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 others of the fascist state to gear up to the worst inhumanities to humanity, but, by that time, Arendt, by way of France, was safely in the United States as an American citizen. This was personal. To see Eichmann in a glass cage at trial.

The book received highly critical and divided reviews at the time of publication because of her perhaps too nuanced and laid-back view of Eichmann. Hers was not a full-throated condemnation, but a more quizzical and measured view of a man, any man, who becomes such a sycophant. And just-taking-orders was part of his defense, to so ill-intended a mission. It included brutal train exportation to mass killing sites and extermination of targeted populations of people. Eichmann oversaw the train rides.

From the Amos Elon Introduction for the 2006 Dover edition, Arendt’s interest was “in understanding Eichmann’s mind (if he had one) and, through the testimonies at the trial, to explore ‘the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society.’”

Also from Elon’s Introduction: “Eichmann’s mediocrity and insipid character struck Arendt on her first day in court.” “He isn’t even sinister.” “Eichmann is actually stupid,” she wrote. And, “but then somehow, he is not.”

And then, “a kind of brainlessness on Eichmann’s part that had predisposed him to becoming the faceless bureaucrat of death and one of the worst criminals of all time. She emphasized Eichmann’s moral and intellectual shallowness, his inner void.”

It is from that attempt to understand who does such acts of butchery and how it comes about that Arendt sought intellectually to come to terms with how such criminality arises and gets sanctioned by the favored tribe of society, in this case the supposedly real German people, viewed as tribe above all others.

She listens at the trial. She does her homework with court records. She tries to put it all into context. She observes the judges, the defending lawyer, and the prosecution. She puts it down in words, words that reflect her own searching for understanding. It is that very personal searching that makes this book a worthwhile read, even if it does not seem to follow an easy-to-track train of thought. All that is what makes “Eichmann in Jerusalem” worth your time.