AESTHETICS O .F EVIL
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did not even know the Party's program, he never read
M ein Kampf
... that was about all there was to it."
Miss Arendt does remark that this "was not all there was
to it." But in filling out the picture Eichmann gave of himself
in Jerusalem, a picture which Miss Arendt in the main accepts,
she adds, to explain why he joined the Nazis, merely that he
was a frustrated man, already a failure in the eyes of his social
class and his family, and that from "a humdrum life without signifi–
c.ance or consequence the wind had blown him into History ..."
But she says not a word about the political views Eichmann held,
as if it were ridiculous to think of a man like this as having
views of any sort. And so with each succeeding step in his career:
his
admission to the SS, his assignment to the Jewish department, his
rise in prominence, his presence among the elite who heard Heydrich
announce Hitler's decision for a "final solution," his assignment to
carry out that decision and organize the unprecedented murders. Is it
possible, one wonders" to describe such a career with scarcely a
single reference to a moral decision or to any personal preference
for certain political ideas rather than others? Now there is one fatal
flaw in Miss Arendt's reasoning on this point: her claim that Eich–
mann had read Herzl's
Judenstaat
and been converted to Zionism,
in her own words, "forever." So the man was capable of forming
political views, even very unusual ones for a middle-class German in
his circumstances. Apparently he thought about Zionism. Did he
never think about Hitlerism?
As
I said, Miss Arendt does rely on one moral category in
analyzing Eichmann, and this is the category of dutifulness: of course,
dutifulness is not a dynamic
cate~ory;
it explains only why one
continues to serve, not why one has elected to serve a particular
program, a particular master. In any case, it is insufficient to account
for the various changes in Eichmann's career, and the choices he had
to make at decisive moments in it. And as for the aesthetic categories
Miss Arendt relies on in the main to account for his actions, they
render him finally inexplicable, just as her purely aesthetic judgment
of the leaders of the Jewish Councils renders their actions, as I have
already shown, inexplicable also, the only difference being that
Eichmann, under Miss Arendt's treatment, comes off as considerably
less ugly.
