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On May 11, 1960, Karl Adolph Eichmann, former traveling salesman and chief executioner of the Final Solution, was seized by special forces in a suburb of Buenos Aires. From there he was ®own under cover to Israel to face ¤fteen counts of “crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity,and war crimes during the whole period of the Nazi regime and especially during the period of the second world war.” The ensuing trial lasted eight months,and on December 5,1961,he was sentenced to death by a special three-judge panel in the District Court of Jerusalem. In the words of the judges, “[T]he idea of the Final Solution would never have assumed the infernal forms of the ®ayed skin and tortured ®esh of millions of Jews without the fanatical zeal and the unquenchable blood thirst of the appellant and his accomplices.” On May 31 of the following year he was hanged and his ashes spread over the Mediterranean.1 From beginning to end the entire episode had been fraught with controversy . The arrest itself was of dubious legal standing—a kidnapping, really—and jurisdictional issues plagued the proceedings throughout. Indeed it was unclear on just what basis an individual could be tried in a country that had not yet existed when his crimes againstitwerecommitted. And David Ben-Gurion, who had ordered the capture and prosecution in the ¤rst place, declared that he did “not care what verdict is delivered against Eichmann,” thus making clear his intention to bring the accused to a distinctive and some would say theatrical brand of political justice. Nothing about the trial, however, was to prove so provocative as the role played by a Jewish-American intellectual, refugee, and political theorist 2 Arendt,Eichmann,and the Politics of Remembrance Stephen Howard Browne who had taken it upon herself to report its proceedings in the pages of the New Yorker. The author of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt was at the time widely regarded as a thinker of stunning originality and insight, and these qualities she unquestionably brought to her task. Once in Jerusalem,Arendt,in the words ofMichaelDenneny,“received a jolt whose impact was to set the course of her thinking for the next¤fteen years, for she realized that this trial ‘touched upon one of the central moral questions of all time, namely the nature and function of human judgment.’” At the same time, nothing could have prepared her for the onslaught of criticism that followed in the wake of her reports, published shortly thereafter in 1963 as Eichmann in Jerusalem:A Report on the Banality of Evil.2 The reactions were not all negative.Arendt’s friend and correspondent Mary McCarthy thought it “morally exhilarating,”indeed “a paean of transcendence , heavenly music, like that of the ¤nal chorus of Figaro or the Messiah.”The poet James Lowell judged it “a masterpiece in rendering the almost unreadably repellent.” Lowell insisted that contrary to her critics , he “never felt she was condescending, or hard, or driven by a perverse theory, or by any motive except a heroic desire for truth.” Dwight McDonald concluded that the book was “a masterpiece of historical journalism that explained the real horror of Nazi genocide” and admitted that whatever the faults of her analysis, Arendt “tried to learn something from history” and so took “heart in a book like Eichmann in Jerusalem.”While disapproving of both the book’s “tone and formulation” and its more polemical critics, William Phillips concluded that Eichmann in Jerusalem was a “powerful account of Eichmann’s contribution to the ¤nal solution.”3 Others, to put it mildly, proved rather less impressed by the work. A review in The Nation claimed that it was little more than a “thin trickle of assertion through a ®ooded swampland of redundancies,” a book, wrote Klaus Epstein in the Modern Age, “marred by prejudices, special pleading, and attachment to ¤xed ideas.” Even her friend Gershom Scholem sadly insisted that it was the “heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious tone with which these matters, touching the very quick of our life, are treated in your book to which I take exception.” Lionel Abel, one of her most vociferous critics, publicly condemned the book for its misapplied “aesthetic” categories, found its argument “strange and shocking,” 46 / Stephen H.Browne “perverse and arbitrary,” and ¤nally dismissed the theory underlying it as wholly “invalidated.” Indeed, to this day, even such sympathetic readers as Seyla Benhabib concede that Eichmann in...

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