Hannah Arendt: Evil back to earth
January 5, 2014
“HUMAN history has known no more difficult story to tell,” wrote Hannah Arendt on the Nazi death camps. With the apparatus of a superpower dedicated to the extermination of an entire race, ordinary human notions of decency and compassion had clearly been confounded by “radical evil”, but Arendt’s life mission was to bring this evil back to earth, to strip it of its uncanny mystique, its numinosity, and reduce it to ordinary properties like ignorance, stupidity and “banality”.
Adolf Eichmann, the “architect of the Holocaust” kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli agents and sentenced to death in Jerusalem a year later, was the principle subject of her most famous and controversial book. He was, in her view, an inarticulate, deluded, shallow, self-obsessed clown who did not deserve the historical significance that the Israeli authorities sought to bestow on him.
Eichmann in Jerusalem antagonised the Zionist establishment, which never forgave Arendt for refusing to recognise the special historical status accorded to the Jews by the Shoah, and for highlighting uncomfortable truths about the way Zionist organisations collaborated with the Nazi government.
Arendt sought to refute the notion that anti-Semitism was some sort of transcendant historical movement that culminated in the Holocaust. Arendt despised the idea that the Final Solution underscored Jewish exceptionalism and thereby provided a sort of spiritual legitimacy to the state of Israel itself, and to Israel’s own questionable behaviour along its disputed borders. The Nazis were evil, Arendt said, but their evil was squalid and stupid and all-too-human: it was not numinous or transcendental, and it was not an integral part of a two-millenia spiritual destiny that allowed the Diaspora to finally return home.
What offended her, perhaps, was the notion that Nazism and Jewishness had somehow become intertwined in a deadly historical-spiritual conflict. Her former lover, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, was one of many Nazi sympathizers who sought to excuse or bring dignity to the squalid and genocidal Nazi programme by pretending the battle with “Weltjudentum” was part of a metaphysical struggle in which the very nature of “Being” was at stake.
But what offended her more was the way the Jewish establishment had accepted the basic terms of ths argument. At the trial, for example, the prosecutor Hausner says in his opening address that he hoped that “anti-Semitism throughout history” could be put on trial. Arendt said this undermines notions of Eichmann’s criminality, turning him into “an innocent executor of some mysteriously foreordained destiny” and just as much a victim of cosmic forces as the poor multitudes he helped put to death.
Arendt was suggesting the more religious Zionists had come dangerously close to interpreting the Final Solution as a necessary historical stage in the return of the Chosen People to the Promised Land, thus giving a sort of spiritual legitimacy to Nazism.
Arendt herself suggested the murder of six million Jews was almost an accidental by-product of a generic phenomenon known as totalitarianism. Ideology is used by totalitarian states to bind people together, to erode old bonds, and to define enemies, and it was essentially a historical accident that the ideology of totalitarian Germany happened to be anti-Semitic. “Only the choice of victims, not the nature of the crime, could be derived from the long history of Jew hatred,” she wrote.
But if she accused the Jerusalem courts of holding a show-trial against “anti-Semitism” in general, wasn’t she instead laying the blame on another abstraction known as “totalitarianism”, which she explained in an earlier book as a unique historical culmination of ideology and technology?
In any case, what the Jewish establishment hated the most was not so much the shared ideological interests of Zionists and Nazis, but her related insinuations that the two sides had collaborated on the ground - not merely as a result of the many humanitarian emergencies that arose from German race laws, but in a deliberate strategic partnership aimed at fulfilling the goals of a Jew-Free Europe and a Jewish State.
Thus, we not only see Zionist organisations establishing a variety of back channels with Eichmann to arrange the transfer of select Jews to Palestine, but we also see attempts by certain right-wing Zionist militias, including the Stern Gang, to form an alliance with the Nazis in order to drive the British out of Palestine.
Arendt’s tone was mostly ironic, with a sort of amused disgust at the various foibles of Eichmann, the prosecutor Hausner and the Israeli government led by Ben-Gurion. At one point, she suggests the transcript of Eichmann’s police interrogation would be a “gold mine” for any psychologist “provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny”.
Such lofty disregard for the solemnity of the occasion struck many observers as offensive. In the words of Amos Elon, who wrote the introduction to a 2006 edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem, “She took a certain pleasure in paradox and her sarcasm and irony seemed out of place in a discussion of the Holocaust.”
But arguing in sombre tones that this was somehow a cosmic confrontation between Good and Evil actually grants the Nazis a victory they do not deserve. It confirms Hitler’s exalted view of himself marching towards his Destiny like a sleepwalker. Before the war it turned the German population into unquestioning, ideologically-determined receptacles of Fate. After the war it allowed ordinary Germans to suggest they were not in control, that they were mere vehicles of History.
Arendt’s approach is consistent with her overall message: stupidity is at the heart of evil, so let’s laugh at these fools, laugh at them before they get the chance to do their damage, and laugh at them even after they have done their worst.
