Hannah Arendt's Testimony: Judging in a Lawless World

Abstract

I was really of the opinion that Eichmann was a buffoon. I'll tell you this: I read the transcript of his police investigation, thirty-six hundred pages, read it, and read it very carefully, and I do not know how many times I laughed--laughed out loud! People took this reaction in a bad way. I cannot do anything about that. But I know one thing. Three minutes before certain death, I probably still would laugh. And that, they say, is the tone of voice. That the tone of voice is predominantly ironic is completely true. The tone of voice in this case is really the person. Hannah Arendt (1) Hannah Arendt's laughter has long rung hollow in the ears of many commentators on the Eichmann trial. The ironic tone of Arendt's controversial reports on the trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), her critics claim, is a mode of defence; a cold-hearted carapace of bitter reason thrown up against the atrocious history of unbearable suffering dramatised in the 62 days of harrowing witness testimony that made the 1961 Jerusalem trial unique in the history of war crime trials. As Idith Zertal has argued recently, however, it was not--or at least not only--the suffering of Holocaust survivors per se that Arendt was distancing herself from in pre-1967 Jerusalem, but the sanctification of that suffering within an emerging politics of Israeli nationhood. In Zertal's unsettling history of the vexed relation between trauma, grief, collective memory and national politics in Israel, Arendt's deliberate irreverence deconstructs a national mythology that did not so much deliver justice to Holocaust victims--'as if justice could be rendered', writes Zertal of Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion's presentation of the Eichmann trial as an uniquely expiatory event in the history of Israel--as set extraordinarily difficult cultural and political terms on the representation of that justice itself. (2) In this essay, I want to suggest that Arendt's refusal to inhabit a rhetoric of traumatic testimony--a refusal that differs so strikingly from the tone of much contemporary memoir writing--connects Eichmann in Jerusalem with her larger project to think about judgement in the 1960s and 1970s. For Arendt, the Prosecution's emphasis on 'what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done', in her words, was questionable politically, but could not be further from what she thought should have been the trial's main business: the risky, necessary and exhilarating legal, moral and philosophical task of defining new terms for judgement after the Shoah. (3) For Arendt, Eichmann the buffoon was the disturbingly vacuous correlative for the moral void left by Nazi history. Finding him funny was part of what it meant to judge him. If one can somehow be one's own irony, as Arendt later suggested in the interview with Gunter Gaus cited above, if irony turns out to be a kind of kernel of the historical and remembering self and not merely a protective shell, it is perhaps because the ironic voice positions the subject in a distinctive relation to historical injury--not only as a suffering, but as a political, moral and, crucially in Arendt's later writing on judgement, thinking witness. I GREY CATS One of the paradoxes of the Eichmann trial was that while nobody really doubted that the defendant was guilty, the guilt of others not in the glass box dominated discussion of it. From Eichmann's ludicrous self-aggrandising claims that his death would serve as an example to all future anti-semites and at the same time relieve Germany's youth of its guilt complex, to Ben Gurion's, 'We want the nations of the world to know [...] and they should be ashamed'(EinJ, p10), the trial took place in a highly-charged culture of grief and expiation in which Eichmann's guilt was not only a given, but even on occasion an irrelevance. (Ben Gurion again: 'the fate of Eichmann, the person, has no interest for me whatsoever. What is important is the spectacle' (IH, p107). …