Banal means lacking in originality or boring. It is a fitting description of the Nazis’ imaginations behind the Holocaust. This crime against humanity was so hideous that international laws were created to try those culpable. Adolf Eichmann was among the planners of the “Final Solution” and fled to Argentina. The new state of Israel had to kidnap him in order to bring him to justice in Israeli courts. He never denied the charges against him and was eventually hanged as punishment. In this book, Hannah Arendt analyzes his trial to show how even an “enlightened” country like Germany could fall to such evil.

This report is not an exciting work. Though crimes and wars are often glamorized, she shows how utterly boring they are. She further demonstrates how an entire culture can fall prey to hideous evils through pride and an excuse that everybody’s doing it. When humans become only self-interested and driven only by self-promotion, we are capable of ignoring our consciences and our own humanity. In the modern world, individuals must learn to say, “no” and “never again,” instead of just passing the buck to the next person.

I appreciate this book’s insights about how Nazi Germany took shape. Before World War I, Germany was considered to have the leading culture in the world – educationally, ethically, scientifically, and artistically. Yet they fell prey to a nationalism that denied the humanity of those not of the “Aryan race,” whatever that means. If they can fall, anyone can fall.

This account, though heavy throughout, reminds me of the seriousness of national politics. It’s easy in a democracy to look upon our political class as entertainers, not leaders. Often, that entertainment leads to beating up on and “othering” someone else. This story shows how that mistake can happen even to the best and the brightest. It shows how only care and conscience can bring justice and love into the world. ( )

[...] ché quando io parlo della «banalità del male,» lo faccio su un piano quanto mai concreto. Eichmann non era uno Iago né un Macbeth, e nulla sarebbe stato più lontano dalla sua mentalità che «fare il cattivo» - come Riccardo Terzo - per fredda determinazione. Eccezion fatta per la sua eccezionale diligenza nel pensare alla propria carriera, egli non aveva motivi per essere crudele, e anche quella diligenza non era, in sé, criminosa; è certo che non avrebbe mai ucciso un suo superiore per ereditarne il posto. Per dirla in parole povere, egli "non capì mai che cosa stava facendo". [...] Non era uno stupido; era semplicemente senza idee (una cosa molto diversa dalla stupidità), e tale mancanza d'idee ne faceva un individuo predisposto a divenire uno dei più grandi criminali di quel periodo. E se questo è «banale» e anche grottesco, se con tutta la nostra buona volontà non riusciamo a scoprire in lui una profondità diabolica o demoniaca, ciò non vuol dire che la sua situazione e il suo atteggiamento fossero comuni. Non è certo molto comune che un uomo di fronte alla morte, anzi ai piedi della forca, non sappia pensare ad altro che alle cose che nel corso della sua vita ha sentito dire ai funerali altrui, e che certe «frasi esaltanti» gli facciano dimenticare completamente la realtà della propria morte. Quella lontananza dalla realtà e quella mancanza d'idee possono essere molto più pericolose di tutti gli istinti malvagi che forse sono innati nell'uomo. Questa fu la lezione di Gerusalemme. Ma era una lezione, non una spiegazione del fenomeno, né una teoria.

E' un libro che dà molto da pensare. A torto o a ragione siamo abituati a pensare in termini di Bene e Male assoluto quando si tratta del nazismo. I nazisti erano i cattivi, gli ebrei erano i buoni. Punto. E' così che ci insegnano a storia, quando andiamo a scuola. E questa visione così drastica, netta, di quegli eventi turbò le persone al processo di Adolf Eichmann, perché non si trovarono di fronte un mostro, uno che avrebbero potuto odiare facilmente, ma una persona normale e neanche troppo brillante. Era un uomo pericolosamente simile a tanti di quelli che stavano dalla parte del “bene”.

Ma il guaio del caso Eichmann era che di uomini come lui ce n'erano tanti e che questi tanti non erano né perversi né sadici, bensì erano, e sono tuttora, terribilmente normali. Dal punto di vista delle nostre istituzioni giuridiche e dei nostri canoni etici, questa normalità è più spaventosa di tutte le atrocità messe insieme, poiché implica - come già fu detto e ripetuto a Norimberga dagli imputati e dai loro patroni - che questo nuovo tipo di criminale, realmente "hostis generis humani", commette i suoi crimini in circostanze che quasi gli impediscono di accorgersi o di sentire che agisce male.

Come a dire, la normalità è pericolosa e nessun “normale” può dirsi immune alla follia, al virus dell'incapacità di distinguere il bene dal male. Perché la normalità è pericolosa? Istintivamente, sembra proprio un ossimoro accostare “normalità” all'aggettivo “pericolosa”. Eppure è così, basta rifletterci un attimo. Tutto dipende da cosa intendiamo per “normalità”. Fare colazione la mattina? Portare la fede al dito dopo il matrimonio? Sterminare i soggetti deboli della società perché così ci è stato ordinato?

Non so se Hannah Arendt abbia assolutamente ragione sulla “banalità del male”. Certamente questo è un libro che pone più interrogativi di quanti non ne risolva e solo per questo meriterebbe di essere letto da chiunque.

Nessuna pena ha mai avuto il potere d'impedire che si commettano crimini. Al contrario, quale che sia la pena, quando un reato è stato commesso una volta, la sua ripetizione è più probabile di quanto non fosse la sua prima apparizione. E le ragioni particolari per cui non è da escludere che qualcuno faccia un giorno ciò che hanno fatto i nazisti, sono ancor più plausibili.

Non è affatto escluso che nell'economia automatizzata di un futuro non troppo lontano gli uomini siano tentati di sterminare tutti coloro il cui quoziente d'intelligenza sia al di sotto di un certo livello. ( )

Em 1960, sequestrado num subúrbio de Buenos Aires por um comando israelense, Adolf Eichmann é levado para Jerusalém, para o que deveria ser o maior julgamento de um carrasco nazista depois do tribunal de Nuremberg. Mas, durante o processo, em vez do monstro sanguinário que todos esperavam ver, surge um funcionário medíocre, um arrivista incapaz de refletir sobre seus atos ou de fugir aos clichês burocráticos. É justamente aí que o olhar lúcido de Hannah Arendt descobre a "banalidade do mal", ameaça maior às sociedades democráticas. Numa mescla brilhante de jornalismo político e reflexão filosófica, Arendt investiga questões sempre atuais, como a capacidade do Estado de transformar o exercício da violência homicida em mero cumprimento de metas e organogramas.

A partir del juicio que en 1961 se llevó a cabo contra Adolf Eichmann, teniente coronel de las SS y uno de los mayores criminales de la historia, Hannah Arendt estudia en este ensayo las causas que propiciaron el holocausto, el papel equívoco que desempeñaron en tal genocidio los consejos judíos -cuestión que, en su época, fue motivo de una airada controversia-, así como la naturaleza y la función de la justicia, aspecto que la lleva a plantear la necesidad de instituir un tribunal internacional capaz de juzgar crímenes contra la humanidad. Poco a poco, la mirada lúcida y penetrante de Arendt va desentrañando la personalidad del acusado, analiza su contexto social y político y su rigor intachable a la hora de organizar la deportación y el exterminio de las comunidades judías. Al mismo tiempo, la filósofa alemana estudia la colaboración o la resistencia en la aplicación de la Solución Final por parte de algunas naciones ocupadas, expone problemas que aún hoy día no se han dilucidado -la relación entre la legalidad y la justicia- y cuya trascendencia sigue determinando la escena política de nuestros días.

review of
Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jersulalem - A Report on the Banality of Evil
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January , 2012

I haven't previously read anything by Arendt but I'm sure that I'm far from the 1st to remark that she's an astonishingly rigorous & painstaking scholar & critic who 'spares no-one' in her analysis. One of the ironies of her depth didn't, however, become apparent to me until I reached page 122 where she writes:

"Much of the horribly painstaking thoroughness in the execution of the Final Solution - a thoroughness that usually strikes the observer as typically German, or else as characteristic of the perfect bureaucrat - can be traced to the odd notion, indeed very common in Germany, that to be law-abiding means not merely to obey the laws but to act as though one were the legislator of the laws that one obeys. Hence the conviction that nothing less than going beyond the call of duty will do."

& this is, indeed, a great way to describe Arendt's thoroughness in her fairness & comprehensiveness in this bk. Arendt deliberately goes further than the court does in Eichmann's trial (at least according to her own report) - both in her analysis of Eichmann's apparently peculiar vulnerableness to expression thru cliché & 'euphemism' (a nazi specialty) & in the court's (alas, understandable) avoidance of elucidation of Jewish cooperation in the genocide of their own people.

I decided to read this b/c I'm currently making an ambitious sampling movie called Robopaths culling from an abundance of sources that basically reinforce my not-particularly original contention that robopaths [people who follow orders w/o any internal free-thinking resistance] enable the genocidal plans of megalomaniacs. & as one of the main texts that I'll be extensively quoting from in Robopaths, I cd've hardly picked a more relevant source.

Reading Eichmann in Jersulalem makes me re-realize why I've found the lifestyles of punk anarchists so strikingly 'valid'. It seems to me that many punks have learned a particular lesson of Nazi Germany & Imperialist America & Britain (etc) well - even if often mainly intuitively: viz: that ALL nations & other entities that oppressively shape a group identity have to be resisted from the inside w/o being so naive as to think that "it can't happen here" (as Sinclair Lewis &, later, Frank Zappa, satirized). In other words, if Nazi Germany had had a resistance culture like anarchistic punk built into it more than maybe there wdn't've been so many Good Germans who 'went w/ the p(r)ogram'.

Unfortunately, Nazi Germany probably did have "a resistance culture like anarchistic punk built into it": viz: cabaret culture & what the nazis called Entartete Kunst und Musik (degenerate art & music) &, alas, it wasn't strong enuf to withstand the shocking tide of Hitler's methamphetamine-fueled mania & the average German's lazy willingness to be lead into sado-masochistic obedience. An obedience that psychologist Stanley Milgram researched later w/ great clarity in the USA w/ more-or-less identical results that the nazis got: IT CAN (& does) HAPPEN HERE. Fortunately, Milgram's intentions were cautionary - but I'm sure that many führers in the USA (governmental, religious, military) have taken note of how this caution cd be thrown out w/ other 'undesirables'.

Nonetheless, let's keep in mind that it's mainly governments (& big businesses) that're capable of appropriating, accumulating, & coordinating resources on such a large scale that tanks & trains & fighter planes can be made - & that such a process is dependent on the enforced cooperation of large numbers of people. DIY culture, on the other hand, is much smaller scale & more dependent on individual initiative &, hence, on individuality. It's my hope that such DIY culture is much less likely to be prone to the robopathia that made Nazi Germany so rapidly effective in its genocide. Maybe that's just wishful thinking insofar as Fundamentalist Islam seems to be pretty handy w/ total conformity combined w/ the individual initiative of IEMs (Improvised Explosive Devices). Fundamentalist USA doesn't have to have much individualized initiative since it's already got a big connection to mainstream power's control of resources.

At the risk of providing a Reader's Digest Condensed Book version of Eichmann in Jersulalem, I provide the following quotes that I've chosen as possible text for my movie Robopaths. Please don't read these & feel like you don't 'need' to read the entire Arendt bk. READ IT FROM COVER-TO-COVER! It's too important to neglect.

"Sixteen years ago, while still under the direct impact of the events, David Rousset, a former inmate of Buchenwald, described what we know happened in all concentration camps: "The triumph of the S.S. demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be lead to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity. And it is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism, that the S.S. men desire his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold . . . is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission, Nothing is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their deaths" (Les Jours de notre mort, 1947)." - page 9

"Would he have pleaded guilty if he had been indicted as an accessory to murder? Perhaps, but he would have made important qualifications. What he had done was a crime only in retrospect, and he had always been a law-abiding citizen, because Hitler's orders, which he had certainly executed to the best of his ability, had possessed "the force of law" in the Third Reich. (The defense could have quoted in support of Eichmann's thesis the testimony of one of the best-known experts on constitutional law in the Third Reich, Theodor Maunz, currently Minister of Education and Culture in Bavaria, who stated in 1943 [in Gestalt und Recht der Polizei]: "The command of the Führer . . . is the absolute center of the present legal order.") Those who today told Eichmann that he could have acted differently simply did not know, or had forgotten, how things had been. He did not want to be one of those who now pretended that "they had always been against it," whereas in fact they had been very eager to do what they were told to do. However, times change, and he, like Professor Maunz, had "arrived at different insights." What he had done he had done, he did not want to deny it; rather, he proposed "to hang myself in public as warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth." By this he did not mean to say that he regretted anything: "Repentance is for little children." (Sic!)" - page 21

"According to his religious beliefs, which had not changed since the Nazi period (in Jerusalem he declared himself to be a Gottgläubiger, the Nazi term for those who had broken with Christianity, and he refused to take his oath on the Bible), this event was to be ascribed to "a higher Bearer of Meaning," an entity somehow identical with the "movement of the universe," to which human life, in itself devoid of "higher meaning," is subject. (The terminology is quite suggestive. To call God a Höheren Sinnesträger meant linguistically to give him some place in the military hierarchy [..]" - pages 23-24

"Before Eichmann entered the Party and the S.S., he had proved that he was a joiner, and May 8, 1945, the official date of Germany's defeat, was significant for him mainly because it then dawned upon him that thenceforward he would have to live without being a member of something or other. "I sensed I would have to lead a leaderless and difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me, no pertinent ordinances would be there to consult - in brief, a life never known before lay before me."" - page 28

"Dimly aware of a defect that must have plagued him even in school - it amounted to a mild case of aphasia - he apologized, saying, "Officialese [Amtssprache] is my only language." But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché. (Was it these clichés that the psychiatrists thought so "normal" and "desirable"? Are these the "positive ideas" a clergyman hopes for in those to whose souls he ministers? [..] )" - pages 43-44

"It was not until the outbreak of the war, on September 1, 1939, that the Nazi regime became openly totalitarian and openly criminal. [..] All officials of the police, not only of the Gestapo but also of the Criminal Police and the Order Police, received S.S. titles corresponding to their previous ranks, regardless of whether or not they were Party members, and this meant that in the space of a day a most important part of the old civil services was incorporated into the most radical section of the Nazi hierarchy. No one, as far as I know, protested, or resigned his job." - page 63

"This "objective" attitude - talking about concentration camps in terms of "administration" and about extermination camps in terms of "economy" - was typical of the S.S. mentality, and something Eichmann, at the trial, was still very proud of." - pages 63-64

"Apart from the not very important industrial enterprises of the S.S., such famous German firms as I.G. Farben, the Krupp Werke, and Siemens-Schuckert Werke has established plants in Auschwitz as well as near the Lublin death camps. Cooperation between the S.S. and the businessmen was excellent; Höss of Auschwitz testified to very cordial social relations with the I.G. Farben representatives. As for working conditions, the idea was clearly to kill through labor; according to Hilberg, at least twenty-five thousand of the approximately thirty-five thousand Jews who worked for one of the I.G. Farben plants died." - pages 73-74

"Thus, for instance, a high official in the Foreign Office once proposed that in all correspondence with the Vatican the killing of Jews be called the "radical solution"; this was ingenious, because the Catholic puppet government of Slovakia, with which the Vatican had intervened, had not been, in the view of the Nazis, "radical enough" in its anti-Jewish legislation, having committed the "basic error" of excluding baptized Jews." - page 80

"The member of the Nazi hierarchy most gifted at solving problems of conscience was Himmler. He coined slogans, like the famous watchword of the S.S., taken froma Hitler speech before the S.S. in 1931, "My Honor is my Loyalty" - ctach phrases which Eichmann called "winged words" and the judges "empty talk" - and issued them, as Eichmann recalled, "around the turn of the year," presumably along with a Christmas bonus. Eichmann remembered only one of them and kept repeating it: "These are battles which future generations will not have to fight again," alluding to the "battles" against women, children, old people, and other "useless mouths." Other such phrases, taken from speeches Himmler made to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen and the higher S.S. and Police Leaders, were: "To have stuck it out and, apart from exceptions caused by human weakness, to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard. [..]"" - page 92

"None of the various "language rules," carefully contrived to deceive and to camouflage, had a more decisive effect on the mentality of the killers than this first war decree of Hitler, in which the word for "murder" was replaced by the phrase "to grant a mercy death." Eichmann, asked by the police examiner if the directive to avoid "unnecessary hardships" was not a bit ironic, in view of the fact that the destination of these people was certain death anyhow, did not even understand the question, so firmly was it still anchored in his mind that the unforgivable sin was not to kill people but to cause unnecessary pain. During the trial, he showed unmistakable signs of sincere outrage when witnesses told of cruelties and atrocities committed by S.S. men [..] and it was not the accusation of having sent millions of people to their death that ever caused him real agitation but only the accusation (dismissed by the court) of one witness that he had once beaten a Jewish boy to death." - page 96

"The story is told by Count Hans von Lehnsdorff, in his Ostpressisches Tagebuch (1961). He had remained in the city [Königsberb, in East Prussia, Germany, in January, 1945] as a physician to take care of wounded soldiers who could not be evacuated [..] There he was accosted by a woman who showed him a varicose vein she had had for years but wanted to have treated now, because she had time. "I try to explain that it is more important for her to get away from Königsberg and to leave the treatment for some later time. Where do you want to go? I ask her. She does not know, but she knows that they will all be brought into the Reich. And then she adds, surprisingly: 'The Russians will never get us. The Führer will never admit it. Much sooner he will gas us.' I look around furtively, but no one seems to find this statement out of the ordinary." The story, one feels, like most true stories, is incomplete. There should have been one more voice, preferably a female one, which, sighing heavily, replied: And now all that good, expensive gas has been wasted on the Jews!" - page 98

"The legal experts drew up the necessary legislation for making the victims stateless, which was important on two counts: it made it impossible for any country to inquire into their fate, and it enabled the state in which they were resident to confiscate theit property. The Ministry of Finance and the Reichsbank prepared facilities to receive the huge loot from all over Europe, down to watches and gold teeth, all of which was sorted out in the Reichsbank and then sent on to the Prussian State Mint. The Ministry of Transport provided the necessary railroad cars, usually freight cars, even in times of great scarcity of rolling stock, and they saw to it that the schedule of the deportation trains did not conflict with other timetables. the Jewish Council of Elders were informed by Eichmann or his men of how many Jews were needed to fill each train, and they made out the list of deportees. The Jews registered, filled out innumerable forms, answered pages and pages of questionnaires regarding their property so that it could be seized the more easily; then they assembled at the collection points and boarded the trains. The few who tried to hide to hide to escape were rounded up by a special Jewish police force. As far as Eichmann could see, no one protested, no one refused to cooperate." - page 102

"What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of "good society" as he knew it. Typical was his last word on the subject of Hitler - whom he and his comrade Sassen had agreed to "shirr out" of their story; Hitler, he said, "may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost eighty million. . . . His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man." His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which "good society" everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to "close his ears to the voice of conscience," as the judgment had it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a "respectable voice," with the voice of respectable society around him." - pages 111-112 ( )