Visualizing Atrocity: Arendt, Evil, and the Optics of Thoughtlessness by Valerie Hartouni (review)

Valerie Hartouni’s volume reinterprets Hannah Arendt’s controversial reflections on political evil in the twentieth century. Hartouni’s preface critiques “conventional” historiography and its “curiously reassuring polemics,” highlighting the incongruity of rendering the Nazi genocide as a “benchmark” or “paradigm” on the one hand, and, on the other hand, making it a uniquely aberrant, extra-historical, and hence “unknowable event” (pp. 10–11, 13, 17, 18, 34, 70, 113).

Hartouni’s approach entails reassessing the role of functionaries and processes in Nazi mass crimes. The author rejects the view that Germany’s state apparatus and professional disciplines were “colonized” by Nazi ideology or subjected to a political agenda: this would revive their putative status as disinterested and value-free agencies merely mobilized as instruments of Nazi domination (pp. 14, 123). Rather, for Hartouni, the “government-driven program of genocide” depended upon “conventional and familiar” state-administrative procedures (p. 63) and professional expertise—notably in the sciences, law, economics, anthropology, and demography—whose “conventional regimes of knowledge-production and collection [helped] set the stage for the mass murder” (pp. 14, 61). The “rationale for what became administrative mass murder” had roots in complex “biodemographic reconfigurations of land and populations … envisioned by experts” (p. 61). The latter drew upon “forms of rationality, modes of relations, mechanisms of management, and techniques of power” common to all modern states (p. 62).

Hartouni retains the link between Nazi ideology and modern notions of demographic reordering, but her central thesis is that the latter must not be collapsed into the former. Still, her approach does raise certain questions. For one, although Hartouni draws attention to the role of conventional state and bureaucratic “regimes” and of professional expertise in Nazi genocide, in fact few historians ever contested their centrality (p. 63), at least since Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961). Second, the author’s use of the term “constitutive rationale” leaves undefined the impetus and trajectory of the “biodemographic reconfigurations” that had been “envisioned” by experts (p. 61) and that gained momentum with the invasion of the Soviet Union. A “rationale” should disclose the principles underlying something, but the ambiguity of the relationship here cannot be explained away by invoking “social modernization” (p. 19)—unless one interprets Nazi conquest as a manifestation of demographic pressures in Germany itself. Other aspects of Hartouni’s argument are based in part on debatable findings of authors such as Götz Aly.

Still, Hartouni’s emphasis upon the “lethal conjunction of processes and practices that … allowed the genocide to emerge as more than an abstract possibility” (p. 13) is complemented by a recognition of a “Nazi project” (pp. 17, 143). There is no indication that Hartouni disparages such crucial figures as Heydrich as mere “midlevel bureaucrats.” At the same time, she does steer away from intentionalist notions of “eliminationist antisemitism,” which conceal more than they reveal of the genesis of the Nazi genocide.

Turning to Arendt’s analysis of “radical evil” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and of “the banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hartouni contends that the former inordinately emphasized “ideology” (pp. 117, 119). Arendt’s encounter with Eichmann led her, according to Hartouni, “to reconsider her assessment of the Nazi project and in particular her understanding of the character of evil it represented” (p. 17). Arendt now “jettisoned the idea of demonic and monstrous perpetrators, henceforth to be understood as functionaries (p. 122) who viewed the world through “the optics of thoughtlessness” (p. 120). These are sweeping claims.

However, if we take into account Arendt’s essays in the 1940s it becomes apparent, first, that Eichmann did not lead Arendt to substantially revise her “assessment of the Nazi project” per se (p. 17); and that these essays and Origins laid the groundwork for her central arguments in Eichmann. Thus, on the one hand, Eichmann reiterates the primacy of the Nazi movement in...