogation and in the trial itself – and all of them appear in the Argentina

Papers as well.128 He had the temerity to write, “I have not made myself guilty of any

crimes, even according to today’s laws”129 – which can only mean denying his role in the

125 EJ, 34. 126 Götzen, p. 596, available at http://www.archives.gov.il/NR/rdonlyres/F02B50C1-2CF5-4605-983B-693B2E862C38/0/Eichmemo2abseng.pdf. My translation. On the workings of his “innermost heart,” see p. 581. 127 Stangneth, p. 366. 128 Stangneth, p. 200. 129 Ibid., p. 202.

mass murders. Weirdly, he expressed the hope that his heart “may even find peace with

my former enemy,” i.e., the Jews – a far cry from the undying anti-Semitism of the

Concluding Remarks.130

Thus, Stangneth cannot think that all the Argentina Papers express Eichmann’s

true convictions, and she does not. In her words, The Others Spoke is “a combination of

vanity and sporadic bursts of honesty” – and, we must add, sporadic bursts of dishonesty,

minimizing his responsibility to fend off his culpability.131 The elements contradict each

other, veering between overstatement and understatement, Nazi braggadocio and denial.

For that matter, Eichmann tried to retract the Concluding Remarks before the

Sassen conversations had even ended.132 The fact is, he lied to former Nazis in Argentina

even when he had no ulterior motive, just as he lied in Jerusalem when his motive was all

too clear. In the early 1950s, he told a former Nazi that the real number of Jewish victims

was half a million maximum.133 Even to other Nazis he was an unreliable narrator.

It is unsurprising that the Argentina Papers are as dodgy as Eichmann’s other

autobiographies. His motive in producing the Argentina Papers was not simply to speak

his mind. Eichmann, Fritsch, and Sassen hoped to make money from their book, which

all of them needed, and it was to be tailored to an audience of Nazi sympathizers – a

point that Stangneth emphasizes. That audience was “my friends and non-friends,” but

especially the “large circle of friends, many millions of people” who sympathize with the

cause.134 (Presumably, the exculpations woven in were included for the benefit of the

non-friends.) Precisely if Stangneth is right that Eichmann always tailored his utterances

130 Ibid. 131 Ibid., p. 210. 132 Ibid., pp. 307-08. 133 Stangneth, p. 108. 134 On the hope to make money: ibid., p. 186; on the target audience, p. 203.

to his audience, we should question whether his professions of Nazi faith represent the

authentic Eichmann, or even whether – given the contradictions – there is such a thing.

What about Stangneth’s diagnosis of Eichmann as a man in the grip of a race-war

theory, fully worked out as an intellectual system? Was he a philosophical Nazi? In her

view, “The speed at which Eichmann was able to fill hundreds of pages may have its

origin in the monologic structure of his thought.”135 That is entirely plausible. But she

continues: “Eichmann didn’t write in order to develop or refine an intellectual construct,

his thoughts taking shape as he went; he was laying out a fully formed, rigid train of

thought.”136 That is less plausible. Arendt’s theory that Eichmann said whatever gave him

a lift at the moment strikes me as a better explanation.

Stangneth herself notices that sometimes Eichmann “writes himself into a state of

euphoria.”137 She observes that his handwriting changed from “tiny and laboriously

legible” to “expansive and idiosyncratic …. The ballpoint pen was clearly flying over the

paper.”138 This could be the sign of a fully formed train of thought, but it seems more like

the telltale behavior of someone unlocking his word hoard and pouring forth whatever

pops into his head, fueled by euphoria and the conviction that it is all brilliant. Although

Stangneth believes Eichmann’s philosophical musings are more cogent than the

“paradoxical drivel and pseudophilosophy”139 they seem to be, it is unclear why she

thinks so. He cycles through anti-philosophy (philosophy is suspect because it is

international), appeals to philosophical authority (Socrates enjoined obedience to the

state), crude relativism (everyone is right from his own standpoint), and cosmic

135 Ibid., p. 231. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid, p. 204. 138 Ibid., p. 205. 139 Ibid., p. 219.

speculation (the microcosm and macrocosm, the “hyper-galactic worldview of Homo

sapiens” – which, if it means anything at all, is the opposite of Volk-specific relativism).

This certainly sounds like drivel and pseudophilosophy. In fact, it sounds like bullshit in

Frankfurt’s sense: words uttered in disregard of truth and coherence, or even of belief that

transcends the moment of their utterance. By comparison, Eichmann’s exposition of Kant

at his trial sounds almost serious:

if I am subjected to a higher power and a higher force, then my free will as such is

eliminated, and then, since I can no longer be master of my free will and volition,

I cannot in fact adopt any principles whatsoever which I cannot influence, but, on

the contrary, I must, and also may, build obedience to the authorities into this

concept, and then the authorities bear the responsibility. In my judgment, that also

belongs to it [i.e., to the categorical imperative].140

Admittedly, this is neither lucid nor logically consistent. First he acknowledges that by

following orders he could not live by Kantian principles or indeed “any principles

whatsoever”; then he contradicts himself by claiming that obedience to authority is built

into the categorical imperative, in which case obedience is a Kantian principle.141

Inadequate as an argument, the sentence nevertheless sounds like a genuine (failed) effort

to reconcile obedience with morality. Based on content alone, there is no reason to

suppose it is less authentically what Eichmann thought than the Argentine musings.

Stangneth herself provides ample material for an explanation of the Argentina

Papers that is much closer to Arendt’s. That explanation focuses not on Eichmann’s

supposed Nazi fanaticism but rather on his overwhelming drive to exhibit himself as an

140 Trial transcript, session 105. 141 The latter claim is the part Arendt focused on in the analysis discussed above in §5.

important person, his “pronounced need for recognition” – which is, in fact, one of

Stangneth’s main points about Eichmann.142 As Arendt wrote, “bragging was the vice

that was Eichmann’s undoing.”143 During his SS days, Eichmann was a relentless self-

promoter who kept a file of foreign press clippings about himself, and exulted in those

that ascribed more power and ability than he really had. He did whatever he could to

make himself seem more important, including fostering rumors that he was born in

Palestine (he wasn’t), that he was fluent in Hebrew and Yiddish (he knew a few words),

and that he was a friend of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (they may have met once). Even

his pretentions as an “expert” on Jewish emigration were inflated. His biggest innovation,

a centralized office to handle all the steps of emigration on a kind of conveyor-belt,

actually came from the Viennese Jews; and his Viennese memos to headquarters on

emigration law and policy were ghosted by a rabbi Eichmann impressed into service as a

kind of research assistant.144 Apparently all this self-inflation served him well in the

Darwinian struggle for advancement within the SS.

Importantly, none of Stangneth’s portrait of his SS years turns in any way on

Eichmann’s ideological commitment, only on his ambition. Cesarani emphasizes that he

was not a long-time Nazi believer. He joined the Party relatively late, in a more or less

happenstance way after a casual meeting with Kaltenbrunner (before that, he was on the

verge of joining a Masonic club).145 His transfer to the division of Jewish affairs was also

happenstance; his first job in the SS was keeping records about the Freemasons.

Becoming an “expert” on Jewish affairs turned out to be Eichmann’s big professional

142 Stangneth, p. 367. 143 EJ, 46. He had “a great inclination” to “deck himself in borrowed plumes.” EJ, 44. 144 Conveyor belt: Cesarani, p. 8. Ghost-writer: so the rabbi, Benjamin Murmelstein, testifies, in his interviews with Claude Landsmann in Landsmann’s documentary film The Last of the Unjust. 145 EJ, 32-33; Cesarani, p. 33.

break; but there is no evidence that he sought the assignment out of ideological

conviction, or indeed that he sought it at all – only that he soon found it a pathway to

advancement.146

After the war, he chafed under the anonymity of his German life in hiding;

apparently that was the principal motive for his move to Argentina. In Perón’s Argentina,

he no longer had to maintain strict incognito, but the mediocrity of his life still rankled;

he yearned to become a somebody once again. To become a somebody in the eyes of his

intended audience (the Sassen circle, but also the wider world of Nazis), he had to out-

Nazi them and show himself to be the supreme authority on the Final Solution. To

attribute his behavior in the Sassen conversations to deep conviction rather than to his

situation – an exiled Nazi showing off to other Nazi exiles – risks committing what social

psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error” of over-focusing on the person

rather than the situation.147

The turning point came when the Sassen group asked him to deny the Holocaust.

Now the situation had changed. They were asking Eichmann, in effect, to become a

nobody once again, for you cannot be a supreme authority on something that did not

happen. Stangneth herself notes the built-in contradiction between what his audience

wanted to hear and his self-image.148 At that point, alarmed by the direction the

conversations were taking, he produced his Concluding Remarks, even though they

contradicted all the responsibility-minimizing comments he made earlier on.

146 David Cesarani argues plausibly that Eichmann held the conventional anti-Semitic beliefs common in Austria at the time, but these were a far cry from the eliminationist anti-Semitism of the Nazis. Cesarani, p. __. 147 Lee Ross, “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process,” in Leonard Berkowitz, ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Academic Press, 1977), pp. 173-220. 148 Ibid., p. 210.

In short: Eichmann’s drive for recognition, what Stangneth calls his desire to

howl with the wolves once again,149 suffices to explain his Sassen behavior, and it is

entirely consistent with Arendt’s diagnosis of Eichmann as a moral chameleon whose

dominant motives were careerism and vanity. These may have been extreme in Eichmann

(even though Arendt spotted his boasting and his “extraordinary diligence in looking out

for his personal advancement,” she didn’t know the half of it); but these are ordinary, not

diabolical or ideological, motives. To commit enormous crimes for everyday motives is,

precisely, what Arendt means by the banality of evil.

There is one other difficulty with Stangneth’s conviction that the most vicious

portions of the Argentina Papers represent the authentic Eichmann. It requires the

corollary that his entire interrogation, as well as his testimony at trial and his final

memoir, Götzen, were elaborately planned and supremely well-executed faking it – well-

executed enough to fool not only Arendt, but most trial observers as well, and even the

skeptical Israeli policeman who closely interrogated Eichmann for 275 hours.

Undoubtedly Eichmann was doing his level best to save his neck by lying (and Arendt

spots several of his lies150). But Stangneth portrays Eichmann as something bigger than a

simple liar. In her portrayal, he cunningly kept track of what his hearers knew and didn’t

know, and shaped his lies accordingly. Stangneth sees a master manipulator who could

maintain a completely fake persona through hundreds of hours of professional

interrogation and cross-examination. That would have included changing his demeanor,

and even his speech patterns, in a performance worthy of The Return of Martin Guerre.

149 Stangneth, p. 367. 150 E.g., EJ, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 33, 40, 44, 47, 49, 57 – to take instances from the beginning of the book.

His ability to inhabit and perfect a role allowed him to keep up this pretense with

surprising consistency. … Even in Israel, surrounded by people who knew exactly

who he was, Eichmann managed to do what he had done so many times before as

a Nazi functionary: arouse the sympathy of his opponents. Everyone who dealt

with Eichmann in Israel said they were sure they had been an important

attachment figure for him. … Again and again – even with experienced

interrogators – Eichmann and his texts led people to false conclusions. … The

Argentina Papers allow us to see behind the mirror. They reveal a man who was

practiced in the art of manufacturing and conveying stories with an inner

coherence, solely to distract people …. In power, Eichmann played treacherous

games with his victims’ hopes of finding a way out of their situation, in order to

drive them to their deaths without resistance. In Argentina, in order to gain the

respect and assistance of his old comrades, he confirmed their expectations.… In

Israel, he tried to serve what he saw as a ‘Jewish instinct’…. Like a mirror, he

reflected people’s fears and expectations …. Behind all the mirror images lay

Eichmann’s will to power and desire to control people’s thoughts, disguised as

diligence.151

Of course this is possible; but nothing in Eichmann’s resumé suggests that kind of

dazzling capability. Along with high-level acting and unflagging ability to remember

what his questioners knew and didn’t know, his skills would include deep insight into

others that allowed him to identify their weaknesses and prey on them. That would be the

diametrical opposite to Arendt’s diagnosis of an inability to think from the point of view

of others. And yet, as we saw in §2, there is ample evidence of Eichmann’s maladroitness 151 Stangneth, p. 367.

in trying to present himself in a sympathetic light – evidence leading Lipstadt to conclude

that he was “completely deaf and blind to the identity of those before whom he was

testifying,” displaying “similar obtuseness” during his interrogation.152 This was

precisely Arendt’s diagnosis, and the plentiful evidence of Eichmann’s insulation from

the reality of his listeners casts doubt on Eichmann-in-Jerusalem as a master manipulator.

Stangneth mentions Eichmann’s “treacherous games with his victims’ hopes of

finding a way out of their situation, in order to drive them to their deaths without

resistance.” She is referring to one of Eichmann’s Sassen recollections, about how he had

manipulated the Jewish functionaries he worked with. “‘I loved playing an open hand

against all the Jewish political functionaries.’ ‘For me, “open hand” is a winged word.”153

His illustration was the infamous deals he offered to Hungarian Jewish leader Rudolf

Kasztner – deals to exchange Jewish lives for money and trucks. Eichmann boasted that

this “was really just about ‘him continuing to play his role as appeasement councilor [!]

with his Jewish community.”154 In other words: the deals were a ruse designed to get

Kasztner to keep the Jews dormant while Eichmann deported them.

The trouble is, this presumes that Eichmann devised the “Jews for sale” deals he

offered Kasztner. But historian Yehuda Bauer reports that the idea came from Himmler,

not Eichmann, and in fact Eichmann opposed it.155 It is likely, then, that Eichmann’s

“appeasement councilor” comment was only some more boasting to impress his

Argentine audience. For that matter, some of Eichmann’s statements about working

152 Lipstadt, pp. 111, 112. 153 Ibid., p. 265. 154 Stangneth, p. 265. The exclamation mark is Stangneth’s. 155 Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945 (Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 167-68.

cooperatively with Jews and holding up his end of the bargain also come from the Sassen

interviews – so he contradicted himself even on this matter.

One should of course give great weight to the considered views of a historian like

Stangneth, who has lived in the unpleasant company of Adolf Eichmann for many years,

reading everything, talking to everyone, and pursuing every lead from archive to archive.

Her ear for which of his tones are authentic and which not is likely to be more reliable

than any particular pieces of the evidence on paper. She is persuaded that the fanatically

Nazi portions of the Argentina Papers represent the authentic Eichmann, while the

exculpatory parts, along with his interrogation, his trial, and Götzen do not. Arendt, by

contrast, reads his palpable inconsistencies as evidence that none of Eichmann’s

professed convictions had deep roots.

This interpretive disagreement has no easy empirical resolution; there is no

smoking gun, not even the Concluding Remarks. To be sure, Stangneth has unearthed a

great deal of information that Arendt did not have. Arendt was unaware of how much

philosophy Eichmann had read and written; she was unacquainted with most of the

Concluding Remarks, the context of the Sassen conversations and much of their content,

the details of Eichmann’s life in Argentina, or the cunning of his post-war escape. She

never heard the Sassen tapes, with whatever they reveal about Eichmann’s aural self-

presentation.

On the other hand, Arendt was no amateur on Eichmann. As Stangneth

forthrightly reminds her readers, Arendt carefully studied the three thousand pages of the

interrogation, plus the trial transcript, perhaps more carefully than anyone else. She had at

least the Life magazine excerpts from the Sassen interviews – which include a few of the

most damning paragraphs of the Concluding Remarks156 – and extracts from Götzen. Re-

reading Eichmann in Jerusalem, we can see that Arendt took full notice of Eichmann’s

propensity to boast, his driving ambition, his “unregenerate Nazi outlook” in the Sassen

interviews, his lying, his skill at negotiation and organization, his brutality (she cites an

instance where he slapped the leader of the Vienna Jewish community in the face), his

personal visits to death camps and other sites of mass murder, and his unyielding zeal in

pursuing the Final Solution. Nor did she neglect the magnitude of his deeds; we must not

forget that the trial produced overwhelming and hair-raising evidence, and Arendt studied

it all. The evidence she relies on the most for her “banality of evil” diagnosis lies in the

habits of mind and speech Eichmann displays – and these are surely the hardest thing to

fake over a long period of time, even for a skilled liar. All this seems like enough to

support her interpretation, which is in some respects actually not far from Stangneth’s

and Cesarani’s.157 In what follows, I will proceed on the assumption that Arendt had at

least a strong case that Stangneth has not refuted.158

156 See “I Regret Nothing,” p. 199. 157 Two of Cesarani’s reviewers see little difference between his portrayal of Eichmann and Arendt’s. Barry Gewen, “The Everyman of Genocide,” New York Times, May 14, 2006, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/books/review/14gewen.html; John Gray, “Eichmann: his life and crimes by David Cesarani,” The Independent, Aug. 20, 2014. I am inclined to agree. 158 Two useful articles on this controversy are Daniel Maier-Katkin, “The Reception of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem in the United States 1963-2011,” Zeitschrift für Politisches Denken/Journal of Political Thinking 6 (2011), available at http://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/64/84, and Rebecca Wittman, “Eichmann Revisited: The Motivations of a Mass Murderer,” German Studies Review 35 (2012): 135-43 (reviewing several books including Lipstadt’s and Stangneth’s).

Arendt After Jerusalem

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