More banality

Here we go again. At The.Ink Anand Giridharadas interviews Ann Heberlein, whose biography of Hannah Arendt, On Love and Tyranny, has just been published. Inevitably we get round to "the banality of evil":

ANAND: Arendt famously coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” It’s a much-used, much-abused, much-misunderstood phrase. What did she mean by it?

ANN: This concept is certainly one of the most misunderstood in the history of political philosophy. It is not the evil act that is to be considered as “banal,” nor should the consequences of any evil deed be regarded as banal. It is the motive behind these evil acts that may be seen as banal. Arendt thus questions whether evil intentions and evil motives are always a prerequisite for evil. According to her, there is not always a relationship between these.

Arendt coined the term in connection with her presence at the trial of one of the highest-echelon SS officers, Adolf Eichmann, who was accused by an Israeli court of crimes against humanity. She observed the trial as a reporter for The New Yorker in Jerusalem in April 1961 and was struck by how ordinary and mundane Eichmann appeared. He did not look at all like the monster you may have imagined. He appeared, as she writes, as “a sad and unimaginative bureaucrat who has just done his job,” neither demonic, nor fanatical.

Hannah believed that evil deeds often are performed or caused by people who have no evil intent. The sad truth is that evil deeds are often performed by people who have not reflected on the moral dimension of their acts, people who have not taken sides, people who choose “to obey their orders,” as Eichmann stated in his defense.

Unfortunately for this interpretation, we now know that Adolf Eichmann was by no means "a sad and unimaginative bureaucrat who has just done his job". He was on the contrary a highly intelligent and dedicated Nazi and one of the key architects of the Holocaust, as Bettina Stangneth showed in her 2014 book Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer.

Smuggled out of Europe after the collapse of Germany, Eichmann managed to live a peaceful and active exile in Argentina for years before his capture by the Mossad. Though once widely known by nicknames such as Manager of the Holocaust, in 1961 he was able to portray himself, from the defendant s box in Jerusalem, as an overworked bureaucrat following orders no more, he said, than just a small cog in Adolf Hitler s extermination machine. How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible? How did a central architect of the Final Solution manage to disappear? And what had he done with his time while in hiding?

Bettina Stangneth, the first to comprehensively analyze more than 1,300 pages of Eichmann s own recently discovered written notes as well as seventy-three extensive audio reel recordings of a crowded Nazi salon held weekly during the 1950s in a popular district of Buenos Aires draws a chilling portrait, not of a reclusive, taciturn war criminal on the run, but of a highly skilled social manipulator with an inexhaustible ability to reinvent himself, an unrepentant murderer eager for acolytes with whom to discuss past glories while vigorously planning future goals with other like-minded fugitives.

In fact Eichmann in Argentinian exile continued to be proud of the role he played in the Nazi machine:

Like many Nazi mass murderers, he possessed a puritanical petit-bourgeois sense of family and social propriety, indignantly denying that he indulged in extramarital relations or that he profited personally from his duties, and yet he lived quite comfortably with the mass killing of Jews. This was so, Stangneth argues, because Eichmann was far from a thoughtless functionary simply performing his duty. He proceeded quite intentionally from a set of tenaciously held Nazi beliefs (hardly consonant with Arendt’s puzzling contention that he “never realized what he was doing”). His was a consciously wrought racial “ethics,” one that pitted as an ultimate value the survival of one’s own blood against that of one’s enemies. He defined “sacred law” as what “benefits my people.” Morality was thus not universal or, as Eichmann put it, “international.” How could it be, given that the Jewish enemy was an international one, propounding precisely those universal values?

In the trial in Jerusalem Eichmann cynically invoked Kantian morality, but as a free man in Argentina he declared that “the drive toward self-preservation is stronger than any so-called moral requirement.” Kantian universalism was diametrically opposed to his racially tinged völkisch outlook. He had been a “fanatical warrior” for the law, “which creates order and destroys the sick and the ‘degenerate,’ ” and which had nothing to do with humanist ideals or other weaknesses. From a surprising admission of German inferiority — “we are fighting an enemy who . . . is intellectually superior to us” — it followed that total extermination of the Jewish adversary “would have fulfilled our duty to our blood and our people and to the freedom of the peoples.”

Arendt was scornful of the Eichmann trial in Israel, arguing that the deluded Jewish authorities had merely captured a pathetic bureaucrat, rather than some Nazi monster. But it was Arendt who was deluded. She was completely taken in by Eichmann's claims to be a merely a cog in the machine, just obeying orders. The Israelis weren't so easily fooled.

Not perhaps a very good judge of character, Arendt. Especially when you consider her affair as a student with the appalling Martin Heidegger, with whom she renewed her relationship after the war despite his enthusiasm for the Nazis.

Comments

[John the Drunkard]

Of course, Heidegger's 'enthusiasm for the Nazis' went rather further than that. He was an active party member, an open supporter of the regime, and managed to avoid any culpability after the fact.

Its no mere irony that his anti-rational, anti-democratic, volkisch attitudes found their long-term home on the LEFT.

[Martin Adamson]

Does rather bear out George Orwell’s observation that intellectuals mainly use their rhetorical gifts to pull the wool over their *own* eyes.