BOOK ESSAY - SUMMER 2013
Hannah Arendt on Trial
The 1963 publication of her “Eichmann in Jerusalem” sparked a debate that still rages over its author’s motivations
By Daniel Maier-Katkin and Nathan Stoltzfus |
The American Scholar, June 10, 2013
Fifty years ago, The
New Yorker published a series of articles that became one of the most
controversial books of the 20th century: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The articles dealt with
the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who coordinated the logistics
of transporting millions of European Jews to their death during World War II.
Arendt portrayed Eichmann and other Nazi criminals not as hate-filled,
anti-Semitic monsters but as petty bureaucrats and spoke openly about the role
played by Jewish councils in the deportation and destruction of their own
people. Arendt’s central insight into what she called “the banality of
evil”—that great crimes can arise from mindless conformity and thoughtlessness
about the humanity of others—came paired with sharp criticism of Israeli
insensitivity to legitimate Palestinian claims and disregard for the rights of
minorities and neighbors.
Arendt suffered
ferocious personal attacks that continue today, 37 years after her death.
Criticism of her Eichmann book inevitably incorporates some variant of the
assertion that she felt herself to be more German than Jewish and was a
self-hating, anti-Semitic Jew—a strange charge against a woman who worked on
behalf of Jewish organizations most of her life. The 50-year battle over
Arendt’s reputation has pitted her defenders against those who would deflect
her criticism of Israel as anti-Jewish, thus turning people away from her ideas
about democratic pluralism and regional cooperation without having to discuss
them.
Soon after the
Eichmann pieces began to appear, civil rights activist Henry Schwarzschild
warned Arendt that Jewish organizations in New York were furiously planning a
campaign against her and that she should expect to be the object of great
debate and animosity.
Siegfried Moses, a
friend from Arendt’s youth who had immigrated to Israel and risen to the
position of state comptroller, sent a note to Arendt on behalf of the Council
of Jews from Germany, declaring war on her and her Eichmann book. Moses then
flew to Switzerland to meet with Arendt and demanded that she stop the book’s
publication. She refused, warning him that the intensity of criticism was
“going to make the book into a cause célèbre and thus embarrass the Jewish
community far beyond anything that she had said or could possibly do.” Indeed,
literary critic Irving Howe would describe the vitriolic public dispute that
ensued as “violent,” while novelist Mary McCarthy would liken it to a pogrom.
It began on March 11
with a memorandum distributed by the Anti-Defamation League alerting its
members to “Arendt’s defamatory conception of Jewish participation in the Nazi
Holocaust,” by which they meant her reporting that evidence at the trial showed
that leaders of Jewish communities across Europe had negotiated the orderly
demise of their communities with Eichmann. The ADL followed up with a pamphlet,
“Arendt Nonsense,” which called the Eichmann articles evil, glib, and trite.
On May 19, 1963, The
New York Times published a highly critical review of Eichmann
in Jerusalem by Michael A. Musmanno, a retired Navy rear admiral who
had served as a judge at the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunals and was then a
sitting justice on Pennsylvania’s supreme court. Musmanno had also appeared as
a witness for the prosecution at the Eichmann trial. In her book Arendt had
disparaged Musmanno’s testimony that Nazi foreign minister Joachim von
Ribbentrop told him at Nuremberg that Hitler’s madness had come about because
he had fallen under Eichmann’s influence. Even the prosecution knew this was a
fabrication. Musmanno wrote in the Times that Arendt was
motivated by “purely private prejudice. She attacks the State of Israel, its
laws and institutions, wholly unrelated to the Eichmann case.”
That summer New York
intellectuals weighed in. A review by playwright and critic Lionel Abel
in Partisan Review accused Arendt of having portrayed the
Nazis as more aesthetically appealing than their victims. Journalist Norman
Podhoretz’s review in Commentary concluded that Arendt had
exemplified “intellectual perversity [resulting] from the pursuit of brilliance
by a mind infatuated with its own agility and bent on generating dazzle.”
Zionist activist Marie Syrkin wrote in Dissent that Eichmann
was the only character who came out better in the book than he went in and
accused Arendt of manipulating the facts with “high-handed assurance.” Arendt
had published often in all three journals.
In July, when she came
home from Europe, where she had been traveling since the articles appeared,
Arendt wrote to a friend, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, that her
“apartment was literally filled with unopened mail … about the Eichmann
business.” Much of it bordered on hate mail, like the letter from a woman in
New Jersey who began with a declaration that she had never read the Eichmann
book and “would never read such trash” and concluded with the hope that “the
ghosts of our six million martyrs haunt your bed at night.”
More measured
criticism came in a letter from Gershom Scholem, a friend from Arendt’s youth
and then a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He affirmed his “deep respect” for Arendt but characterized the tone of her
book as “heartless,” “flippant,” “sneering and malicious,” replacing balanced
judgment with a “demagogic will-to-overstatement.” He could never think of her,
he wrote, as anything other than “a daughter of our people” but admonished her
for insufficient Ahabath Israel, love of the Jewish people: “In
you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who come from the German Left, I
find little trace of this.”
Arendt replied that
she came not from the German Left but from the tradition of German philosophy
and that of course she was a daughter of the Jewish people and had never
claimed to be anything else: “I have always regarded my Jewishness as one of
the indisputable actual data of my life, and I have never had the wish to
change or disclaim facts of this kind. There is such a thing as basic gratitude
for everything that is as it is.” But you are quite right, she told him, in
what you say about Ahabath Israel. “I have never in my life ‘loved’
any people or collective—neither the German people, nor the French, nor the
American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’
my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of
persons.”
In the full flush of
the attack, Mary McCarthy stepped forward as Arendt’s champion. Writing in the
Winter 1964 issue of Partisan Review, she observed that the
hostile reviews and personal attacks on Arendt were written almost entirely by
Jews. She dismissed Lionel Abel’s assertion that Arendt made Eichmann
aesthetically palatable: “Reading her book, he liked Eichmann better than the
Jews who died in the crematoriums. Each to his own taste. It was not my
impression.”
Fevered discourse
continued to rage across the pages of Partisan Review’s next issue.
Marie Syrkin accused McCarthy of intellectual irresponsibility and ignorance,
and writer and historian Harold Weisberg characterized her defense of Arendt as
wholly lacking in charity and logic. Poet Robert Lowell countered that Arendt’s
only motive was a “heroic desire for truth.” Journalist and critic Dwight
Macdonald called Eichmann in Jerusalem a masterpiece of
historical journalism and defended McCarthy’s “brilliant” observation that the
split over the book was between Christians and Jews, especially
“organization-minded Jews.”
In 1965, Jacob
Robinson, an adviser to the prosecution in the Eichmann trial, published a
400-page denunciation of Arendt’s scholarship, And the Crooked Shall Be
Made Straight: The Eichmann Trial, The Jewish Catastrophe and Hannah Arendt’s
Narrative. With the assistance of teams of researchers in New York, London,
Paris, and Jerusalem, Robinson scoured Arendt’s book and found 400 “factual
errors,” including such minutiae as the misspelling of a first name. Some of
the things he listed, it turned out, were not errors at all. Nevertheless, an
essay by historian Walter Laqueur in The New York Review of Books asserted
that Arendt lacked the factual knowledge needed to make a scholarly
contribution. Laqueur characterized Robinson as “formidable,” an eminent
authority on international law, an erudite polymath with knowledge of many
languages and unrivalled mastery of sources. Robinson’s motivation for undertaking
a full-scale refutation of “Miss Arendt’s” flippant display of cleverness,
Laqueur wrote, was the natural “resentment felt by the professional against the
amateur.”
Arendt had been
reluctant to react publicly to the controversy, preferring to let her work
speak for itself. In January 1966, however, she responded, in The New York
Review of Books, to Laqueur’s essay. Laqueur, she wrote, was so
overwhelmed by Robinson’s “eminent authority” that he had failed to acquaint
himself with the facts. For a start, she had not written a narrative about the
Jewish catastrophe, but only a report about a trial. She criticized the
prosecution for repeatedly raising questions about why there had not been more
Jewish resistance during the Holocaust—a line of questioning she dismissed as
Israeli militarist propaganda. She also pointed out that Robinson was not a
historian but a lawyer who had published practically nothing prior to his book.
The honorific of “eminent authority” had been attached to him only after he joined
the chorus of critics attacking her. What is formidable about Robinson, Arendt
concluded, is that his words were amplified by the Israeli government with its
consulates, embassies, and missions throughout the world, along with the
American and World Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, and the ADL, in a coordinated
effort to characterize her book as a posthumous defense of Eichmann and her as
the evil person who wrote it.
Arendt worried that
the backlash against the Eichmann book had blown the controversy out of
proportion and that partially informed people would believe “all the nonsense”
critics were spouting. At the height of the scandal, however, Jaspers assured
her that she would emerge with her reputation intact: any fair-minded person
who read the Eichmann book would see her seriousness of purpose, honesty,
fundamental goodness, and passion for justice. “A time will come that you will
not live to see, when Jews will erect a monument to you in Israel, as they are
doing now for Spinoza,” he wrote. “They will proudly claim you as their own.”
Now, as the debate began to subside, Jaspers wrote that though she had suffered
greatly, the critical uproar was adding to her prestige.
Arendt wrote back that
she had been warmly received by the mostly Jewish students who had turned out
in substantial numbers for her lectures on politics at Yale, Columbia, Chicago,
and other universities. “The funny thing,” she told Jaspers, was that after
speaking her mind openly about “the formidable Mr. Robinson,” she was once
again “flooded with invitations from all the Jewish organizations to speak, to
appear at congresses, etc. And some of these invitations are coming from
organizations that I singled out to attack and named by name.”
In the next few years
she would collect a dozen honorary degrees from American universities and be
inducted into both the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, which awarded her its Emerson-Thoreau Medal for
distinguished achievement in literature. In Denmark, where Jews had been
heroically protected during the Nazi occupation, Arendt in 1975 received the
Sonning Prize (worth the equivalent of roughly $200,000 today) for “commendable
work that benefits European culture.”
For a long moment,
which lasted another quarter-century after her death in 1975, Arendt had beaten
back her detractors, with her reputation intact. New Yorker editor
William Shawn wrote that Arendt’s death had removed “some counterweight to all
the world’s unreason and corruption,” that she had been “a moral and
intellectual force that went beyond category,” and that her influence “on
intellectuals, artists, and political people around the world was profound.”
More recently, though,
the battle over Arendt’s reputation and the value of her work, especially Eichmann
in Jerusalem, has been joined again, rekindled by evidence in Arendt’s
papers that as a young woman, she had a love affair with the German philosopher
Martin Heidegger. It was known that Arendt had been Heidegger’s student, but
the posthumous revelation of their romantic relationship by Arendt’s
biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, came as a bombshell.
Arendt and Heidegger
were lovers for about six months, beginning in November 1924. She was an
18-year-old philosophy student; he was 35, married with two children, and was
in something of a creative frenzy writing Being and Time, the
all but inscrutable masterpiece that established his position as an
existentialist. Arendt thought she was his muse. The love affair cooled by
summer, when Heidegger withdrew into family and professional life, and there
was less and less contact. Arendt appears to have suffered the bittersweet
longings of unrequited love.
What seemed a final
break between them occurred when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Arendt fled
Germany, and Heidegger very publicly joined the Nazi Party and was elevated to
the position of Rektor at Freiburg University. He resigned
after one year, having fired the Jewish faculty, disbanded the university
senate in favor of a Führer system of governance, and exhorted students to
military service, often ending his speeches, right arm stretched out and up in salute,
with “Heil Hitler,” repeated three times. After the war he downplayed the
significance of all this and told transparent lies about the past, claiming to
have done it all in an effort to protect the university.
Nevertheless, five
years after the war, Arendt reconciled with Heidegger. She was in Germany
directing a State Department project to preserve and distribute unclaimed
Jewish cultural property looted by the Nazis—mostly books and religious
artifacts—to synagogues and Jewish museums, libraries, and universities around
the world. Passing through Freiberg, she sent a note to Heidegger, who came to
see her. A lifelong friendship and affectionate correspondence ensued. After
the affair became public, Heidegger’s reputation as a Nazi seeped into the Eichmann
controversy, giving new shape to the old calumny that Arendt was a
pathologically self-hating Jew, whose opinions about Israel and Jewish politics
were not to be taken seriously.
Arendt’s latter-day
critics maintain that she was so blinded by schoolgirl love that she either
could not see what a bad man Heidegger was or did not care; that she so adored
him and the German intellectual tradition he represented that she was driven to
forgive him; that her affection for Heidegger and everything German explains
how she could distort Eichmann into something banal and display such shocking
insensitivity toward Jewish victims.
It is as if Arendt’s
detractors conflate Heidegger with Eichmann, a mass murderer whose execution
Arendt supported. Whatever his sins, Heidegger was not one of the leaders of
the Third Reich, nor was he involved in planning or executing war crimes or
crimes against humanity. He was, after 1934, an increasingly irrelevant
professor of philosophy. Despite his early enthusiasm for Nazism, there is
little evidence suggesting Heidigger was ever an anti-Semite. Granted, he was
never forthcoming about his past, not even in a final interview published by
prior agreement after his death. Still, he was not Adolf Eichmann.
Arendt understood the
distinction, once referring to Heidegger as a man who lied at the drop of a hat
in order to manage a situation. Heidegger nurtured fantasies of power as the
foremost Nazi intellectual and had grandiose ambitions to restore philosophy to
a state of grace not known since the Greeks, but his ignorance of the world,
Arendt concluded, prevented him from seeing that the Nazis were interested only
in people who thought as they did. In a public address honoring Heidegger on
his 80th birthday, Arendt referred to his Nazi time as a mistaken “escapade,”
spent primarily in “avoiding” (which implies willfully looking away from) the
reality “of the Gestapo’s secret rooms and the torture cells of the
concentration camps.”
Her critique was not
strong enough for Heidegger’s most severe critics, nor for Arendt’s. Heidegger
scholar Emmanuel Faye asserts that Heidegger’s texts reveal an inveterate Nazi
not only during the Hitler years but before and after as well. Faye finds that
even Being and Time, written 10 years before the Nazis came to
power, is so thick with veiled proto-Nazi messages that it should be shelved
next to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Literary critic Carlin
Romano, in a 2009 review of a book Faye wrote about Heidegger, laid the
philosopher’s guilt at Arendt’s feet, identifying her among the acolytes who
venerated the “pretentious old Black Forest babbler.” Journalist Ron Rosenbaum
adds that it will never be possible to think about Arendt or her
“intellectually toxic relationship” with Heidegger the same way again because
of her “lifelong romantic infatuation with the Nazi-sympathizing professor.” He
dismisses the “banality of evil” as the “most overused, misused, abused
pseudo-intellectual phrase in our language” and finds Arendt’s use of it
“deceitful,” “disingenuous,” and “utterly fraudulent” in relation to Eichmann,
concluding that the man responsible for the “logistics of the Final Solution”
simply could not be “a banal bureaucrat.”
Deborah
Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial (2011) concludes that Arendt was
just plain wrong about Eichmann. On the basis of “new” evidence that Eichmann
was a bully, braggart, and liar, Lipstadt proposes to supplant Arendt’s image
of the banal bureaucrat with a hate-filled, mad-dog, anti-Semitic monster.
Arendt was wrong,
Lipstadt declares, to think that Eichmann “did not really understand the
enterprise in which he was involved.” But this is certainly not what Arendt
meant when she concluded that the trial had been a “long course in human
wickedness [that] had taught us the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality
of evil.” Lipstadt’s insight into Arendt’s supposed misjudgment of Eichmann
is based on the reporting of a French journalist, Joseph Kessel, who was
present at the trial on a day when Arendt was not. When damaging depositions of
SS officers were read aloud, Kessel could detect “the passion and rage of the
true Eichmann” beneath the “hollow mask” of a bumbler that he held up to the
world.
Why does Lipstadt
think Arendt was unable to detect Eichmann’s true character? Because, she tells
us, Arendt was writing for only one person, the only person whose approval
mattered to her: Martin Heidegger. A more plausible understanding of
Heidegger’s significance in the history of the Eichmann book is that during her
first postwar encounter with her former mentor, in 1950, Arendt intuitively
recognized the banality of evil: Martin was still Martin. He had behaved
despicably, but she recognized his humanity and admired his genius. The
epiphany when she saw Eichmann a decade later was that, even at that level of
culpability (so far beyond Heidegger’s), the motives for direct participation
in mass murder were still fundamentally banal: not blood lust but ambition to
advance one’s career, to enjoy status and opportunity, to fulfill an oath of loyalty,
to be regarded as capable, a leader, a good fellow, perhaps to have a place in
history.
The more recent
battles over Arendt’s reputation and her criticism of Israeli policy and Jewish
politics have taken a desperate turn with their focus on her love affair with
Heidegger. Everything else about their relationship was known in 1963. The
assertion that Arendt was hard-hearted and uncaring is supported by nothing new
and is no stronger now than it was 50 years ago.
Arendt’s insight into
the banality of evil remains undiminished: human character is malleable, not
fixed; in the right circumstances masses of otherwise ordinary, decent,
law-abiding people can be transformed into collaborators and perpetrators of
reprehensible crimes against humanity.
Likewise, her
depiction of the Eichmann trial as political theater is still cogent. Arendt
was not alone in her criticism of the prosecution: the Israeli judges also
complained that the prosecutor relied on survivors’ inflammatory testimony
about the horrors of the Holocaust without showing a connection to the
defendant. What Arendt hoped to learn in Jerusalem was how Eichmann had done
his work, how the mass murders had been organized and implemented. Who had said
and done what with and to whom? But the prosecutor’s ambition was to capture
the imagination of Israeli youth and world Jewry with a retelling of the
suffering of the Holocaust.
Real justice, in
Arendt’s view, requires full disclosure, including self-disclosure, not only
retribution for Nazi crimes against humanity but also an effort to understand
how political systems can produce the complicity of perpetrators, bystanders,
and even victims. If evil is banal, it can turn up anywhere, even among
victims, even among Jews, even in Israel.
Permission
required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.
Daniel Maier-Katkin and Nathan Stoltzfus coauthored this article.
Maier-Katkin is the author of Stranger From Abroad: Hannah Arendt,
Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness. Stoltzfus is the author
of Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protests
in Nazi Germany. Both are on the faculty at Florida State University.
