Genocide, Holocaust, and the Banality of Evil Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and After 1
The Trial in Jerusalem (1963) In February and March, 1963, a lengthy article appeared in the New Yorker entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem. Its focus was the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal who had been kidnapped in Argentina on May 11, 1960 and brought to the District Court of Jerusalem on April 11, 1961 to stand trial for his role in the final solution of the Jewish question. 2
Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) The author of the New Yorker essay was Hannah Arendt, a student a Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger whose reputation had been firmly established with The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958). Arendt s essay and the book of the same title that followed it in 1963 has arguably become the single most important document on the problem of evil to appear in the last half century. 3
Who was Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) Who was Hannah Arendt? Arendt was born to an assimilated German-Jewish family in which religious issues had been almost totally absent. But as a young student, she developed an interest in writers like Augustine and Kierkegaard, and in 1924, she would with Heidegger. By 1933, with the rise of the Third Reich, she had become politicized and, though not a Zionist, was arrested for doing research for some Zionist friends. 4
Who was Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) Once released, she fled to Prague, Geneva, and finally Paris where, in 1940, she was again arrested and was sent to Gurs the French internment camp for German emigrés but was lucky enough to escape, first to Lisbon and then to the United States. By 1945, she had declared: The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe. This remained the single focus everything she wrote until the end of her life. 5
Who was Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962) Who was Adolf Eichmann? The son of a businessman and industrialist, Adolf Eichmann grew up in Linz, Austria, where he left high school (Realschule) without having graduated and began training to become a mechanic, which he also discontinued. He worked at a variety of jobs before he joined the Austrian branch of the SS and, in 1933, returned to Germany to join the very powerful and feared Sicherheitzpolizei (Security Police) 6
Who was Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962) Other promotions followed until his organizational talents and ideological reliability brought him to the attention of Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. At the infamous Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, Heydrich gave Eichmann the task of managing the deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe the so-called final solution to the Jewish question. After Germany s defeat, Eichmann fled first to Austria and then to Argentina, where he was captured by Mossad and Shin Bet agents in 1960 and brought to Israel to stand trial on 15 criminal charges, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the Jewish people. 7
Arendt and radical evil Arendt s philosophical commitments, both by training and inclination, were not those that one would expect of the eventual author of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Briefly, she was an ardent Kantian who believed emphatically in human autonomy, freedom, individuality, spontaneity and unpredictability, loathed Hegelian determinism, and emphasized the singularity and personal responsibility of each individual. But above all, she seemed to belong to the Kantian tradition of radical evil i.e., that tradition that associated evil with the adoption of evil maxims, and thus with evil intentions and motives. 8
The Concentration Campus (1948) Yet as early as 1948, in an article for The Partisan Review, Arendt was already insisting that we were witnessing something new in history. The real horror began, she observed, when the SS took over the administration of the camps. The old spontaneous bestiality gave way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human dignity: death was avoided or postponed indefinitely. These camps were no longer amusement parks for beasts in human form, that is, for men who really belonged in mental institutions and prisons: the reverse became true: they were turned into drill grounds on which perfectly normal men were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS. 9
The banality of evil At the trial itself, nothing struck Arendt so much as Eichmann s sheer ordinariness, which she epitomized in the famous phrase, the banality of evil. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that they many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied... that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong. 10
Letter to Gershom Scholem, July 24, 1963 Arendt s phrase provoked a critical response, not least from Gershom Scholem, a friend and leading Jewish intellectual to whom Arendt replied almost immediately. In conclusion, let me come to the only matter where you have not misunderstood me, and where indeed I am glad that you have raised the point. You are quite right: I changed my mind and do no longer speak of radical evil.... It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never radical, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is thought-defying, as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its banality. 11
Anton Schmid (1900-1942) In many ways, however, Arendt remained an unreconstructed Kantian, as she made clear in the lesson she drew from the life of Anton Schmid. Schmid was an Austrian conscripted to the Wehrmacht and stationed in Vilnius, Lithuania, who helped 250 Jewish men, women and children escape extermination by the Nazi SS by supplying them with false identification papers and helping them to escape before being exposed and executed by his superiors on April 13, 1942. Here Arendt agreed with Kant i., the difference between individuals like Eichmann and those like Schmid in simply inscrutable (unerforschlich) so that, at the end of the day, they simply acted differently. But if we can t know why such individuals act differently, we can hold individuals responsible for their actions. In response to the excuse that one is merely a cog in the system, it is always appropriate to ask: And why did you become a cog in such circumstances? 12
Bernstein s ten theses on evil A leading authority on Arendt, Richard J. Bernstein, has recently concluded a book on Radical Evil with a summary which might well serve us for the same purpose. Briefly, it consists of ten provisional theses on evil with which one might agree or disagree. 13
Thesis # 1: Interrogating evil is an ongoing, openended process. Throughout his work, Bernstein is skeptical of the very idea of a theory of evil, if this is understood as a complete account of what evil is. For he doesn t think such a theory is possible, because we can t anticipate what new forms of evil or vicissitudes of evil will appear. In short, any inquiry about evil must remain intrinsically open. 14
Thesis # 1: Interrogating evil is an ongoing, openended process. 15
Thesis # 2: There is a plurality of types of evil, with no common essence. Here Bernstein suggests Wittgenstein s family resemblances as an alternative to looking for what is essentially evil. 16
Thesis # 2: There is a plurality of types of evil, with no common essence. 17
Thesis # 2: There is a plurality of types of evil, with no common essence. 18
Thesis # 3: Evil is an excess that resists total comprehension. In any case, extreme evil is an excess that defies synthesis, conceptualization, or categorization. We cannot give up the desire to know and understand the evils that we confront; but at the same time, we must avoid deluding ourselves that total comprehension is ever possible. 19
Thesis # 3: Evil is an excess that resists total comprehension. Jews on selection ramp at Auschwitz, May, 1944 20
Thesis # 4: Evil resists all attempts to justify it; it resists theodicy. The true purpose of any theodicy religious or secular is to find a justification for unbearable suffering. Hegel represents the culmination of the tradition of theodicy. At the heart of his thinking is the dialectical development from finitude, through the spurious infinite, to the true infinite. This means that evil is a necessary moment in the actualization of Spirit. But to affirm that evil is a necessary moment in the development of Spirit is to justify evil. 21
Thesis # 4: Evil resists all attempts to justify it; it resists theodicy. Nietzsche is the beginning of a critique of Hegel for, more than any other writer, Nietzsche understood the urge to find some justification for suffering, recognizing that it is not suffering per se, but meaningless suffering that we find so unacceptable and offensive. But after Auschwitz, we must give up any idea of theodicy i.e., of some sort of ultimate cosmic harmony in which extreme evil and suffering have their proper place. After Auschwitz, it is obscene to continue to speak of evil and suffering as something to be justified by, or reconciled with, a benevolent cosmological scheme. We are, in the end, beyond good and evil. 22
Thesis # 5: The temptation to reify evil must be avoided. There is a temptation to think that evil is a fixed ontological feature of the human condition, and that there is nothing to be done except to learn to live with it and resign ourselves to its brute existence. This can lead to an overwhelming sense of pessimistic impotence when we are confronted with concrete evils. 23
Thesis # 5: The temptation to reify evil must be avoided. In fact, ever since the Enlightenment, there has been an oscillation between: utopian visions of the future, grand narratives of moral progress, in which all evils are eliminated periods of disillusionment, when it is thought that attempts to combat evil are useless Bernstein argues that both extremes should be rejected. 24
Thesis # 6: The power of evil and the human propensity to commit evil deeds must never be underestimated. Kant believed that it is always in our power to resist evil and to adopt good maxims; but at the same time, he claimed that there is an inborn tendency, or propensity, to evil. Nietzsche and Freud pursued this moral psychology of evil with far greater subtlety and finesse, and we should never forget it. 25
Thesis # 7: Radical evil is compatible with the banality of evil. Perfectly ordinary people who are motivated by the most mundane desires can in extraordinary circumstances commit monstrous deeds. 26
Thesis # 8: There is no escape from personal responsibility for committing evil deeds. Kant of course greatly emphasized the importance of personal responsibility. Both Nietzsche and Freud extended this still more, by exposing the illusions whereby we hide from ourselves, and thus enabling us to live freer, more humane, and more realistically responsible lives. 27
Thesis # 9: Affirming personal responsibility is not enough: after Auschwitz, we must rethink the very meaning of responsibility. Here Bernstein owes a debt to Emmanuel Levinas, as well as Hans Jonas and Arendt, who redefines responsibility as heteronomy, whereby we have a responsibility to and for the other (l autrui) that is ethically prior to our own freedom and autonomy. 28
Thesis # 10: The ultimate ground for the choice between good and evil is inscrutable. Bernstein considers this to be one of Kant s most important contributions i.e., that the ultimate subjective ground of the adoption of moral maxims is inscrutable. 29