Why Hannah Arendt's name is a dirty word to many Zionists -> http://www.thenation.com/article/207217/trials-hannah-arendt
The Trials of Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt, 1969. Photo via AP.
Events have the last word. Journalists report them, historians contextualize them, and philosophers interpret them. But whether war or revolution, assassination or inauguration, deeds and their doers routinely escape the grasp of their chroniclers. Even in the works of the greatest analysts—Hobbes on the English Civil War, Marx on the Paris Commune—events have a way of evading their command.
Sometimes, however, a writer does get the last word. Do we know of a Trojan War that is not intimately Homer’s, a Richard III who is not Shakespeare’s? This is especially true of trials. Socrates has no apology apart from Plato’s; Gary Gilmore, no song that is not Norman Mailer’s. It’s not clear why a trial should be more hospitable to a writer’s control than other events. Lawyers and witnesses tell stories, too. Why should a writer’s story endure, but not theirs? Any writer whose narrative of a trial outlives that of its protagonists has achieved something rare.
Hannah Arendt’s five articles on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann by the state of Israel appeared in The New Yorker in February and March 1963. They were published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evillater that year. The book immediately set off a controversy that a half-century later shows no signs of abating. Just this past fall, the intellectual historian Richard Wolin (a colleague of mine at the CUNY Graduate Center) and the Yale political theorist Seyla Benhabib fought bitterly over Eichmann in the pages of The New York Times and the Jewish Review of Books. The book has become the event, eclipsing the trial itself.
The Eichmann fires are always smoldering, but what reignited them last fall was the appearance in English of Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem, first published in Germany in 2011. Eichmann Before Jerusalem aims to reveal a depth of anti-Semitism in Eichmann that Arendt never quite grasped. Stangneth bases her argument on the so-called Sassen transcripts, a voluminous record of conversations between Eichmann and a group of unreconstructed Nazis in Argentina in the 1950s (only a portion of the transcripts were available to Arendt, who read and discussed them in Eichmann). Yet Stangneth’s is merely the latest in a series of books—including Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial, published in 2011, and David Cesarani’s Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer,” which appeared in 2004—arguing that Eichmann was more of an anti-Semite than Arendt had realized.
There’s a history to the conflict over Eichmann in Jerusalem, and like all such histories, the changes in how we read and argue about the book tell us as much about ourselves, and our shifting preoccupations and politics, as they do about Eichmann or Arendt. What has remained constant, however, is the wrath and the rage that Eichmann has aroused. Other books are read, reviled, cast off, passed on. Eichmann is different. Its errors and flaws, real and imagined, have not consigned it to the dustbin of history; they are perennially retrieved and held up as evidence of the book’s viciousness and its author’s vice. An “evil book,” the Anti-Defamation League said upon its publication, and so it remains. Friends and enemies, defenders and detractors—all have compared Arendt and her book to a criminal in the dock, her critics to prosecutors set on conviction.
Like so many Jewish texts throughout the ages, Eichmann in Jerusalem is an invitation to an auto-da-fé. Only in this case, almost all of the inquisitors are Jews. What is it about this most Jewish of texts that makes it such a perennial source of rancor among Jews, and what does their rancor tell us about Jewish life in the shadow of the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel? What does the wrongness of Eichmann’s readers reveal about the rightness of its arguments?
In the first decades after its publication, Eichmann in Jerusalem provoked readers primarily over what it had to say about Jewish cooperation with the Nazis. Arendt cast her eye on everyone from the Zionists who negotiated with the Nazis to the Jewish Councils that provided them with detailed lists of Jewish property for dispossession, helped Jews onto the trains, administered the ghettos, and helped Jews onto the trains again. She concluded, “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 people.” It was a sentence for which she would never be forgiven.
The charges against Arendt were many: She blamed the victims; she ignored the trap the Jews were in; “she saw symmetry,” in the words of Lipstadt, “between the Nazis and their victims where there was none.” According to Wolin, “Arendt made it seem as though it was the Jews themselves, rather than their Nazi persecutors, who were responsible for their own destruction.”
None of this is true, but neither is Arendt’s account of Jewish cooperation beyond reproach. She did fail to confront the fact that, with or without the cooperation of the Jewish Councils, the Jews were slaughtered—often, as historian Yehuda Bauer observed in Rethinking the Holocaust (2000), with greater dispatch when there was no cooperation or leadership. In the wake of the Nazis’ invasion of the Soviet Union, for example, the Einsatzgruppen, German police battalions, and local death squads killed Jews without assistance from Jewish leaders.
Yet, as Arendt tirelessly reminded her readers, murder on the Eastern Front was not Eichmann’s concern. His portfolio encompassed Western Europe to the Balkans, but it did not include the “bloodlands” of eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, or the Baltics. Before the killing machine began operating, Eichmann’s job was to move the Jews out of areas under German control; after, to send them to their deaths. Working with Jewish leaders, as Cesarani shows, was one of his signature methods. To write about his crimes, Arendt had to write about these methods.
Eichmann, however, was more than an empirical report about one man on trial. It was also a work of political theory. To understand Arendt’s approach, it helps to set her account of Jewish cooperation in Eichmann against her account of total terror in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which appeared in 1951. In this earlier work, Arendt had argued that totalitarian ideologies conjured a world of perpetual motion: the movement of history, in the case of Soviet communism; the rhythms of nature, in the case of Nazism. The purpose of terror was to liberate that motion, to eliminate all friction from the human machine. Men and women were reduced to a Pavlovian minimum, offering no resistance to the forces of nature or the wheels of history. Whether hunter or hunted, predator or prey, they were repurposed to serve as the pliant materials of these ideologies. Even at the highest rungs of the regime, even at the cost of their lives: “The process may decide that those who today eliminate races and individuals or the members of dying classes and decadent peoples are tomorrow those who must be sacrificed. What totalitarian rule needs to guide the behavior of its subjects is a preparation to fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim.”
But as Arendt came to realize, if everyone, including the regime’s top leaders, was perfectly outfitted for his own murder, how could anyone be criticized for not opposing the regime? If perpetrators were mere implements of an ideology—and ultimately its victims—how could they be condemned for executing its verdicts? “There exists a widespread theory,” Arendt would write later in a letter, “to which I also contributed [in Origins], that these crimes defy the possibility of human judgment.”
With Eichmann, Arendt retreated from this view, extracting from a blurred silhouette of mass ruin detailed sketches of discrete men, making discrete choices, taking discrete actions. There was room for maneuver under the Nazis—indeed, the regime depended upon it—and how one maneuvered made a moral difference.
That difference was most evident in Arendt’s five chapters on the regional patterns and variations of the Holocaust, from Denmark to Bulgaria. These chapters focus not on the Jewish leadership but on non-Jews. Where local non-Jewish officials and cadres opposed, evaded, delayed, or sabotaged the Nazis’ plans, they saved Jews; where they cooperated, collaborated, or stood by, they made a catastrophe. Geography mattered for Arendt: not the physical terrain of a country, but its institutions, leadership, and personnel, the particular decisions they made, the actions they took, the support they offered or withheld.
In her effort to restore some room for maneuver, some sense of responsibility, to the Nazi edifice, Arendt ranged widely—sometimes clumsily, sometimes cruelly—into the darkest spaces of its cornered victims. But if she overstated her case regarding Jewish cooperation—“these people had still a certain, limited freedom of decision and action,” as she wrote in a famous letter to Gershom Scholem, which was true of some leaders, not others, in some places, but not all—it’s important to remember that her most informed critics have also insisted that Jewish leaders did not react like automatons; they acted in a variety of ways, depending on context and circumstance, and those differences sometimes made a difference. While Arendt may have misconstrued the empirics of collaboration and resistance, what she was calling attention to was not the failure of all Jews to resist, but the failure of Jewish leaders to refuse the role that had been thrust upon them. And her judgment of that failure—from top to bottom, the micro-politics of refusal and collaboration—remains salient.
Further Reading: http://www.thenation.com/article/207217/trials-hannah-arendt#
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