Richard J. Golsan and Sarah M. Misemer, editors. The Trial That Never Ends: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem in Retrospect.

Abstract

Since the publication of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963, no link between a key element of Holocaust history and a specific postwar interpretation has been as firmly enshrined in academic and public discourse as the association of Adolf Eichmann, the organizer of the Final Solution put on trial in Israel in 1961, with Arendt and her book. If Auschwitz has become the most frequently used synecdoche for the Holocaust, Arendt continues to serve as the contrarian thinker par excellence, her writings feeding successive cycles of divergent reflection and wide-ranging controversy. This insight—expressed by the title of Richard J. Golsan and Sarah M. Misemer’s edited collection The Trial That Never Ends: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem in Retrospect—is not new; already in the late 1980s the German historian Hans Mommsen wrote about Arendt’s appeal: “In a world where the realization is constantly growing that the comprehensive social, ecological, security and demographic problems facing it can no longer be tackled from a purely realist or pragmatic political perspective, interest in the ‘Jewish rebel’ trained in the spirit of ‘German philosophy,’ which Hannah Arendt always was, is bound to rise, particularly among the younger generation to whom she always addressed herself first and foremost—and despite the fact that she was never really to finally resolve the conundrums at the centre of her work” (Mommsen, “Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann Trial,” in From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in German History, trans. Philip O’Connor [1991], 254–278, here 278).