Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

In the Introduction of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Amos Elon discusses the “civil war” that her series of articles in The New Yorker and her subsequent book “launched among intellectuals in the United States and in Europe” (vii). Central to the book’s controversy is Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann’s “alleged banality” (xiv). For many, the belief that the orchestrators of the Holocaust are evil and monstrous helps make some sense of the catastrophe. However, Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann makes him flesh-and-bone: an ordinary, everyday man without much motivation other than to do well at his job and follow the laws in place at the time: “He personified neither hatred nor madness nor an insatiable thirst for blood, but something far worse, the faceless nature of Nazi evil itself” (xiii). What also feels “especially provocative” (xv) is Arendt’s questioning of the Jewish communal leaders’ cooperation with the Nazis: “If there had been no Jewish organizations at all and no Judenräte, Arendt suggested, the deportation machine could not have run as smoothly as it did” (xv). Other objections to Arendt’s reporting focus on her tone and delivery, suggesting she was “attacked less for what she said than for how she said it” (xvii).