Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt seemed a very different book this year than when I first read it the first time in 2011. Twelve years ago, I had never visited a Nazi Death Camp. I had not even visited a Holocaust museum. Since 2017 I have visited ten death camps in four countries. The book was much more vivid in this reading.
Since 2018, I have been a member of the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Over the past three months, I have listed to weekly 30-minute introductions of the chapters of the book by Roger Berkowitz, the director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
The book is a compilation of essays first published in the New Yorker magazine in 1963 in five parts. Later in the year the essays were published as a book.
Arendt reported on the trial for the New Yorker and considered both her essays and the later book as a work of journalism. The "journalist" in this case was a philosopher of considerable renown and a Jew who narrowly and early escaped the Holocaust. She was a refugee in France before finding her way to America.
The essays and the book cover the trial and give background on the life of Adolf Eichmann as well as a country-by-country accounting of the Holocaust. Arendt makes clear that Eichmann's role in transporting Jews to death camps required the cooperation of Jewish leaders to be as terribly effective as it was.
In Bulgaria and Denmark, the Nazis got very little cooperation from Jews or the government and most Jews survived the war. In the countries conquered by both the Soviets and the Nazis, the Jews were almost completely wiped out. Less than one percent of the Jews in the Baltic Republics survived the war. Poland was not much better. More Jews survived in Germany than in the worst countries in the east.
Eichmann was most effective in Hungary where cooperation by Jewish leaders made possible deportation of a half million Jews in less than a year. Arendt makes clear that Eichmann was a mid-level Nazi bureaucrat with a talent for logistics who was able to move three million people to death camps. He was a horrible person who deserved death, but he was not a titanic evil person with a plan like Adolf Hitler.
The waves of criticism that crashed on Arendt after the publication of the book had much to do with the portrayal of Eichmann as a shallow functionary rather than a personification of evil. The controversy that began in 1963 continues today as evidenced by comments in the Virtual Reading Group from people who strongly disagree with Arendt on Eichmann. Some of the discussion were heated (but polite).
The reading group is recorded and available in the podcast "Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz" hosted by Jana Mader, the Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center.
