In a Glass Cage

The book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil” (1963) is Hannah Arendt’s historical account of the trial of one of the Nazi’s leading perpetrators. It was originally published journalistically as a series of articles in The New Yorker magazine earlier in 1963. It is about the belated 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, which she, having been born in Hanover, Germany in 1906, was driven to attend. A last chance to see and hear firsthand. Eichmann was apprehended in 1960 in Argentina by Israeli agents while living under the assumed name Ricardo Klement. Arendt fled Germany in 1933, the same year that Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, marking the end of the Weimar Republic, and democracy in Germany. It took several years after Hitler’s assumption of power for Eichmann and o…