One of the interesting things about the unplanned but intensely rewarding intellectual journey that the pandemic has forced upon me is that certain themes have emerged, unbidden, to give it a kind of coherence. Maybe not so much themes as crystallizations of ideas. One such is the bundle of stories and concepts that has cohered around the labels "Israel", "Palestine", and "Jewishness".

Much has come my way about the fates of Jews in the 1930s/40s: Colette's husband; Gary's neighbour -- or whoever it was; various figures in the Cazalet Chronicles; the passengers on the Last Train to Istanbul; and certain characters in The Wandering (an Indonesian novel I'm still reading -- report to come). But works that touch on the lives of Jews before that time have also washed up on my reading shore: Edward Speyer, for example; and Lev Nussimbaum, who wrote (or did he?) Ali and Nino. Then there have been the reminders of the schisms of today: between Israelis and Palestinians, or between orthodox and secular lifestyles.

I find this interesting, because I have not consciously sought these connections.

Thus it was that I watched Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta's 2012 biopic) not because of its Jewish connections but because Arendt's was a name that used to crop up regularly in my International Relations reading, but I knew next to nothing about her life.

The movie pivots around a seminal event: the trial in Jerusalem, in 1961, of Adolf Eichmann, who was eventually sentenced to death for organizing the transport of tens of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps. Arendt (herself a Jew, who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, settled first in France, and then, in 1940, moved to the United States, where she attained a high academic status) offered to cover the trial for The New Yorker.

The result was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published in book form in 1963 (and reprinted, in revised and enlarged form, in 1964).

It turned out to be quite the bombshell. Amos Elon, in his 2006 introduction to the Penguin edition, describes the reaction it engendered as "a civil war": "No book within living memory had elicited similar passions."


The photos are from Phnom Penh and Choeung Ek, Cambodia, 2009. Hannah Arendt died in 1975, the year the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, took power in Cambodia, unleashing another programme of mass killing whose perpetrators have been difficult, to say the least, to call to account

The film deals with Arendt's relatively brief experience of the trial, the long labour of putting together the book (on the basis of a mountain of documentation), and then this firestorm of reaction.

I liked it. It made me want to find out more about Arendt's life; it made me want to read the book. The viewer is teased by the portrayal of her academic/intellectual milieu, and by the contrast between the soft cuddliness of her relationship with her husband and her utterly resolute and apparently dispassionate toughness in facing down criticism. And you couldn't help wondering, from this depiction, whether she would have faced quite such blistering attacks if she hadn't been a woman...

Barbara Sukowa plays the lead role well, but the real Hannah Arendt (whom you can see in action, amidst clouds of cigarette smoke, in this interview with German journalist Guenter Gaus in 1964) is somehow so much "bigger", has so much more gravitas...

The real Hannah Arendt ("the first woman," as Gaus emphasizes, "to be profiled in this series") is smiley and pleasant, but steely. She has quite a gruff voice; she's very confident, very straightforward, very much not to be messed with. And it's clear that she's an incisive and highly articulate analyst. She is driven, as she explains it, by the need to understand: "For me, writing is part of this process of understanding... As long as I manage to think something through, I'm satisfied. If I manage to express my thought process adequately in writing, that also satisfies me. You ask about the effect my work has on others... If I may speak ironically, that's a masculine question. Men always so want to be influential... Do I see myself as influential? No, I want to understand."

Her remarkable intelligence was obvious from an early age, and she didn't realize until later how much that cut her off from other youngsters. She also confesses to having shown "disdain" (Verachtung) for others in those early days: "I often suffered because I felt such disdain -- knowing that one really shouldn't and mustn't and so on."

I think these two factors -- the drive to understand, and the temptation to disdain -- inform Eichmann in Jerusalem to a certain extent, in positive and negative directions.



Criticism of the book can be divided into four broad categories:

Firstly, she was accused of blaming the Jews for not resisting the Nazis. This is utterly unfair, and I'm not sure how anyone who reads the book can support that argument. In fact, it was the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, who (presumably with pro-Zionist motives) constantly asked witnesses: "Why did you not protest?" Arendt, on the other hand, describes the type of reprisals that met attempts to resist: "There exist many things considerably worse than death, and the SS saw to it that none of them was ever very far from their victims' minds and imagination."

Secondly, she was attacked for her key thesis: the idea of the "banality" of evil. What she meant by this was that evil can thrive without evil geniuses. Eichmann, for Arendt, was essentially a bureaucrat. Inarticulate, unimaginative, self-serving, and self-pitying, he was incapable of real thought or empathy: "Officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliche... The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with his inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else." Nor does Eichmann appear to recognize when his statements are self-contradictory. It was as though each story "ran along a different tape in his memory, and it was this taped memory that showed itself to be proof against reason and argument and information and insight of any kind". (As you read this kind of thing, so many decades later, you're struck by the resemblances to prominent politicians we have recently known...)

So there was nothing monstrous about him, in that sense. He was, indeed, banal. What appalled her was precisely that figures such as this -- inferior in every sense -- could be instrumental in bringing about the deaths of millions: "The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal."

What she definitely didn't mean by banal was that the events surrounding Eichmann were trivial: "It was sheer thoughtlessness ... that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of the period. And if this is 'banal' ... that is still far from calling it commonplace... That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man -- that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem."

I find her argument very plausible. We have seen other such examples, after all. On the other hand, was she influenced by that "disdain" for the unintelligent that I noted before? Richard Brody comments: "I've long believed that her division of the world into those who 'think' and those, like Eichmann, who speak in what she calls 'cliches' reflects the snobbery of a proud member of the intellectual class."

The work of Claude Lanzmann, a French film-maker of eastern European Jewish origins, who has extensively documented the Nazi killings, rebuts her thesis. According to Brody, Lanzmann's The Last of the Unjust "reveals Adolf Eichmann to have been an anti-Semitic ideologue, not a dispassionate bureaucrat". Bettina Stangneth's Eichmann Before Jerusalem (published in German in 2011 and in English three years later) also challenges Arendt's characterization, on the basis of interviews Eichmann gave while still in Argentina, and concludes that he concealed his more calculating and ideologically driven side when he was on trial. Reviewing Stangneth's book, however, Richard Evans disputes the publishers' proposition that she presents a complete reassessment of Eichmann or "permanently undermines" Arendt's idea of the banality of evil. Maier-Katkin and Stoltzfus sift through the criticism of Eichmann in Jerusalem, and similarly conclude: "Arendt’s insight into the banality of evil remains undiminished."

Ultimately, I'm not in a position to judge whether her assessment of Eichmann was correct.



The third focus of attack was Arendt's comments on the Jewish Councils. She wrote: "To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story... Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million... I have dwelt on this chapter of the story, which the Jerusalem trial failed to put before the eyes of the world in its true dimensions, because it offers the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society -- not only in Germany but in almost all countries, not only among the persecutors but also among the victims."

It doesn't take much of a leap of the imagination to see why this went down so badly.

Amos Elon wonders: "Would she have shocked less if she had raised questions about their behaviour instead of contemptuously attacking them?... Would it have shocked less had she said explicitly that the Jewish leaders 'inadvertently' collaborated in their own destruction? This was certainly what she meant to say."

Arendt, as we saw, was propelled by the desire to understand. And such quests know no red lines. She told it as she saw it.

The Lanzmann movie I mentioned above profiles one such Jewish leader, Benjamin Murmelstein, who was appointed by the Nazis to be head of the Jewish Council at Theresienstadt. These councils operated very differently, so it's difficult to generalize about them. But by this account, their leaders were not volunteers; they had little power; and they were constantly subject to impossible demands from the Nazis.

Neil Gablenz argues that Arendt was unfair and undiscriminating in her judgment of the Jewish Councils, possibly because of her prejudice against Eastern Jews, as opposed to German ones. Ayala Paz, on the other hand, contends that Eichmann in Jerusalem as a whole is best understood as a continuation of the themes of The Origins of Totalitarianism, an earlier work of Arendt's, which contextualizes both the idea of banality and her criticism of the Jewish Councils: "The uniqueness of totalitarianism lies in its ability to mobilize all population groups to promote the regime's overarching vision, conditioning and shaping them to perform their designated roles."

Again, I can't judge how fair her assessment was. My instinct is always to sympathize with those driven to take invidious positions. Maybe my instinct blinds me. Amos Elon again: "Thinking, judging, and acting were closely linked in this and in other books by Hannah Arendt. Her position was that if you say to yourself, 'Who am I to judge?' you are already lost."



Fourthly, critics took aim at Arendt's "tone", which they saw as flippant, brash, insolent, and sarcastic. To many she came across as arrogant.

Again, I wonder whether gender plays a role here. To me, the tone is authoritative, but nowhere disrespectful, and I wonder whether, in a man's mouth, the "tone" would have met with as much censure.

Certainly, no-one who reads the book can be unmoved by it. Its detailed account of the merciless excision of Jewish rights in the years leading up to the "Final Solution", its exposure of the minutiae of the killings, and its constant repetition of the sheer numbers of people whom Eichmann freighted to their death, cannot fail to shock. How could a pathos-laden or rhetorical tone have added more?

As she says in her interview with Gaus: "I know one thing. Three minutes before certain death, I probably still would laugh. And that, they say, is the tone [of the book]. The tone is predominantly ironic, of course. The tone in this case really is the person... [When people criticize] the tone, this is an objection to me as a person. There is nothing I can do about it."



Having disposed of the major controversies that surrounded this book, I will close by recording some personal reactions.

1. Trials

Before I retired, I taught a postgraduate course entitled "The Politics of International Law". I would have happily made this book required reading, because it scythes through to the heart of our current difficulties in bringing horrendous crimes to account.

Questions about the nature of the trial were from the beginning in the forefront of Arendt's consciousness.

She fundamentally objected to the "show trial" quality of the event. The set-up, she felt, ensured that what was on trial was not an individual, but anti-Semitism throughout history; what was to be exalted was Zionism, which had finally allowed the Jews to fight back.

Nor did she sympathize with the prosecutor's determination to build a "general picture", as though this was some kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission: The impression at times, she records, was of a "mass meeting, at which speaker after speaker does his best to arouse the audience..." It is not that the witnesses did not deserve to be heard; it was just that this was the wrong forum.

She notes the trial's resemblance to those in other "Successor States" (sovereign states encompassing territories and peoples formerly under the sovereignty of another state). Just as Polish judges, for example, pronounced on crimes committed against the Polish people, now Israeli judges were trying crimes committed against the Jews. The Eichmann proceedings "differed from the Successor trials only in one respect -- the defendant had not been duly arrested and extradited to Israel; on the contrary, a clear violation of international law had been committed in order to bring him to justice... This, unhappily, was the only almost unprecedented feature in the whole Eichmann trial, and certainly it was the least entitled ever to become a valid precedent."

The major deficiency of the trial, however, in Arendt's eyes, was its failure to correctly determine the scope of the crime, and therefore the scope of the trial apparatus required. Israel, and the Jewish people in general, she argues, were too little disposed to recognize the utterly unprecedented nature of the crimes Eichmann was accused of:

"In the eyes of the Jews ... the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler, in which a third of the people perished, appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprecedented crime of genocide, but, on the contrary, as the oldest crime they knew and remembered. This misunderstanding ... is actually at the root of all the failures and shortcomings of the Jerusalem trial. None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution and judges alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history. They therefore believed that a direct line existed from the early anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party to the Nuremberg Laws and from there to the expulsion of Jews from the Reich and, finally, to the gas chambers. Politically and legally, however, these were 'crimes' different not only in degree of seriousness but in essence... The crime of the Nuremberg Laws was a national crime; it violated national, constitutional rights and liberties, but it was of no concern to the comity of nations. 'Enforced emigration', however, or expulsion, which became official policy after 1938, did concern the international community... Expulsion of nationals, in other words, is already an offense against humanity, if by 'humanity' we understand no more than the comity of nations. Neither the national crime of legalized discrimination... nor the international crime of expulsion was unprecedented... It was when the Nazi regime declared that the German people not only were unwilling to have any Jews in Germany but wished to make the entire Jewish people disappear from the face of the earth that the new crime against humanity -- in the sense of a crime 'against the human status,' or against the very nature of mankind -- appeared. Expulsion and genocide, though both are international offenses, must remain distinct; the former is an offense against fellow-nations, whereas the latter is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the 'human status' without which the very words 'mankind' or 'humanity' would be devoid of meaning. Had the court in Jerusalem understood that there were distinctions between discrimination, expulsion, and genocide, it would immediately have become clear that the supreme crime it was confronted with, the physical extermination of the Jewish people, was a crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people... Insofar as the victims were Jews, it was right and proper that a Jewish court should sit in judgment; but insofar as the crime was a crime against humanity, it needed an international tribunal to do justice to it."

What was needed was a permanent international criminal court... But it would be decades before such a body emerged, and it is still mired in controversy.



2. States

Again with my old IR hat on, it is impossible not to recognize from this account the importance of the state.

Firstly, we can clearly see the curse of statelessness, still a major problem for millions today. The most efficient way of expelling the Jews, it was found, was to first make them stateless. That way, no country could enquire about them or take responsibility for them; and the country where they were resident could confiscate their property.

Secondly, it becomes clear, over the course of several fascinating chapters, that the fate of the Jews was wildly different in the different countries of Europe. The case of Denmark is particularly interesting. "One is tempted," writes Arendt, "to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence... When the Germans approached [the Danish authorities] rather cautiously about introducing the yellow badge, they were simply told that the King would be the first to wear it... It is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds."

Bulgaria is another interesting example. The government eventually introduced the requirement for the yellow star to be worn: "For the Nazis, even this turned out to be a great disappointment. In the first place, as they dutifully reported, the badge was only a 'very little star'; second, most Jews simply did not wear it; and, third, those who did wear it received 'so many manifestations of sympathy from the misled population that they actually are proud of their sign'... Under great German pressure, the Bulgarian government finally decided to expel all Jews from Sofia to rural areas, but this measure was definitely not what the Germans demanded, since it dispersed the Jews instead of concentrating them... Both Parliament and the population remained clearly on the side of the Jews... Finally, the same thing happened in Bulgaria as was to happen in Denmark a few months later -- the local German officials became unsure of themselves and were no longer reliable... Not a single Bulgarian Jew had been deported or had died an unnatural death when, in August, 1944, with the approach of the Red Army, the anti-Jewish laws were revoked."

Of course, there were many countries whose stories were much less edifying...



3. Psychology

The political-psychological aspects of the period Arendt reviews were fascinating.

Firstly, a whole infrastructure of language has to be created, with the widespread use of code words, such as "final solution", "evacuation", and "special treatment". The gassing in the East, in the language of the Nazis, was "the humane way" of killing, "by granting people a mercy death". The very expression "language regulation" (Sprachregelung) was itself a code name, Arendt says: "It meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie."

Secondly, the baleful effects of groupthink are very apparent. As the Nazis' intentions for the Jews became clearer, Eichmann's conscience was "set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which 'good society' everywhere reacted as he did".

Euphemism and groupthink set the stage for the rest. Amos Elon again: "The Nazis had succeeded in turning the legal order on its head, making the wrong and the malevolent the foundation of a new 'righteousness'... Within this upside-down world Eichmann (perhaps like Pol Pot four decades later), seemed not to have been aware of having done evil."

Finally, the criminals exhibited a narcissistic compulsion to make it all about them... In Arendt's words: "What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique ('a great task that occurs once in two thousand years'), which must therefore be difficult to bear... The trick used by Himmler ... consisted in turning these instincts [of pity] around... So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!..."



4. Hope

In the midst of what is undeniably a dark story, Arendt makes sure we remain aware of our agential options. In the darkest times, individual choice is still possible.

Mentioned at the trial, for example, was Anton Schmidt, a German Army sergeant, who had helped Jewish partisans in various ways, and had eventually been arrested and executed. When this story was told, "a hush settled over the courtroom... And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question -- how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told."

There are explanations for their scarcity. Arendt mentions, for example, testimony from a German military doctor, who admitted that he and his colleagues knew what was happening, but did nothing -- because they would have disappeared, achieved nothing, and thereby made a "practically useless sacrifice".

Arendt is at pains to counter this: "It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear, but just as the Nazis' feverish attempts, from June, 1942, on, to erase all traces of the massacres ... were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents 'disappear in silent anonymity' were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be 'practically useless,' at least, not in the long run... Under conditions of terror most people will comply but SOME PEOPLE WILL NOT, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that 'it could happen' in most places but IT DID NOT HAPPEN EVERYWHERE. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation."

Sobering...

_*_*_

Arendt's what-the-judges-might-have-said-to-Eichmann-but-didn't is an excellent summary of the thrust of this long and complex book. It closes thus:

"Just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations -- as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world -- we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang."

Eichmann was hanged on 31 May 1962. His final piece of would-be high-flown oratory, summed up, according to Arendt, "the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us -- the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil".