Understanding and truth in Hannah Arendt: The critical reception of the Eichmann trial and the will

Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem was an ennobling treatise that changed the way Nazis were depicted on stage. This chapter explores the Nazi mentality through Arendt's concept of the “banality of evil” as depicted in Donald Freed's The White Crow: Eichmann in Jerusalem, Cecil Taylor's Good, Peter Barnes's Laughter!, and Thomas Bernhard's Vor dem Ruhestand.

Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem retains its importance largely because the dilemmas with which it wrestles have, if anything, grown rather than diminished in significance since it first appeared in the early 1960s. While Arendt rightly saw the Holocaust as an unprecedented crime, many of the moral and legal paradoxes central to her analysis of Nazi trials are in fact not specific to Holocaust trials as Holocaust trials.1 Rather, they pertain to all

Se somete a análisis la “naturaleza del mal” en el pensamiento de Hannah Arendt a través del análisis de sus libros, artículos y experiencia vital. Principalmente, se estudian las tesis que defendió en su libro The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), al tratarse de un profundo estudio sobre el régimen estalinista y nazi que generó un intenso debate sobre la naturaleza y los antecedentes históricos del fenómeno totalitario. Otros libros importantes para abordar esta cuestión son The Human Condition (1958), un estudio filosófico original que investiga las categorías fundamentales de la vita activa (obra, trabajo, acción), y The Life of the Mind (1978), centrado en examinar las tres facultades fundamentales de la vita contemplative (el pensamiento, la voluntad y el juicio). 
\nAdemás de estas obras, Arendt publicó un gran número de influyentes ensayos en los que trata el tema de la naturaleza de la revolución, la libertad, la autoridad, la tradición, y la edad moderna que pueden ayudar también a entender cómo concibió la naturaleza del mal.
\nSu propia experiencia personal jugó un papel decisivo a la hora de desarrollar sus tesis sobre el mal, especialmente al cubrir el juicio de Eichmann en Jerusalén donde ella afirmaría que Eichmann representaba “la banalidad del mal”. Nuestro objetivo en esta contribución es saber, siguiendo a Hannah Arendt, qué características tiene el mal, por qué surge, por qué se manifiesta de forma permanente en la historia y si puede ser destruido, encontrando ciertos paralelismos con el pensamiento de Voltaire.

Por meio de pesquisa qualitativa, exploratória e bibliográfica, levanta-se referencial teórico sobre assédio moral, e observa-se a predominância de associar o seu cometimento nas empresas a pessoas com perfil psíquico perverso. É este o dado que se pretende questionar, o que se faz a partir de conceitos talhados por Hannah Arendt, tais como a “banalidade do mal”, que ela se utiliza na obra “Eichmann em Jerusalém: um relato sobre a banalidade do mal”. Para Hannah Arendt, em nome de cumprir ordens, Otto Adolf Eichmann contribui para o funcionamento da máquina nazista. Dessa obra, é apropriada a ideia de ausência de pensamento e de ambição para identificar o assédio moral nas empresas, propondo-se o entendimento de que a personalidade do assediador não o caracteriza; antes, o assédio pode se manifestar numa cultura empresarial acrítica. Para chegar à referida conclusão, no primeiro tópico são analisados aspectos relacionados ao assédio moral nas empresas, e no segundo, trata-se do conceito da “banalidade do mal” para, ao final, argumentar em favor de sua aplicação para identificação do assédio moral no trabalho.

Commentaries on Eichmann in Jerusalem are of two kinds. The first confronts the historical relevance of Arendt's `report' and attempts to ascertain whether her ironical presentation of Eichmann's trial matches reality, namely, the incommensurable suffering of the Jewish people. The second focuses on the meaning of her expression `the banality of evil', and places Arendt in a long tradition of moral and political philosophy concerned with the problem of evil and, accordingly, of judging evil. The argument of this paper is that both paths of research miss Arendt's intention, and that her `report' has to be read in light of Walter Benjamin's conceptions of history and storytelling. On the one hand, Eichmann in Jerusalem was not intended to reflect reality objectively because, as Arendt claimed, the objectivity of scientific historiography may serve only to condone the genocide. Throughout her entire work, Arendt aimed at avoiding the neutrality of historicism, the `tradition of sine ira et studio', which, according to her, represents a renunciation of responsibility. On the other hand, Arendt emphasized that she did not attempt to write about the nature of evil but to faithfully describe a phenomenon. Therefore the questions to be answered are: What did Arendt mean by a `report'? What does it mean to describe Eichmann's trial non-objectively but faithfully? In this paper, I show that her report should be understood in the light of a new methodological experiment inherited from Benjamin, which can be broken down into two steps: 1. To reveal the truth of history in stories rather than seek historical `objectivity' through theories; and 2. To look at events from forgotten standpoints, which are assumed to represent the experienced `inside' of history.

In order to complicate facile comparisons between Eichmann in Jerusalem and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing , this paper argues that each work can illuminate the other if they are examined by the gesture that organizes each: Arendt’s and Oppenheimer’s efforts to humanize their subjects. This approach allows us to understand the motivations driving each work: refining institutional memory for Arendt, agitating for official recognition of war crimes for Oppenheimer. Arendt’s commitment to taking Eichmann seriously is mirrored by Oppenheimer’s earnest engagement with individual perpetrators of the genocide that occurred in Indonesia in 1965–66. Because the regime that initiated these events is still in power, these perpetrators enjoy public admiration for their murderous pasts. Through this film, Oppenheimer is able to describe some of the costs of these unrecognized crimes against humanity–as well as the costs of ignoring an unpunished and so unapologetic regime. The film also reflexively highlights Eichmann in Jerusalem ’s continuing significance as a moment of profound resistance to official narratives that oversimplify the significance of crimes against humanity. Rather than collapsing either of these works into a catalogue of guilt, taking them in alongside each other highlights the demands of justice unique to each colossal infraction against the global community. Indeed, Arendt thought the Eichmann trial should have helped legitimate the idea of a global community and support an international judicial system capable of meting out justice across the borders of nation–states. But The Act of Killing demonstrates just how inadequate the safeguards meant to ensure such a process are–the film interrogates what kinds of community current international human rights laws are capable of supporting while imagining a new community in pursuit of justice.

Reviewed by: The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction by Erin McGlothlin Katharina von Kellenbach Erin McGlothlin. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021. 346 pp. We will never be able to fully understand the mind of another person. This is especially true of people involved in atrocity, who are both eminently “ordinary” (Browning) and “monstrous” (Mohammed). “Perpetrator studies” has emerged as a new field of inquiry with its own scholarly networks, journals, and book series. The scholarly and popular fascination with the minds of perpetrators is partly driven by their inscrutability. Perpetrators are notoriously obtuse, in part because of their vested interest in keeping their crimes hidden from critical view, but also because their hearts and minds have become impenetrable—even to themselves. Acts of violence involve a “hardening of the heart,” to use a biblical term, as perpetrators avert their eyes and block their ears from seeing, feeling, and responding to the suffering of others. The ability to shield against empathy is integral to codes of conduct that allow agents of mass violence to dehumanize and degrade [End Page 217] victims. And generally, they show little awareness of culpable wrongdoing. Atrocities create force fields that suck entire communities into moral indifference, complicity, and denial. Erin McGlothlin, professor of German and Jewish studies at Washington University in St. Louis, analyzes fictional and nonfictional approaches to the mind of the perpetrator, distinguishing “mind-reading” from “imagination.” “Mind-reading” refers to practices of nonfiction writers attempting to penetrate and intuit the thinking and feeling of individual perpetrators in direct interaction. Fiction authors, on the other hand, use “imagination” to invent and envision the interior world of Holocaust perpetrators. Choosing her samples was, I am sure, the hardest part of writing the book. McGlothlin settles on four writers to make her case about “mind-reading.” Three observed Eichmann in Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt, the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch, and the American Pentecostal minister William Hull; the fourth author, Gita Sereny, interviewed Franz Stangl in the early 1970s. The second part of the book examines Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber (1971), Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2009), and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and The Zone of Interest. Out of the profusion of possible titles, this choice of authors serves McGlothlin to develop a theoretical framework that bridges fictional and nonfictional literature. This linkage of fiction and nonfiction is startling and somewhat disturbing at a point in history when the boundary between fact and fiction is hotly contested, and the objective truth is systematically challenged by peddlers of conspiracy myths and purveyors of alternative facts. But McGlothlin is right to point out that fact-driven historical descriptions of perpetrators also follow narrative conventions. While Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is different from Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, both authors enter into the imagined interior world of a perpetrator. McGlothlin proposes the “theory of mind” to ground the human capacity to decode the thoughts and feelings of others in order to anticipate their plans and actions. Human beings learn early on to interpret facial expressions, behavioral cues, and body language to predict behavior, especially in situations of vulnerability and moments of danger. This, argue cognitive psychologists, is a critical survival skill. Literature, argues McGlothlin, builds on this human ability to experience the world through the eyes of others. Authors of perpetrator literature must enter into a depraved mental world of cruelty and dehumanization. This requires “empathetic identification” and “intersubjective intermediation” that filters mendacity and maintains ethical adjudication. It is probably no accident that most of McGlothlin’s authors are Jewish (except for Amis and Hull). There is little appetite among German non-Jewish fiction writers to enter into the minds of Holocaust perpetrators, which involves impossible balancing acts between intimate familiarity and disassociation, fears of contamination and apology. For Jewish authors, entering into the Nazi universe is tempered by embodied identification with the victims. Gita Sereny, for instance, can extend sympathy to Franz Stangl, because she is also mediating his thinking against her own experience and ethical position. Her strategy of eliciting a confession from Stangl...

Hannah Arendt has come to occupy, in the collective consciousness of Jews in this century, a notoriety comparable to that attained by Karl Marx a century ago. Respect for brilliance and compelling insight has been compromised by suspicion and shame. Rejection of Jewish identity and Judaism for both Marx and Arendt has gone hand in hand with creative contributions to secular thought. In the case of Marx, that suspicion was, of course, based primarily on his 1843 essay, "On the Jewish Question." The force of the suspicion in Hannah Arendt's case is less severe, and so are the rationalizations for it. Nevertheless, how does one reconcile the moral character of works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and Between Past and Future with the claims put forward in Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem', and with the sustained bitterness of the controversy over that book. Even though a dispassionate reading of the Eichmann book should dispel the most blatant allegations about Hannah Arendt, she contin? ues to be a source of discomfort for many Jewish intellectuals in America and Israel. The appearance in 1978 of The Jew as Pariah, a col? lection of her essays on the Jews in modern times, most of which were first published in the 1940s and early 1950s, did little to alle? viate the outrage. This collection, together with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's 1982 biography, pro vides an appropriate basis for reconsidering the image of Hannah Arendt's work and life, above all with respect to the Jewish question. When Arendt died in 1975, the tributes offered in her memory reflected the image of Hannah Arendt that had evolved since The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). She was seen as a "citizen of the world," as a cosmopolitan thinker whose Jewish origin was an incidental fact. Ironically, the resentment towards her Eichmann book within the Jewish community was based on the belief that she was merely an? other assimilated refugee German Jew, perhaps "of the German left" and clearly without "a love of the Jewish people," as Gershom Scholem put it bluntly in a critical public ex? change of letters with Arendt. Even Hans Jonas, her lifelong friend, apologized publicly for her Eichmann book at a symposium at Bard College on the day of her burial, calling it regrettable. Content with the image of Arendt as "world citizen," even those who took up Arendt's defense considered the Eichmann book only incidentally about Jewish matters. Most defenders of the work agreed that its sig? nificance lay in the fact that it was a specula? tive essay in ethics and philosophical politics. Indeed, it inspired Arendt's final, unfinished philosophic work on "Thinking" and "Willing." Lapses in its facticity were viewed as irrelevant. In 1975, at the moment of her death, then, the importance of Arendt's self-defining Jewish? ness was forgotten or discounted. Not one of the memorial papers delivered at the New Leon Botstein is President of Bard College, Annandale, New York.

In his book Justice in Jerusalem, Gideon Hausner provides a detailed account on the prosecution and sentencing of SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolf Eichmann by an Israeli court tribunal in 1961. As chie...

Since Hannah Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1964, her stance toward the Eichmann trial in Israel has been the subject of controversy. This essay considers why Arendt, in her reporting on the trial, seems to have insisted on a criterion of “relevance” in the face of pain and focused on procedures in the face of catastrophe. The authors propose that relevance and legality are doing a certain work in Arendt’s text, that they are not the only criteria in play, and that they are not, strictly speaking, criteria at all. Arendt treats relevance and legality as contested and contestable practices that operate in various ways in different contexts. She does this in the service of a broader and heretofore unappreciated argument developed in Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she tries to participate in the repair of the world broken by what survivors in 1945 referred to as “Nazi extermination plans.” This essay shows how we can see this if we look not only at what Arendt says in Eichmann but also at what she does in that book, at what she recovers from the trial as she casts about for resources that may help renew judgment, responsibility, spontaneity, creativity, and imagination

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). …

Joshua Polster brings many academic virtues to anything he writes, among them sophisticated attention to detail, breadth and depth of research, and sensitivity to social context. These are abundantly apparent in his edition of Incident at Vichy, which along with After the Fall is a play Miller worked on in 1963–64 as he and Elia Kazan were resuscitating their friendship after Kazan’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) testimony more than a decade earlier and were working together with others to launch a repertory theater company at Lincoln Center in New York. As Polster points out, Miller’s sense of being a social writer even influenced his approach to his actors. “For Miller,” Polster writes, “there is a careful balance to performing his characters as psychological and social beings” (xvi). Polster applies this idea to Miller himself, opening his discussion of Vichy by positioning the play in Miller’s own Jewish heritage (x–xii) and reminding us that once again this is a play about people’s obligations to each other in tension with their rights to self-interest, a theme Miller explores in many of his plays, from All My Sons, The Crucible, After the Fall, and The Price through The Ride Down Mt. Morgan and others of his later works.Polster emphasizes that Vichy is not simply about the Holocaust; its themes of rights, obligations, and betrayal continue to permeate our lives today. We can only imagine conversations Miller and Kazan had as they were renewing their friendship in the early 1960s, each looking back a decade to the height of the McCarthy era, each understanding the difference in political atmosphere between 1952 when Kazan was called to testify and 1956 when Miller was called and the ways this influenced their actions, each having in some fashion loved and abandoned Marilyn Monroe before her suicide—and in loving her, having abandoned and betrayed other people—each feeling a sense of relief that his career now seemed to be getting back on track. In Timebends, Miller states that the source of the play was a story he heard from his psychoanalyst, Dr. Rudolph Loewenstein, about a man who became part of Miller’s model for Prince Von Berg in the play (538). But Kazan has said, “Art was not a writer who made up stories. . . . He had to have a living connection with a subject before he could make a drama out of it” (367–68). No one could write a play that builds the vivid moral tension of Vichy simply by imagining someone else’s life. Miller must have had his own moments of crises of the self like the ones he depicts here. What could Miller have said to Mary Slattery about obligation and betrayal as he abandoned her and their young children to begin a new life with Monroe? What discussions did Miller and Kazan have in 1952 as Kazan was deciding whether to “name names” for HUAC? Those moments must have been a source for the conversations Miller wrote between Von Berg, the psychiatrist Leduc, and the Major or for his vision of the silent face-off between Von Berg and the Major that ends the play. Miller is presenting the stuff of his own life here and, as Polster points out, encouraging us not to distance ourselves from it as a melodramatic fable about good guys and bad guys from the past but to see it as a mirror in which we too must examine ourselves.Polster focuses this by drawing together ideas about obligation, justifiable self-interest, betrayal, overwhelming political and social forces, and willful disregard into what he calls Miller’s ongoing concern with “accountability” in the face of life’s absurdity (xv). The Nazis are like an unapproachable, insentient force of nature—a tornedo or an earthquake—in their lack of concern for the people they destroy. All people can hope for is to be lucky enough to get out of the way. Miller has the painter Lebeau express this sense of personal absurdity in the face of unfeeling catastrophic power. Lebeau and his family could have escaped in 1939, but his mother did not want to leave behind her furniture. “I am ridiculous,” says Lebeau; “I’m here because of a brass bed and some fourth-rate crockery” (136). But here, citing Christopher Bigsby, Polster wants to be sure we understand that “this is Miller not Beckett . . . not to rebel against the absurd is to succumb to it, to compound it. It must be possible to resist and in resisting discover the values which seem to have been evacuated from the world” (xiv). What then is this resistance? Is Miller calling on all of us to make sacrifices as aspirationally enticing as Von Berg’s?I first read Vichy in college during the Vietnam War. Looking back, I see myself then as someone like the character in Tim O’Brien’s fictionalized autobiographical story “On the Rainy River” (in The Things They Carried): Dave Palmer, moral hero, at least in his own mind, certain of his willingness to do the right thing in any situation regardless of the personal cost—or even the cost to the people around him, although how that last part fits with moral heroics remained a bit murky. Reading the play at that time, my hero was Von Berg, a man who finally recognizes that maintaining integrity requires authenticity expressed in action. He was the man I wanted to grow up to be; all it would take, I thought, is intelligence and will. But I was not yet twenty then, and Miller was almost fifty when he wrote this play, having lived a morally complicated life. I had to grow up a bit before I understood that this play was not written by a sheltered, romantic, and arrogant adolescent.Vichy contains two themes that are prominent in many of Miller’s plays. The first is that a person’s self is a story. That’s the central idea in Miller famous essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” which he published in 1949 shortly after Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway. There Miller connects dignity and tragedy, defining both in terms of these personal stories:For Miller, we each have a story of who we are that guides us through life, a “chosen image of what and who we are in this world.” Tragedy occurs when that story begins to seem flawed in irreparable ways so that it collapses and no longer can serve as a guide; we become lost, directionless, and adrift in our own existence.This idea is present in many characters in Vichy; each has a story he uses to explain to himself who he is and how the world works, only to see this story collapse when confronting the Nazi terror. That pattern culminates in Von Berg, who begins by thinking he is not complicit with the Nazis because he despises their vulgarity and then is convinced by the psychiatrist Leduc that the purity of his attitude is insufficient to secure his sense of innocence; his inaction is complicity. To maintain his sense of who he is—his sense of dignity, as Miller would say—Von Berg must act against the Nazis, not simply despise them. This realization is what prompts Von Berg to give his pass to Leduc. But is that all there is to it? Is Von Berg now the moral hero Miller wants us all to emulate? It would be odd for the man who wrote of the pain of life’s moral complexity a few months earlier in After the Fall to be telling us now that the challenge of morality is really nothing more than recognizing our moral obligations and having the strength of character to overcome our self-serving greed and cowardice.This takes us to Miller’s second central theme in many of his works, which Polster identifies as “accountability,” a complicated mixture of conflicting values, beliefs, and social forces in tension with each other. Polster points out that Miller wrote Vichy after having visited the site of the Mauthausen concentration camp with his wife Inge Morath in 1962 and in the following few years covering the Nazi trials in Frankfurt for the International Herald Tribune (x–xi). In 1961, Stanley Milgram, prompted by a desire to understand the Nazis, had conducted his social psychology experiments on obedience in which participants thought they were delivering painful electric shocks to another person while following the instructions of a man they believed was doing important scientific research. The early 1960s also is the time when Hannah Arendt’s controversial articles about the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 were appearing in the New Yorker magazine; they would be published as her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Study in the Banality of Evil late in 1963. Inge Morath owned an apartment in Paris, which in 1965 she was subletting to Mary McCarthy, who was one of Arendt’s closest friends (Bigsby 90). As far as I know, there is no evidence that Miller and Arendt, two of New York’s most prominent Jewish intellectuals at the time, ever met, but he must have been aware of her ideas as he himself, along with many other people, was struggling to make sense of what had happened in Nazi Germany and what it meant for our own lives. Arendt’s “banality of evil” may be the key to what Miller wants us to take seriously as accountability in Vichy. (For more detail and a different view, however, see Christopher Bigsby’s account of the relationship between McCarthy, Arendt, and Miller in his discussion of Vichy, 57–66.)Von Berg is a great melodramatic hero, but the businessman Marchand is where Miller makes his clearest statement about the real-world accountability Polster identifies as Miller’s theme. For whatever reasons, Marchand realizes that he is immune to the Nazi threats the other detainees fear. For him, the detention is merely an annoyance that is disrupting his morning. As a result, he feels no connection to the other detainees or concern about them, even as he observes their fear and understands the danger they face. He feels their situation need not concern him; he knows he will have a pass. Marchand is a model of Arendt’s banality of evil, which she defined as not stupidity but a kind of inattentiveness to issues in a situation that should be important, what she calls “a curious inability to think” (Arendt 159). This attentiveness is what Miller, the author of After the Fall, is asking us to take seriously in Vichy and apply to our own lives. Few of us can be Von Berg, and it is not even clear that in supporting Leduc, a man he hardly knows who has presented him with a powerful story, he has not been self-indulgent, jeopardizing and morally betraying the other people in his life who depend on him. But it is clear that Miller is demanding of all of us that we not fall into the smug detachment of Marchand. Even the cynical Major in his alcoholism has taken a stand against that.In his essay “Guilt and Incident at Vichy,” Miller wrote that the play’s theme often is presented as “Am I my brother’s keeper?” “Not so,” Miller replies. “‘Am I my own keeper’ is more correct” (290). To be one’s own keeper is to take responsibility for being attentive, to avoid falling into Arendt’s banality of evil. The complications and commitments of our own lives may limit our ability to respond, but that does not give us an excuse for ignoring what is happening around us. That attentiveness is the resistance to the abuses of the absurd that Polster and Bigsby see Miller calling for; it is that for which, as Polster would say, Miller like Arendt is holding us “accountable.” As Linda Loman says of her husband Willy’s suffering, “Attention. Attention, must be paid.” We live at a historical moment when many groups that have been abused by the absurdity our culture requires them to endure are calling for attention and calling those around them to account. Vichy is one more example of a Miller play continuing to resonate in our lives decades after it was written.Joshua Polster has done a fine job focusing key issues to introduce this play in ways that enable us to understand why a depiction of wartime France in the 1940s helps us to engage with the challenges of our own lives today. His insights will not only prompt classroom discussion of the play but introduce students to the complexity of Miller’s moral vision, his belief that moral challenges rarely have simple answers. Miller is seen as a banal moralist only by banal critics. As Polster makes clear, helping students to overcome that banality in their own thinking is among the most important reasons for reading Miller.

Reviewed by: The Eichmann Trial Mary J. Gallant The Eichmann Trial, by Deborah E. Lipstadt. New York: Schocken Next-book, 2011. 237 pp. $24.95. Deborah E. Lipstadt is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. Her work underscores the importance of confronting contested remembrance, as for instance in Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (Free Press/MacMillan,1993). Holocaust revisionism and denial come under attack as she applies the ideals of historical analysis in each of her works. Her quest for accuracy and an in-depth knowledge of her subject make an inestimable contribution to the larger orientation in Holocaust scholarship of tikkun olam, repairing the past to heal the future. In 1996, David Irving, a Holocaust denier and author, brought a libel suit against Lipstadt and Penguin Books for publishing a British edition of Denying the Holocaust in which he was mentioned. The case went on for six years. She described it in History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2005). Preparing for the Lipstadt v. Irving trial, she obtained some of the perpetrator testimony she used from the Eichmann trial (1961). Israeli authorities allowed her access to what until then had been a sealed document, the Eichmann memoir, written during his 1961 trial. From her engagement of materials in that earlier trial she determined to write the present work, The Eichmann Trial (2011), published fifty years after the 1961 trial in Israel. In The Eichmann Trial, Lipstadt is plain spoken and maintains that the trial delivered a correct verdict. It contains an Introduction, six chapters and a Conclusion in which she gives a clear picture of Adolph Eichmann, who as a Nazi career officer was completely dedicated to the goals of racial cleansing. He put his own stamp on the eradication of European Jewry during 1942–1945. Her forensics on the 1961 trial pays homage to Jews who were victims and survivors. So far from aligning with noted intellectuals at the 1961 trial, such as Hannah Arendt, who in her work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1963), saw Eichmann as a bumbling clerk merely carrying out the Nazi mandate, Lipstadt saw Eichmann as knowing exactly what he was doing. Eichmann was an unrepentant [End Page 192] antisemite who as a Nazi officer zealously sent millions to their deaths with intention and forethought. Marc Osiel, a student of Arendt’s, in his work Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers) takes the Eichmann trial as a brilliant success, not just in terms of a scrupulous rendering of justice, but in the way the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, presented the facts for collective memory. Hausner had worked to give survivors the right to testify at the trial, and to have the Holocaust itself provide the context for interpreting the actions of the defendant. Osiel cites Haim Gouri (Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994, translated by Michael Swirsky), who in a lead article titled “Facing the Glass Booth” (in Geoffrey Hartman’s Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory and Anti‐Semitism, London: Blackwell, 1994), noted that the Eichmann trial had allowed the Israeli nation to face contradictions in its remembrance of the Holocaust at a time when the next generation was in danger of seeing Holocaust Jews as having “allowed” themselves to be slaughtered. In 1932, in Bavaria, Eichmann (b. 1906) joined the then secret agency, the Schutzstafel (SS), and in 1934 joined the terrorist “Austrian Legion” and the SS unit at Dachau. Bored by the SS appointment at Dachau, he asked for reassignment to the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and was assigned to its central office in Berlin; there he became part of the section concerned with Jewish affairs. In 1938, as Lipstadt points out (p. 69), the SD sent him to Austria. Antisemitism there had peaked after the Anschluss. Eichmann added to it, becoming a main figure in the persecution of Austrian Jews. He had boasted about his power to an SS colleague in a letter produced at...

The early 1960s was a productive moment of theorizing on political trials. This is when Otto Kirchheimer’s Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends (1961), Hannah Arendt’s her “report” on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), and Judith N. Shklar’s Legalism: Law, Morals and Political Trials (1964) were published. These works go beyond the predictable and conventional liberal outrage vis-a-vis political trials and instead offer a keen thinking of the intersections, interpenetrations, and entanglements of law and politics on the stage of trials. It is also in these works that we find incipient conceptualizations of what may be understood as the performativity of legal proceedings. Kirchheimer discerns the ability of law to enact its own foundations into being through a trial. Arendt renders her report into a textual tribunal and invests in the legal substantiation of the notion of “crimes against humanity” as a way to performatively produce humanity as legal community. Shklar’s identification of the political function of a trial is one that brings embodied practice into play: the performance of a trial as a legalistic ritual can performatively recreate a culture of legalism.

This chapter traces Arendt’s trajectory from her birth in Königsberg, East Prussia in 1906 to her death in New York in 1975. It describes her study of philosophy with Heidegger and Jaspers in the 1920s; her initiation into politics with the rise of the Nazi movement in the early 1930s; her escape from Germany and her sojourn in Paris; and her eventual arrival in America in 1941. The chapter then provides context and background for some of her major works, including Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and The Life of the Mind.