Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics)

336 Pages·2006·2.67 MB·English

by  Hannah Arendt

EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM

HANNAH ARENDT was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906. She studied at the
Universities of Marburg and Freiburg and received her doctorate in philosphy at the
University of Heidelberg, where she studied under Karl Jaspers. In 1933 she fled from
Germany and went to France, where she worked for the immigration of Jewish refugee
children into Palestine. In 1941 she went to the United States and became an American
citizen ten years later.
She was a research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations, chief editor of
Schocken Books, executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction in New York
City, a visiting professor at several universities, including California, Princeton,
Columbia, and Chicago and university professor at the graduate Faculty of the New
School for Social Research. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952 and
won the annual Arts and Letters Grant of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in
1954.
Hannah Arendt's books include The Origins of Totalitariansim, Crisis in the
Republic, Men in Dark Times, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercizes in Political
Thought, and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. She also edited
two volumes of Karl Jaspers's The Great Philosophers. Hannah Arendt died in
December 1975.
AMOS ELON was born in Vienna, Austria, and has spent most of his adult life in
Jerusalem. A frequent essayist, lecturer, and critic who is well known for his articles in
The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, he is the author of such bestselling
works as The Israelis, Flight into Egypt, Founder, Herzel, and most recently The Pity of
It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch.
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HANNAH ARENDT
Eichmann in Jerusalem
A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Introduction by AMOS ELON

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First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1963
Revised and enlarged edition published 1965
Published in Viking Compass edition 1965
Published in Penguin Books 1977
This edition with an introduction by Amos Elon published in Penguin Books 2006
Copyright © Hannah Arendt, 1963, 1964
Copyright renewed Lotte Kohler, 1991, 1992
Introduction copyright © Amos Elon, 2006
All rights reserved
The contents of the original edition of this book, in slightly abbreviated and otherwise
slightly different form, originally appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it
shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN: 978-0-14-193159-3
Contents

Introduction by Amos Elon
Note to the Reader
I: The House of Justice
II: The Accused
III: An Expert on the Jewish Question
IV: The First Solution: Expulsion
V: The Second Solution: Concentration
VI: The Final Solution: Killing
VII: The Wannsee Conference, or Pontius Pilate
VIII: Duties of a Law-Abiding Citizen
IX: Deportations from the Reich—Germany, Austria and the Protectorate
X: Deportations from Western Europe—France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Italy
XI: Deportations from the Balkans—Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania
XII: Deportations from Central Europe—Hungary and Slovakia
XIII: The Killing Centers in the East
XIV: Evidence and Witnesses
XV: Judgment, Appeal, and Execution
Epilogue
Postscript
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
THE EXCOMMUNICATION OF HANNAH ARENDT

In December 1966, Isaiah Berlin, the prominent philosopher and historian of ideas, was
the guest of his friend, Edmund Wilson, the well-known American man of letters. An
entry in Wilson's diary mentions an argument between the two men. Berlin “gets
violent, sometimes irrational prejudice against people,” Wilson noted, “for example
[against] Hannah Arendt, although he has never read her book about Eichmann.” In a
memoir in the Yale Review in 1987, Berlin made exactly the same charge against
Wilson and elaborated upon this in a 1991 interview with the editor of Wilson's diary.1
We don't know the outcome of this quarrel. One thing we do know: more than three
years after the publication of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil first appeared in print, the civil war it had launched among intellectuals
in the United States and in Europe was still seething. Describing the debate that raged
through his own and other families in New York, Anthony Grafton later wrote that no
subject had fascinated and aroused such concern and serious discussion as the series of
articles Hannah Arendt had published in The New Yorker about the Eichmann trial, and
the book that grew out of them. Three years after the publication of the book, people
were still bitterly divided over it. No book within living memory had elicited similar
passions. A kind of excommunication seemed to have been imposed on the author by
the Jewish establishment in America. The controversy has never really been settled.
Such controversies often die down, simmer, and then erupt again. It is perhaps no
accident that at this time of a highly controversial war in Iraq, Arendt's books are still
widely read and that, even though close to 300,000 copies of her book on Eichmann
alone have so far been sold, this new edition is now published by Penguin.
Eichmann in Jerusalem continues to attract new readers and interpreters in Europe,
too. In Israel, where the Holocaust was long seen as simply the culmination of a long
unbroken line of anti-Semitism, from pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler and Arafat
—David Ben-Gurion, the architect of the 1960 show trial wanted it that way—the
growing interest among young people in this book suggests a search for a different
view. A new Hebrew translation was recently published to considerable acclaim. In the
past, the difficulty of many Israelis to accept Arendt's book ran parallel to another
difficulty—foreseen by Arendt early on—the difficulty of confronting, morally and
politically, the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians. The Palestinians bore no
responsibility for the collapse of civilization in Europe but ended up being punished for
it.
In Europe, the collapse of communist totalitarianism contributed to the renewed
interest in Arendt's work. Interest was further kindled by the publication, in the past
several years, of Arendt's voluminous correspondence with Karl Jaspers, Mary
McCarthy, Hermann Broch, Kurt Blumenfeld, Martin Heidegger, and her husband