Debate

Arendt and Scholem on Eichmann in Jerusalem

1963 · What does it mean to call evil “banal” – and how can one judge the conduct of the perpetrators and of the Jewish councils without either demonising or trivialising?

Hannah Arendt reported on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem for The New Yorker; her articles appeared in five instalments in February and March 1963 and, the same year, as the book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”. Her portrait of Eichmann as a thoughtless, career-minded functionary, her remarks on the role of the Jewish councils and her tone set off a long and bitter controversy. In a letter of 23 June 1963 Gershom Scholem, the historian of Jewish mysticism and her friend of many years, set out his objections, and Arendt replied in July; the exchange was published in German in 1963 and in English in Encounter in January 1964.

Open in the star map

Positions

The banality of evil

Arendt held Eichmann fully responsible and endorsed his death sentence, but found in him no demonic depth – rather “sheer thoughtlessness”, an inability to look at anything from another’s point of view. She spoke of the banality of evil, she later wrote, “only on the strictly factual level”. To Scholem she replied that evil is “never ‘radical’”, only extreme, without depth or any demonic dimension, and that depth, and radicalism, belong to the good alone. To the charge of lacking Ahabath Israel she answered that no people or collective had ever been the object of her love; she loved only her friends.

Held by

Hannah Arendt1906–1975

Love of the Jews and tact of the heart

Scholem, who had corresponded with Arendt since 1939, wrote from Jerusalem that the book treated a matter touching the very heart of Jewish life in a heartless, often almost sneering tone. He missed in her what Jewish tradition calls Ahabath Israel, love of the Jews, and the tact of the heart the occasion demanded. Some members of the Jewish councils, he wrote, had been scoundrels and others saints; he did not presume to judge, since he had not been there. The phrase “banality of evil” struck him as a slogan rather than the result of an analysis such as she had given, far more convincingly, in her book on totalitarianism.

Thoughtless or convinced?

Drawing on conversations Eichmann recorded in Argentina in the 1950s and on his own manuscripts, Bettina Stangneth (Eichmann vor Jerusalem, 2011) portrays a convinced Nazi and antisemite who played the subordinate official in Jerusalem – a mask that, in her view, Arendt did not see through. Richard Wolin concluded that Arendt had drastically underestimated Eichmann’s fanaticism. Defenders reply that her concept concerns thoughtlessness, not lack of conviction: Seyla Benhabib (2014) asked why Eichmann could not have been both a fanatical Nazi and banal, and Richard J. Bernstein separates the question whether Arendt got Eichmann right – in his view not quite – from her lasting point that monstrous deeds can be done by people who are not monsters.