Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil - Softcover

Arendt, Hannah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140187650 ISBN 13: 9780140187656

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1994

Synopsis

Provides a report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, including facts that were exposed after the trial, and presents Arendt's commentary on the controversy created by the report.

About this title

Review

While living in Argentina in 1960, Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped and smuggled to Israel where he was put on trial for crimes against humanity. The New Yorker magazine sent Hannah Arendt to cover the trial. While covering the technical aspects of the trial, Arendt also explored the wider themes inherent in the trial, such as the nature of justice, the behavior of the Jewish leadership during the Nazi Régime, and, most controversially, the nature of Evil itself.

Far from being evil incarnate, as the prosecution painted Eichmann, Arendt maintains that he was an average man, a petty bureaucrat interested only in furthering his career, and the evil he did came from the seductive power of the totalitarian state and an unthinking adherence to the Nazi cause. Indeed, Eichmann's only defense during the trial was "I was just following orders."

Arendt's analysis of the seductive nature of evil is a disturbing one. We would like to think that anyone who would perpetrate such horror on the world is different from us, and that such atrocities are rarities in our world. But the history of groups such as the Jews, Kurds, Bosnians, and Native Americans, to name but a few, seems to suggest that such evil is all too commonplace. In revealing Eichmann as the pedestrian little man that he was, Arendt shows us that the veneer of civilization is a thin one indeed.

About the Author

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was an influential German political theorist and philosopher whose works include The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140187650
• ISBN 13: 9780140187656
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312