Overview. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened’. ", When in the midst of his muddled explanation, Eichmann reformulates the categorical imperative such that one ought to act in such a way that the Führer would approve, or would himself so act, Arendt offers a swift rejoinder, as if she were delivering a direct vocal challenge to him: "Kant, to be sure, had never intended to say anything of the sort; on the contrary, to him every man was a legislator the moment he started to act; by using his 'practical reason' man found the principles that could and should be the principles of law.". Am 11. We can imagine how doubly scandalous such a moment was for Arendt. Although Arendt agreed with the final verdict of the trial, namely, that Eichmann should be condemned to death, she quarreled with the reasoning put forward at the trial and with the spectacle of the trial itself. Hannah Arendt: Thinking and Moral Considerations 1906-1975 Biographical Notes 1906, Oct. 14 … About Eichmann in Jerusalem. To have "intentions" in her view was to think reflectively about one's own action as a political being, whose own life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others. Hierfür stehe… In a way, we can understand much of Arendt's later work, including her work on willing, judgment and responsibility, as an extended debate with Eichmann on the proper reading of Kant, an avid effort to reclaim Kant from its Nazi interpretation and to mobilise the resources of his text precisely against the conceptions of obedience that uncritically supported a criminal legal code and fascist regime. By writing about Eichmann, Arendt was trying to understand what was unprecedented in the Nazi genocide – not in order to establish the exceptional case for Israel, but in order to understand a crime against humanity, one that would acknowledge the destruction of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, communists, the disabled and the ill. Just as the failure to think was a failure to take into account the necessity and value that makes thinking possible, so the destruction and displacement of whole populations was an attack not only on those specific groups, but on humanity itself. Arendt's book on Eichmann is highly quarrelsome. Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen ist ein Buch der politischen Theoretikerin Hannah Arendt, das sie anlässlich des 1961 vor dem Bezirksgericht Jerusalem geführten Prozesses gegen den ehemaligen österreichischen SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann verfasste. If Arendt thought existing notions of legal intention and national criminal courts were inadequate to the task of grasping and adjudicating Nazi crimes, it was also because she thought that nazism performed an assault against thinking. The Hannah Arendt Papers (The Library of Congress Manuscript Division). At this historical juncture, for Arendt, it became necessary to conceptualise and prepare for crimes against humanity, and this implied an obligation to devise new structures of international law. She did not think he acted without conscious activity, but she insisted that the term "thinking" had to be reserved for a more reflective mode of rationality. View Arendt_ Thinking.key.pdf from PHILOSOPHY 13 at Ateneo de Manila University. She thought that the trial necessitated a critique of the idea of collective guilt, but also a broader reflection on the historically specific challenges of moral responsibility under dictatorship. Yaacov Lozowick served as director of archives at Yad Vashem and chief archivist at the Israel State Archives. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem was published fifty years ago, first as a series of articles in The New Yorker and then, a few months later, as a book. Create a free account to continue reading and you'll get two months of unlimited access to the best in Jewish thought, culture, and politics, More about: Hannnah Arendt (1906-1975) was for many years University Professor of Political Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research and a Visiting Fellow of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Arendt wrote works on intellectual history as a philosopher, using events and actions to develop insights into contemporary totalitarian movements and the threat to human freedom presented by scientific abstraction and bourgeois morality. In Arendt’s telling, Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. On the one hand, he clarifies: "I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws." What had become banal was the attack on thinking, and this itself, for her, was devastating and consequential. Hannah Arendt, the German Jewish political philosopher who had escaped from a Nazi internment camp, [1] had obtained international fame and recognition in 1951 with her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. When, in the winter and spring of 1963, Arendt first presented her view of Eichmann and his trial in the New Yorker, and in the subsequent book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, it defied the consensus view of the Nazis as diabolical fiends. The man was either made to stand for all of nazism and for every Nazi, or he was considered the ultimately pathological individual. The controversial journalistic analysis of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust, from the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. We might think at first that this is a scandalous way to describe his horrendous crime, but for Arendt the consequence of non-thinking is genocidal, or certainly can be. It’s hard to argue with Martin Kramer’s essay on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s capture of Adolf Eichmann. But more than this, she faults him as well for failing to realise that thinking implicates the subject in a sociality or plurality that cannot be divided or destroyed through genocidal aims. About the Author. [2] Feeling compelled to witness the trial of Adolf Eichmann (‘an obligation I … F ifty years ago the writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt witnessed the end of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major figures in the organisation of the Holocaust. Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) understood that evil does not announce itself with fanfare and a jet of sulphur. In 1961, The New Yorker commissioned Arendt to report on the trail of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. And yet, he also acknowledges that once he was charged with the task of carrying out the final solution, he ceased to live by Kantian principles. But what did she really mean? Arendt lacks Cohen's naivete, and sustained an important critique of the nation-state. One such moment occurred when Eichmann claimed that in implementing the final solution, he was acting from obedience, and that he had derived this particular moral precept from his reading of Kant. The trial began in April 15, 1961. One thing Arendt certainly did not mean was that evil had become ordinary, or that Eichmann and his Nazi cohorts had committed an unexceptional crime. Arendt writes: "This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant's moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man's faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience. One of the many ironies surrounding Hannah Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial 1 is involved in the fact that it should have been serialized in the New Yorker so short a time after the appearance in the same … Covering the trial Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil", a phrase that has since become something of an intellectual cliche. Arendt’s five articles, which were then expanded into the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, proved hugely controversial. ", Eichmann contradicts himself as he explains his Kantian commitments. Fifty-five years later, her book still has the power to shock—and disgust. Arendt saw Eichmann, on trial for his life, as a "buffoon" whose inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. Das Buch erschien erstmals 1963 und rief mehrere langanhaltende Kontroversen hervor. “The Truth of the Capture of Adolf Eichmann” shows how his image has morphed from diabolical Nazi to the charming fellow portrayed by Ben Kingsley in the Hollywood film Operation Finale (2018). In addition to her major texts she published a number of anthologies, including Between Past and Future(1961), Men in Dark Times (1968) and Crises … Hannah Arendt, whose account of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann's trial provided an unflinching study of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust and sparked heated debate, was born on this day in 1906. In 1961, the noted German-American philosopher of Jewish origin, Hannah Arendt, gets to report on the trial of the notorious Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. To understand that consensus, consider that even today the Nazis stand in for the worst evil in history. He now teaches at Bar-Ilan University. Arendt, who fled Nazi Germany at 27, was already an internationally renowned scholar and public intellectual when she arrived in Jerusalem in April 1961 to cover the trial for The New Yorker. The first problem is that of legal intention. The Enduring Outrage of Hannah Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’. The strong feelings that Arendt, who died in 1975, arouses in scholars, especially Israelis, spring primarily from her 1963 book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”Based on a series of articles Arendt wrote for The New Yorker, the book is critical of the way Israel conducted the Eichmann trial and the way the defendant was portrayed. To understand Eichmann, you have to see not his “banality” but how innovative and utterly committed he was as a bureaucrat. Cohen thought universality belonged to German philosophy, rather than considering internationalist or global models that might provide an alternative to both nation-states. She is also critical of Eichmann himself for formulating and obeying a noxious set of laws. At no time, however, is there anything theatrical in the conduct of the judgesMoshe Landau, the presiding judge, Judge Benjamin Halevi, and Judge Yitzhak Raveh. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, her controversial analysis of the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, had just been published in German in … Did the courts have to prove that Eichmann intended to commit genocide in order to be convicted of the crime? Indeed, that for which she faulted Eichmann was his failure to be critical of positive law, that is, a failure to take distance from the requirements that law and policy imposed upon him; in other words, she faults him for his obedience, his lack of critical distance, or his failure to think. Like the legal philosopher Yosal Rogat before her, Arendt did not think that the history of anti-semitism or even the specificity of anti-semitism in Germany could be tried. Fifty years ago the writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt witnessed the end of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major figures in the organisation of the Holocaust. Fifty years ago, on October 28, 1964, a televised conversation between the German-Jewish political theorist, Hannah Arendt, and the well-known German journalist, Günter Gaus, was broadcast in West Germany. One of the many ironies surrounding Hannah Arendt's book on the Eichmann trial is involved in the fact that it…. Hannah Arendt. What had become banal – and astonishingly so – was the failure to think. Many questions abound: is thinking to be understood as a psychological process or, indeed, something that can be properly described, or is thinking in Arendt's sense always an exercise of judgment of some kind, and so implicated in a normative practice. T. he war over history begins where the war in history leaves off, which may be why Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann caused more anguish in New York literary circles 55 years ago than the trial itself. In ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ and after, it was Kant, not Heidegger, who was foremost on Hannah Arendt’s mind. As a result, Arendt objected to a specific nation-state conducting a trial of Eichmann exclusively in the name of its own population. There were at least two challenges to legal judgment that she underscored, and then another to moral philosophy more generally. Sadly, he’s probably right that these quarreling former colleagues are not blameless for mischaracterizations of Eichmann. Hannah Arendt’s five articles on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann by the state of Israel appeared in The New Yorker in February and March 1963. Among the many controversial aspects of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which originally appeared as a multi-part series in The New Yorker, the most incendiary points she made appeared in chapter VII. Arendt makes this distinction between practical reason and obedience in Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963 and seven years later she began her influential set of lectures on Kant's political philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. One rhetorical feature of her book on Eichmann is that she is, time and again, breaking out into a quarrel with the man himself. April 1961 musste Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem vor Gericht. Der SS-Obersturmbannführer war mitverantwortlich für den Holocaust. Arendt relays his self-description: "he no longer 'was master of his own deeds,' and … he 'was unable to change anything'. In her view, no thinking being can plot or commit genocide. Vor 60 Jahren schockierte Hannah Arendt mit ihrer These von der «Banalität des Bösen». Adolf Eichmann, Holocaust. So, in this first instance, she feared that what had become "banal" was non-thinking itself. She thought the trial needed to focus on the acts that he committed, acts which included the making of a genocidal policy. (1) (Hannah Arendt) Eichmann in Jerusalem (2) was originated when Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem in order to report, for The New Yorker, on the trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann, (3) who was acused of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Her view at once aggrandised the place and role of philosophy in the adjudication of genocide and called for a new mode of political and legal reflection that she believed would safeguard both thinking and the rights of an open-ended plural global population to protection against destruction. Of course, the first reaction to such an apparently naive claim may be that Arendt overestimated the power of thinking or that she held on to a highly normative account of thinking that does not correspond to the various modes of reflection, self-muttering, and silent chatter that goes by that name. Although Arendt focuses on Eichmann's failure to think as one way of naming his ultimate crime, it is clear that she thinks the Israeli courts did not think well enough, and sought to offer a set of corrections to their way of proceeding. How, we might ask, does thinking implicates each thinking "I" as part of a "we" such that to destroy some part of the plurality of human life is to destroy not only one's self, understood as linked essentially to that plurality, but to destroy the very conditions of thinking itself. For the most part, she reports on the trial and the man in the third person, but there are moments in which she addresses him directly, not on the trial, but in her text.