Hannah Arendt Revisited: Eichmann in Jerusalem und die Folgen (review)

This collection of essays based on papers given at a conference, “Zur Historiographie des Holocaust: Hannah Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ Revisited,” at the Einstein Forum in Berlin 1996 reflects a variety of perspectives, a few of them yielding new insights and even fewer contributing to a more differentiating historiography of “the Holocaust.” Most of these essays document the enduring difficulties of many Jewish readers with Arendt’s New Yorker report on the Eichmann trial. Four decades after the book’s publication, Arendt’s lack of solidarity with “the Jewish people” as demon strated by the “heartless,” “cold,” “rationalistic,” “profoundly inappropriate” stylistic and conceptual shape of her argumentation still seems a centrally important issue—as the critical analysis of unquestioned solidarity was of central importance to Arendt’s political essayism.

Seyla Benhabib’s “Identität, Perspektive und Erzählung in Hannah Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem” sharply criticizes Arendt for the confusing stylistic and conceptual hypercomplexity of her discussion of Eichmann’s particular criminality and its inherent moral dilemma: the common man and uncommon murderer. Somehow, Eichmann is not worth Arendt’s attention because Benhabib is not interested in Arendt’s emphasis on understanding and then possibly learning from a historical catastrophe rather than preserving it in ritualized collective memory. Dan Diner’s “Hannah Arendt Reconsidered: Über das Banale und das Böse in ihrer Holocaust-Erzählung” laments her lack of sympathy for East European Jews and the predominantly East European narrative of the Holocaust, and her “thoughtless and reckless” accusations of Judenräte (p. 120). Complaining about her alleged tendency to blur the distinction between perpetrator and victim (pp. 122f.), Diner denounces the values of the “Vernunftzionistin” Arendt as “abstract, universal, institutional and therefore republican” that prevent her from feeling one with (or even close to) the Jewish people as an ethnic entity (pp. 124f.).

The general issue of unquestioning Jewish solidarity in reaction to the trauma of Nazi persecution has had a profound impact on its historiography. Annette Wieviorka’s argument in “Die Entstehung des Zeugen” is very important here and one of the few really useful contributions in its critical analysis of the implications of the chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner’s decision to base the dramatic structure of Eichmann’s trial on the stories of witnesses rather than the Nazi documents gathered by the Israeli police. He chose them on the basis of their already recorded testimonies and his subsequent interviews with them and choreographed for the “stage of the world” their presenting Jewish collective identity in the experience of Nazi persecution, extreme and therefore “unique” Jewish victimization. Hausner’s assumption had been that this experience could only become “real” for the millions of readers, listeners, and viewers if a large number of survivors testified in person and thereby “individualized” the sameness of unspeakable persecution. In the act of recitation, however, these stories would not draw on memories “refreshed” by the witnesses’ previously recorded written testimonies as Hausner had hoped. Rather, the stories told by the witnesses at the trial became their memories (pp. 146f.). These memory stories and the modalities of “performing” them caused the presence of the witnesses to overwhelm and obscure the presence of the defendant Eichmann. One observer noted that the witnesses were “the authorized delegates of the Holocaust, they were the facts” (p. 150). There were very few critical voices like Arendt’s that would question the claims made by the organizers of the show trial with respect to its authority to write the history of the persecutions, of that total war, of the twentieth century, of modernity, of mankind.

Wieviorka points out rightly that the Eichmann trial “set free the language of the witnesses,” helping them to “achieve their social identity as survivors,” and the core of this identity was the, as if predestined, calamitous course of history (pp. 151–53). With their memory stories, the witnesses were asking the public to both identify with their unspeakable suffering and accept its transhistorical, translinguistic nature...