Eichmann, the Banality of Evil, and Thinking in Arendt's

Thought*
Bethania Assy
https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/.../ContAssy.htm

"What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else!" (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 accused of crimes against the Jewish
people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The trial began in April 15, 1961. The New York Times
had announced Eichmann's capture by Israeli agents in Argentina, in May 24, 1960. Israel and Argentina
had discussed Eichmann's extradition to Israel, and the United Nations finally decided the legality of
Jerusalem Trial. After the confirmation that Eichamnn was to be judged in Israel, Arendt asked The New
Yorker's director, William Shamn, to do a complete report of the Eichmann case in Israel.
Arendt's first reaction to Eichmann, "the man in the glass booth," was — nicht einmal unheimlich — not
even sinister." (4) She argues that "The deeds were monstrous, but the doer ... was quite ordinary,
commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous." (5) Arendt's perception that Eichmann seemed to be
a common man, evidenced in his transparent superficiality and mediocrity, left her astonished in
measuring the unaccounted evil committed by him, that is, organizing the deportation of millions of Jews
to the concentration camps. Actually, what Arendt had detected in Eichmann was not even stupidity, in
her words, he portrayed something entirely negative, it was thoughtlessness. Eichmann's ordinariness
implied an incapacity for independent critical thought: "... the only specific characteristic one could detect
in his past as well as in his behaviour during the trial and the preceding police examination was
something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think." (6)
(emphasis added) Eichmann became the protagonist of a kind of experience apparently so quotidian, the
absence of the critical thought. Arendt says: "When confronted with situations for which such routine
procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the
stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases,
adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized
function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events
and facts make by virtue of their existence." (7)
Eichmann had always acted according to the restricted limits allowed by the laws and ordinances. Those
attitudes resulted in the clouding between virtues and vices of a blind obedience. In fact, it was not only
Eichmann, as an isolated person, who was normal, whereas all other bureaucrats were sadist monsters.
One was before a bureaucratic compact mass of men who were perfectly normal, but whose acts were
monstrous. Behind such terrible normality of the bureaucratic mass, who was able to commit the greatest
atrocities that the world has even seen, Arendt addressed the question of the banality of evil. This
normality opened up the precedent regarding the possibility that some attitudes commonly repudiated by
a society — in this case the Nazi German attitudes — find as a locus of manifestation the common citizen,
who has not reflected on the content of the rules. Richard Bernstein highlights this "normal and ordinary
behaviour" of the bureaucratic mass in not thinking about the real meaning of the rules themselves, in
the sense that they would behave in the same manner in the manufacturing of either food or corpses.
"We may find it almost impossible to imagine how someone could 'think'(or rather, not think) in this
manner, whereby manufacturing food, bombs, or corpses are 'in essence the same' and where this can
become 'normal', 'ordinary' behaviour. This is the mentality that Arendt believed she was facing in
Eichmann... ." (8) Eichmann has brought up the radical danger of "such remoteness from reality and
such thoughtlessness." (9)