Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

In the Introduction of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Amos Elon discusses the “civil war” that her series of articles in The New Yorker and her subsequent book “launched among intellectuals in the United States and in Europe” (vii). Central to the book’s controversy is Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann’s “alleged banality” (xiv). For many, the belief that the orchestrators of the Holocaust are evil and monstrous helps make some sense of the catastrophe. However, Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann makes him flesh-and-bone: an ordinary, everyday man without much motivation other than to do well at his job and follow the laws in place at the time: “He personified neither hatred nor madness nor an insatiable thirst for blood, but something far worse, the faceless nature of Nazi evil itself” (xiii). What also feels “especially provocative” (xv) is Arendt’s questioning of the Jewish communal leaders’ cooperation with the Nazis: “If there had been no Jewish organizations at all and no Judenräte, Arendt suggested, the deportation machine could not have run as smoothly as it did” (xv). Other objections to Arendt’s reporting focus on her tone and delivery, suggesting she was “attacked less for what she said than for how she said it” (xvii). Elon calls her tone “inexcusably flippant” and claims her “style was brash and insolent” (xvii), that she “overreacted” (xviii) to some members of the courtroom and became “slightly paranoid” (xix) in response to the backlash to her book. Elon also states that although Arendt has a right to criticize in her role as reporter, Arendt “overdid it.” 

First published in 1963, and introduced here by Elon, in 2006, Arendt’s book remains relevant, Elon suggests, because of the controversial war in Iraq and a younger generation’s “search for a different view” (viii). In the years following the original publication, communities in the United States started a campaign against her to “discredit her in the academic world” (xx); in more recent years, even though some are willing to reflect on her work in a more respectful manner, Arendt “is still the subject of controversy” (xxi). This revised version of the book includes a postscript written by Arendt in direct response to the controversy that her book has inspired. She admits to a handful of technical errors that bear no effect on the content, for which “her critics will never forgive her” (xxii). But as Elon concludes, “she got many of the big things right and for that she deserves to be remembered” (xxii).