View Arendt_ Thinking.key.pdf from PHILOSOPHY 13 at Ateneo de Manila University. In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity "banal", she was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance. Remarkable for us, no doubt, is Arendt's conviction that only philosophy could have saved those millions of lives. She thought the trials failed to understand the man and his deeds. The controversial journalistic analysis of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust, from the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. What had become banal – and astonishingly so – was the failure to think. One of the many ironies surrounding Hannah Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial 1 is involved in the fact that it should have been serialized in the New Yorker so short a time after the appearance in the same … So, in this first instance, she feared that what had become "banal" was non-thinking itself. Their walk is unstudied; their sober and intense attention, visibly stiffening under the impact of grief as they listen to the tales of suffering, is natural; their impatience with the prosecutors attempt to drag out the hearings is spontaneous and refreshing; their attitude toward th… Eichmann in Jerusalem. HANNAH ARENDT June, 1964 1: The House of Justice "Beth Hamishpath" - the House of Justice: these words shouted by the court usher at the top of his voice make us jump to our feet as they announce the arrival of the three judges, who, bare-headed, in black robes, walk into the courtroom from a side entrance to take their seats on the Arendt wondered whether a new kind of historical subject had become possible with national socialism, one in which humans implemented policy, but no longer had "intentions" in any usual sense. Indeed, at one point the failure to think is precisely the name of the crime that Eichmann commits. Die Denkanstöße und politischen Strategien, die zum Beispiel zu Fragen der strafrechtlichen Ahndung der Kriegsverbrechen, des Völkerrechts, der politischen Zukunft Europas, der Dokumentation und historischen Einordnung des Geschehenen sowie im weiteren Umfeld der umfassenden jüdischen Restitutionsanstrengungen entstanden, zeugen von einer sich stetig weiterentwickelnden Aktivität und Auseinandersetzung in Bezug auf den Nationalsozialismus seit den frühen 1940er Jahren. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. by Ruth R. Wisse. It’s hard to think of another work capable of setting off ferocious polemics a half-century after its publication. In Arendt’s telling, Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. Intellectually, she was an independent thinker, a loner not a "joiner", separating herself from schools of thought or ideology. Am 11. Hannah Arendt. Covering the trial Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil", a phrase that has since become something of an intellectual cliche. There were at least two challenges to legal judgment that she underscored, and then another to moral philosophy more generally. One thing Arendt certainly did not mean was that evil had become ordinary, or that Eichmann and his Nazi cohorts had committed an unexceptional crime. Fifty-five years later, her book still has the power to shock—and disgust. In her view, no thinking being can plot or commit genocide. To understand that consensus, consider that even today the Nazis stand in for the worst evil in history. Arendt saw Eichmann, on trial for his life, as a "buffoon" whose inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. Of course, they can have such thoughts, formulate and implement genocidal policy, as Eichmann clearly did, but such calculations cannot be called thinking, in her view. And yet, he also acknowledges that once he was charged with the task of carrying out the final solution, he ceased to live by Kantian principles. The degradation of thinking worked hand in hand with the systematic destruction of populations. Indeed, her indictment of Eichmann reached beyond the man to the historical world in which true thinking was vanishing and, as a result, crimes against humanity became increasingly "thinkable". When, in the winter and spring of 1963, Arendt first presented her view of Eichmann and his trial in the New Yorker, and in the subsequent book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, it defied the consensus view of the Nazis as diabolical fiends. The man was either made to stand for all of nazism and for every Nazi, or he was considered the ultimately pathological individual. Hannah Arendt’s five articles on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann by the state of Israel appeared in The New Yorker in February and March 1963. The first problem is that of legal intention. Das Buch erschien erstmals 1963 und rief mehrere langanhaltende Kontroversen hervor. Her argument was that Eichmann may well have lacked "intentions" insofar as he failed to think about the crime he was committing. The most polished writing andsharpest analysis in the Jewish world. In a way, we can understand much of Arendt's later work, including her work on willing, judgment and responsibility, as an extended debate with Eichmann on the proper reading of Kant, an avid effort to reclaim Kant from its Nazi interpretation and to mobilise the resources of his text precisely against the conceptions of obedience that uncritically supported a criminal legal code and fascist regime. Hannah Arendt on Eichmann:A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance. While observing the legal proceedings, Arendt concludes that Eichmann was not a monster, but an ordinary man who had thoughtlessly buried his conscience through his obedience to the Nazi regime and its ideology. We might think at first that this is a scandalous way to describe his horrendous crime, but for Arendt the consequence of non-thinking is genocidal, or certainly can be. At this historical juncture, for Arendt, it became necessary to conceptualise and prepare for crimes against humanity, and this implied an obligation to devise new structures of international law. Unbestritten ist … Yaacov Lozowick served as director of archives at Yad Vashem and chief archivist at the Israel State Archives. The Hannah Arendt Papers (The Library of Congress Manuscript Division). One such moment occurred when Eichmann claimed that in implementing the final solution, he was acting from obedience, and that he had derived this particular moral precept from his reading of Kant. In addition to her major texts she published a number of anthologies, including Between Past and Future(1961), Men in Dark Times (1968) and Crises … Arendt's book on Eichmann is highly quarrelsome. In this way, her view recalls that of Hermann Cohen, who argued tragically in the early part of the 20th century that Jews would find greater protections and cultural belonging in Germany than in any Zionist project that would take them to Palestine. “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to … F ifty years ago the writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt witnessed the end of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major figures in the organisation of the Holocaust. Vor 60 Jahren schockierte Hannah Arendt mit ihrer These von der «Banalität des Bösen». She objected to Eichmann's treatment as a scapegoat; she criticised some of the ways that Israel used the trial to establish and legitimate its own legal authority and national aspirations. ", When in the midst of his muddled explanation, Eichmann reformulates the categorical imperative such that one ought to act in such a way that the Führer would approve, or would himself so act, Arendt offers a swift rejoinder, as if she were delivering a direct vocal challenge to him: "Kant, to be sure, had never intended to say anything of the sort; on the contrary, to him every man was a legislator the moment he started to act; by using his 'practical reason' man found the principles that could and should be the principles of law.". In ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ and after, it was Kant, not Heidegger, who was foremost on Hannah Arendt’s mind. “The Truth of the Capture of Adolf Eichmann” shows how his image has morphed from diabolical Nazi to the charming fellow portrayed by Ben Kingsley in the Hollywood film Operation Finale (2018). About the Author. To understand Eichmann, you have to see not his “banality” but how innovative and utterly committed he was as a bureaucrat. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem was published fifty years ago, first as a series of articles in The New Yorker and then, a few months later, as a book. Although Arendt agreed with the final verdict of the trial, namely, that Eichmann should be condemned to death, she quarreled with the reasoning put forward at the trial and with the spectacle of the trial itself. She thought that the trial necessitated a critique of the idea of collective guilt, but also a broader reflection on the historically specific challenges of moral responsibility under dictatorship. The movie “Hannah Arendt,” which opened in New York in May, has unleashed emotional commentary that mirrors the fierce debate Arendt herself ignited over half a century ago, when she covered the trial of the notorious war criminal Adolf Eichmann. To have "intentions" in her view was to think reflectively about one's own action as a political being, whose own life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others. Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen ist ein Buch der politischen Theoretikerin Hannah Arendt, das sie anlässlich des 1961 vor dem Bezirksgericht Jerusalem geführten Prozesses gegen den ehemaligen österreichischen SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann verfasste. In 1961, the noted German-American philosopher of Jewish origin, Hannah Arendt, gets to report on the trial of the notorious Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) understood that evil does not announce itself with fanfare and a jet of sulphur. Of course, the first reaction to such an apparently naive claim may be that Arendt overestimated the power of thinking or that she held on to a highly normative account of thinking that does not correspond to the various modes of reflection, self-muttering, and silent chatter that goes by that name. Hierfür stehe… The trial began in April 15, 1961. One of the pre-eminent political thinkers of the 20th century, Arendt, who died in 1975 at the age of 69, was a Jew arrested by the German … Arendt’s five articles, which were then expanded into the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, proved hugely controversial. One rhetorical feature of her book on Eichmann is that she is, time and again, breaking out into a quarrel with the man himself. The controversial journalistic analysis of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust, from the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. She thought the trial needed to focus on the acts that he committed, acts which included the making of a genocidal policy. How, we might ask, does thinking implicates each thinking "I" as part of a "we" such that to destroy some part of the plurality of human life is to destroy not only one's self, understood as linked essentially to that plurality, but to destroy the very conditions of thinking itself. Inhalt 60 Jahre Eichmann-Prozess - Hannah Arendt ist aktueller denn je. The Truth of the Capture of Adolf Eichmann, Thinking about Eichmann in the Way That the World Thinks about Israel, The Misrepresentation of the Past in the Cinema. One of the many ironies surrounding Hannah Arendt's book on the Eichmann trial is involved in the fact that it…. Arendt writes: "This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant's moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man's faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience. She did not think he acted without conscious activity, but she insisted that the term "thinking" had to be reserved for a more reflective mode of rationality. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened’. Arendt makes this distinction between practical reason and obedience in Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963 and seven years later she began her influential set of lectures on Kant's political philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. For the most part, she reports on the trial and the man in the third person, but there are moments in which she addresses him directly, not on the trial, but in her text. In her treatise on the banality of evil, Arendt demanded a rethink of established ideas about moral responsibility, ifty years ago the writer and philosopher. It’s hard to argue with Martin Kramer’s essay on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s capture of Adolf Eichmann. Arendt, who fled Nazi Germany at 27, was already an internationally renowned scholar and public intellectual when she arrived in Jerusalem in April 1961 to cover the trial for The New Yorker. Sadly, he’s probably right that these quarreling former colleagues are not blameless for mischaracterizations of Eichmann. If Arendt thought existing notions of legal intention and national criminal courts were inadequate to the task of grasping and adjudicating Nazi crimes, it was also because she thought that nazism performed an assault against thinking. ", Eichmann contradicts himself as he explains his Kantian commitments. The strong feelings that Arendt, who died in 1975, arouses in scholars, especially Israelis, spring primarily from her 1963 book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”Based on a series of articles Arendt wrote for The New Yorker, the book is critical of the way Israel conducted the Eichmann trial and the way the defendant was portrayed. Indeed, that for which she faulted Eichmann was his failure to be critical of positive law, that is, a failure to take distance from the requirements that law and policy imposed upon him; in other words, she faults him for his obedience, his lack of critical distance, or his failure to think. At no time, however, is there anything theatrical in the conduct of the judgesMoshe Landau, the presiding judge, Judge Benjamin Halevi, and Judge Yitzhak Raveh. Fifty years ago the writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt witnessed the end of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major figures in the organisation of the Holocaust. Cohen thought universality belonged to German philosophy, rather than considering internationalist or global models that might provide an alternative to both nation-states. Adolf Eichmann, Holocaust. The Enduring Outrage of Hannah Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’. He invoked "duty" in an effort to explain his own version of Kantianism. Although Arendt focuses on Eichmann's failure to think as one way of naming his ultimate crime, it is clear that she thinks the Israeli courts did not think well enough, and sought to offer a set of corrections to their way of proceeding. Her view at once aggrandised the place and role of philosophy in the adjudication of genocide and called for a new mode of political and legal reflection that she believed would safeguard both thinking and the rights of an open-ended plural global population to protection against destruction. As a result, Arendt objected to a specific nation-state conducting a trial of Eichmann exclusively in the name of its own population. Overview. She is also critical of Eichmann himself for formulating and obeying a noxious set of laws. This fact was not banal at all, but unprecedented, shocking, and wrong. On the one hand, he clarifies: "I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws." About Eichmann in Jerusalem. Clips of Hannah Arendt in a 1964 interview with Joachim Fest. (1) (Hannah Arendt) Eichmann in Jerusalem (2) was originated when Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem in order to report, for The New Yorker, on the trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann, (3) who was acused of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. April 1961 musste Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem vor Gericht. And in the course of that telling, Kramer explains how clashes of ego among elderly ex-Mossad memoirists furnished Hollywood with the materials it needed to transform our culture’s shared memory of Eichmann. Create a free account to continue reading and you'll get two months of unlimited access to the best in Jewish thought, culture, and politics, More about: By writing about Eichmann, Arendt was trying to understand what was unprecedented in the Nazi genocide – not in order to establish the exceptional case for Israel, but in order to understand a crime against humanity, one that would acknowledge the destruction of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, communists, the disabled and the ill. Just as the failure to think was a failure to take into account the necessity and value that makes thinking possible, so the destruction and displacement of whole populations was an attack not only on those specific groups, but on humanity itself. But what did she really mean? Among the many controversial aspects of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which originally appeared as a multi-part series in The New Yorker, the most incendiary points she made appeared in chapter VII. In many ways, Arendt's approach is itself quite astonishing, since she is, among other things, trying to defend the relation between Jews and German philosophy against those who would find in German culture and thought the seeds of national socialism. He now teaches at Bar-Ilan University. Eichmann in Jerusalem, an expanded version of the serialized report Hannah Arendt produced for “The New Yorker” in 1963, covers the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann before an Israeli court 17 years after his crimes. Arendt relays his self-description: "he no longer 'was master of his own deeds,' and … he 'was unable to change anything'. But more than this, she faults him as well for failing to realise that thinking implicates the subject in a sociality or plurality that cannot be divided or destroyed through genocidal aims. But it is probably worth remarking that she is not only taking issue with the Israeli courts and with the way in which they arrived at the decision to punish Eichmann to death. So if a crime against humanity had become in some sense "banal" it was precisely because it was committed in a daily way, systematically, without being adequately named and opposed. Hannnah Arendt (1906-1975) was for many years University Professor of Political Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research and a Visiting Fellow of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She reformulates Cohen's project in a new social and political philosophy: truly staying with Kant or, rather, reformulating him for a contemporary social and political philosophy in a true sense would have stopped Eichmann and his cohorts, would have produced another kind of trial than the one she saw in Jerusalem, and would have redeemed the German-Jewish philosophical vocation – one that she tried to bring with her to New York. Fifty years ago, on October 28, 1964, a televised conversation between the German-Jewish political theorist, Hannah Arendt, and the well-known German journalist, Günter Gaus, was broadcast in West Germany. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a nonfiction book by political theorist Hannah Arendt, originally published in 1963.. Arendt wrote works on intellectual history as a philosopher, using events and actions to develop insights into contemporary totalitarian movements and the threat to human freedom presented by scientific abstraction and bourgeois morality. Die politische Theoretikerin Hannah Arendt war damals als Reporterin dabei. It was surely bad enough that he formulated and executed orders for the final solution, but to say, as he did, that his whole life was lived according to Kantian precepts, including his obedience to Nazi authority, was too much. T. he war over history begins where the war in history leaves off, which may be why Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann caused more anguish in New York literary circles 55 years ago than the trial itself. It seemed not to matter to the prosecutors that these two interpretations were basically in conflict. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, her controversial analysis of the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, had just been published in German in … Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. Hannah Arendt, whose account of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann's trial provided an unflinching study of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust and sparked heated debate, was born on this day in 1906. Arendt lacks Cohen's naivete, and sustained an important critique of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt, the German Jewish political philosopher who had escaped from a Nazi internment camp, [1] had obtained international fame and recognition in 1951 with her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. What had become banal was the attack on thinking, and this itself, for her, was devastating and consequential. Did the courts have to prove that Eichmann intended to commit genocide in order to be convicted of the crime? We can imagine how doubly scandalous such a moment was for Arendt. In 1961, The New Yorker commissioned Arendt to report on the trail of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Indeed, she thought the crime was exceptional, if not unprecedented, and that as a result it demanded a new approach to legal judgment itself. Hannah Arendt: Thinking and Moral Considerations 1906-1975 Biographical Notes 1906, Oct. 14 … Many questions abound: is thinking to be understood as a psychological process or, indeed, something that can be properly described, or is thinking in Arendt's sense always an exercise of judgment of some kind, and so implicated in a normative practice. The best thinking on Israel and the Middle East. Evil creeps. Der SS-Obersturmbannführer war mitverantwortlich für den Holocaust. [2] Feeling compelled to witness the trial of Adolf Eichmann (‘an obligation I … If the "I" who thinks is part of a "we" and if the "I" who thinks is committed to sustaining that "we", how do we understand the relation between "I" and "we" and what specific implications does thinking imply for the norms that govern politics and, especially, the critical relation to positive law? Like the legal philosopher Yosal Rogat before her, Arendt did not think that the history of anti-semitism or even the specificity of anti-semitism in Germany could be tried.