Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt's Rhetoric of Warning and Hope

7. The Banality of Evil: Eichmann in Jerusalem

90 7 The Banality of Evil Eichmann in Jerusalem He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity. . . . This is “banal.” . . . Seemingly more complicated . . . than examining the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil, is the question of what kind of crime is actually involved here—a crime, moreover, which all agree is unprecedented. —Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963. She attended Adolf Eichmann’s trial in the formal capacity as a reporter for the New Yorker; Arendt had proposed to the New Yorker that she assume the role of trial reporter in 1961 when it was clear that Eichmann would go on trial in Israel.1 Arendt subordinated Eichmann, a single person, to a much larger critical agenda—her ongoing critique of modernity, which fueled the Nazi rise to power and its temporal social and military prowess. With her disdain for modernity, the object of Arendt’s wrath was a foe significantly larger, particularly more pervasive, and ravenously more expansive than the unimpressive figure of Eichmann—she sought to unmask modernity. 91 The Banality of Evil Resistance to the call to belong was a frequent theme in Arendt’s scholarship. This emphasis is textured differently in her work on the Eichmann trial, as she outlines the life of the petty bureaucrat and also focuses on careerism, which works within the myth and promise of linear progress as long as one keeps one’s sights on advancement, necessitating a limited vision of one’s responsibilities in the construction of a good life for others. Only in a society increasingly committed to an individualism carried out within the irony of conformity could such a destructive view of belonging function as an unavoidable temptation. Arendt looks at how modernity took this impulse from the realm of temptation into unthinking action; therein rests her conception of the banality of evil. Arendt assumed that it was this modern vulgar temptation to belong at any cost that lurked at the heart of Eichmann’s careerism and thoughtlessness. During the Eichmann trial, Arendt unmasked “the banality of evil,” which functioned as her hermeneutic entrance into modernity, understood as a stage that gives rise to an ongoing tragic drama.2 For most of her readers then and now, this drama (the problem of modernity) went unnoticed, unobserved, and undetected in the unreflective act of everyday looking. The Eichmann trial was a public display of the tragic drama of the banality of evil, to which Arendt directs our attention. Fifteen years after the conclusion of World War II, Eichmann was found guilty of “crimes ‘against the Jewish people,’ . . . ‘crimes against humanity[,]’ . . . [and] ‘war crimes.’”3 He was executed on May 31, 1962, at the age of fifty-six, hanged in Ramia, Israel. The time of Eichmann’s capture was surrounded by dramatic events: the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco in Cuba (April 17, 1961); the erection of the Berlin Wall (August 13, 1961); the Cuban missile crisis (October 1962); the beginnings of the civil rights movement and the March on Washington (August 28, 1963); and the expansion of U.S. military personnel in Vietnam, all of which were followed by the assassination of President Kennedy in the very year of publication of the Eichmann book by Arendt, 1963. An ensuing controversy over her account of the Eichmann trial continues today, long after the conclusion of the trial and her own death on December 4, 1975.4 Detractors claim Arendt was too lenient on Eichmann and unduly harsh on the prosecution. Her account disappointed an angry world that demanded retribution; she reported contrary to expectations , refusing to frame Eichmann as an originative home of evil. Only in retrospect, with the distance of time, is it possible to comprehend Arendt’s unique construction of her reporting assignment. She unmasks Eichmann’s bureaucratic false sense of “height” and how this diminutive man contributed to the orchestration of such an atrocity. 92 The Banality of Evil The Story: Taking Us from Actor to Script Construction Arendt sets the scene for this drama between two major coordinates: the philosophical optimism that the Israeli government had for the Eichmann trial as a moral drama and the emerging pragmatic consequences that Arendt sensed would define the outcome. She frames the misalignment between abstract optimism and the realities of...