Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt (May 2019)
Arendt's reporting of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann's trial is collected in this 1963 book. It's observations and analysis left much for me to think about and we’ll cover some of the best ideas in-depth over a couple upcoming posts.
Today, I’ll comment briefly on a couple of thoughts that caught my attention. First, I liked the simple statement that the Nazis demonstrated the certainty of their guilt by destroying so much evidence. There is an element of history that always thinks a little too much about what the world looked like through the perpetrator’s eyes. Was there something so fundamentally different about the criminal than the horrified onlooker? Destroying evidence is a clear and simple signal that the criminal at least understands enough about society to be expected to abide by its laws. I also found it fitting for this statement to be in a book that otherwise makes a similar point in a far more complex way.
The insight that the beleaguered tend to hope that more time will improve their situation was another interesting observation. The idea, I believe, was included to help explain why so many victims stay in place even in the face of frequent signals of imminent danger. This thought helps a reader see how a feeling common to most people explains an oft-considered question about the Holocaust.
Finally, a fact that surprised me was how there wasn’t much evidence that individual Nazis were punished for refusing to participate in exterminations. This doesn’t rule out individual cases to the contrary but it does make a strong argument against the possibility that Nazis as a whole were reluctant participants in carrying out Hitler’s deranged visions. Perhaps it links back to the thought above – maybe individual Nazis hoped that time would improve their situations such that their participation in exterminations would no longer be necessary. My conclusion is perhaps a little darker. I think people who live in fear of their own safety must learn to do what is right, and to do it right away, because each compromise with conscience pushes them closer to the point where the conscience has no influence at all.
One up: One topic I’ll cover in the future is Arendt’s deep analysis of criminal law. For today, I’ll preview it by sharing her analogy that suggesting a crime is excusable because anyone else would have done it is like saying an average crime statistic compels criminals to wake up each morning and fulfill the daily quota.
One down: I’ve heard people talk about ‘following orders’ as if such dictums are defined by the same standards as law. The difference is that law is never bound by the time, space, or circumstantial constraints of an order. The danger of my comments above may be that the best way to disobey certain orders may indeed be to wait for the emergence of new circumstances.
Just saying: I thought one of the important ideas in this book was that lessons do not need to explain the phenomena. It seems like a universal urge that we seek understanding of what’s happened but the danger of pursuing our curiosity is that it lacks an obvious relationship to future behavior. A good understanding of the past isn’t necessarily to know what happened – it’s to use the past to make better decisions in the future.
