When Eichmann in Jerusalem was initially published in 1963 as a five-part article in The New Yorker, Hannah Arendt was viciously attacked. She was accused of exonerating Eichmann, making him appear more attractive than his Jewish victims and blaming the Jews for bringing about their own extermination. Many were offended by Arendt’s “ironic” style. Some accused her of being “flippant” and “malicious.” The phrase the “banality of evil” seemed to trivialize the extermination of millions of Jews. The attack became personal. Arendt was accused of being a self-hating Jew. There were even attempts to suppress the publication of her book. Several of her oldest and closest friends broke off relations with her. Reading Eichmann in Jerusalem today, more than fifty years after its publication, it is difficult to understand the intensity of the furor it created. There are serious criticisms that can be (and have been) raised about many of her key claims. Her brief discussion of the role of the Jewish councils justifiably aroused a great deal of outrage. The Jewish councils consisted of prominent Jews selected by the Nazis to organize Jewish communities and ghettos. When the extermination process began, the Jewish councils were assigned the task of filling the Nazi quotas. Arendt is harsh in her judgment of the Jewish leadership.
Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people. (Arendt 1965a: 125)
This is one of the most inflammatory and irresponsible claims made in Arendt’s report. She fails to take account of the wide range of behavior of these Jewish leaders, some of whom committed suicide rather than follow Nazi orders. The truth is that no one can say for certain how many Jews would have been murdered even if Jewish councils had never existed.
Even in light of legitimate criticisms of her report, there is, nevertheless, an enormous disparity between what Arendt wrote and the “image” of her book that her critics condemned. The charge that Arendt exonerated Eichmann is completely false. She considered him to be one of the “greatest criminals” of the time. Unlike many who challenged the legitimacy of the trial, she strongly defended the right of the Israeli court to try Eichmann. Throughout her report she argued that Eichmann was fully responsible for the crimes that he committed. Although she was critical, even scornful, of the melodramatic performance of the chief prosecutor, she expressed her highest admiration for the three judges who tried Eichmann. She completely endorsed their judgment concerning Eichmann’s responsibility and guilt. “What the judgment had to say on this point was more than correct, it was the truth” (Arendt 1965a: 246). When the court finally sentenced Eichmann to death, Arendt endorsed the death sentence. When she used the phrase “the banality of evil,” she was not advancing a theory about Nazi evil but describing what she took to be a factual matter. Eichmann’s deeds were monstrous, but Eichmann was not a monster. He was banal and ordinary, caught up in his own clichés and language rules. In the postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem she explained what she meant by “the banality of evil.”
[W]hen I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III “to prove a villain.” Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement he had no motives at all… . He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation, pouring out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that he reached only the rank of lieutenant colonel in the S.S. and that it had not been his fault that he was not promoted… . He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. (Arendt 1965a: 287–8, italics original)
When Arendt says that he “never realized what he was doing” she doesn’t mean that he acted blindly. He was masterful in arranging the transportation of Jews to concentration and extermination camps. But he lacked the imagination to see things from the perspective of his victims. He lacked what Kant had described as an “enlarged mentality.” In a lecture that Arendt gave at The New School for Social Research in 1970, she returned to the banality of evil, expanding on the point she made in Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Some years ago, reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of “the banality of evil” and meant with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was perhaps extraordinary shallowness. However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think. He functioned in the role of prominent war criminal as well as he had under the Nazi regime; he had not the slightest difficulty in accepting an entirely different set of rules. He knew that what he had once considered his duty was now called a crime, and he accepted this new code of judgment as though it were nothing but another language rule. (Arendt 1971: 417)
Ever since the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem there has been an extensive debate about the accuracy of Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann. My own view is that it is not accurate. We now know much more about Eichmann’s past in Germany as well as his life in Argentina, where he lived when he escaped from Germany. In Argentina he was closely associated with other former Nazis and boasted about (even exaggerated) his role in the Final Solution. I agree with the judgment of the distinguished historian of the Holocaust, Christopher Browning, when he writes: “I consider Arendt’s concept of ‘the banality of evil’ a very important insight for understanding many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, but not Eichmann himself. Arendt was fooled by Eichmann’s strategy of self-representation in part because there were so many perpetrators of the kind he was pretending to be” (Browning 2003: 3–4).
One might think that if Arendt was mistaken in her historical “factual” judgment of Eichmann – that although he appeared banal and clichéridden in the Jerusalem court, he was actually more fanatical and ideologically motivated as a Nazi – then this puts an end to the matter. I do not think so. On the contrary, there is something extremely important about the idea of the banality of evil, and when properly understood, it has significant relevance for us today. One of the reasons why her phrase provoked such a strong reaction is that she was calling into question a deeply entrenched way of thinking about evil – one that is psychologically appealing and frequently becomes dominant in times of perceived crisis. We tend to think of good and evil in absolute terms – as a stark dichotomy. There are heroes and villains. There are vicious perpetrators and innocent victims. If one commits “monstrous deeds” as Eichmann did, then one must be a monster or demonic. He must have sadistic, monstrous, antisemitic intentions and motives – or be pathological. He must be like the great villains portrayed in literature, or even like the villains portrayed in popular films and culture. There is something so deep and entrenched about this way of thinking that to call it into question is extremely disturbing. Eichmann was certainly portrayed as demonic by Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor. Eichmann was the embodiment of antisemitism dating back to Pharaoh in Egypt and the mastermind of the Final Solution (which is clearly false). Arendt also firmly rejected the “cog theory” – the idea that Eichmann was merely a cog in a vast bureaucratic machine. In response to the claim that someone was merely a cog or a wheel in a system, it is always appropriate to ask in matters of law and morality, “And why did you become a cog and continue to function in this way?”
Arendt’s major point is that we should not mythologize evil. Many years before the trial, in an exchange of letters with her mentor and friend Karl Jaspers, he wrote to her that he objected to speaking about a guilt that goes beyond all criminal guilt because it takes on a streak of satanic greatness. It is inappropriate to speak of the demonic element in Hitler and other Nazis. In 1946 he wrote: “It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what truly characterizes them. Bacteria can cause epidemics that wipe out nations, but they remain merely bacteria” (Arendt and Jaspers 1992: 62). Seventeen years later when Gershom Scholem criticized the idea of the banality of evil, Arendt answered him in a way that echoes Jaspers’s earlier remark. “It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical,’ that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay to waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is ‘thought-defying,’ as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality’” (Arendt 2007: 471). (For a further discussion of the meaning of the banality of evil and how it is related to Arendt’s characterization of radical evil in The Origins, see Bernstein 1996 and Bernstein 2016.) The idea of the banality of evil is still relevant today because we need to face up to the fact that one doesn’t have to be a monster to commit horrendous evil deeds. To claim that people can commit evil deeds for banal reasons is to confront the reality in which we live today: “The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their mind to be either good or bad” (Arendt 1971: 438).