HUE AND CRY
87
to the tenth degree of complacency and self-delusion. How could Abel
have missed the irony in Miss Arendt's account of his "conversion"-a
dramatic irony, furthermore, since when she tells the reader that
Eichmann had been "promptly and forever" made a Zionist by reading
a "basic book," she is dryly echoing a speaker who had no idea of the
effect on an audience of what he was saying?
It
was Eichmann, alone
in the world, who considered himself a good disciple of Herz!'
According
to
Abel, Eichmann must have thought about Nazism
politically since he thought about Zionism. But Eichmann's "thought"
was a parody of the idea of thinking. Had
Mein Kampf
been his "Bible,"
he might have pressed a flower in it. His Zionist "studies" had a
function; they made him an expert, at least in the circles he moved in.
They made him "stand out" from his co-workers-the life-object of all
mediocrities. As a specialist in Jewish emigration, he was perfectly
fitted, when the time came, to arrange Jewish emigration to the next
world, to Abraham's bosom. Among his fellow bureaucrats, he might have
passed highest in a vocational aptitude test for the new job. A sadist,
monster, or demon would not have qualified for the position; these "un–
desirables" had their place in the Nazi system as jailers and editors of
periodicals, but a man with Eichmann's responsibilities could not be a
Beast of Belsen or a Julius Streicher. The fact that Eichmann was squeam–
ish, could not bear the sight of blood, was even an "idealist" permitted
precisely that distancing from reality that facilitated the administrative
task-a distancing that reflected the physical and psychic space between
the collective will of the German people in the homeland and its execu–
tion in the east.
If
Eichmann seems to have been cordial, rather than the
block of ice described by one witness, this was good public relations, for
one of his duties was to allay the suspicions of the Jews and other
foreigners he came in contact with, so that they too would be distanced
from reality.
Abel does not think that Miss Arendt should have assigned duti–
fulness-"a positive value"-to Eichmann, as though she were free,
reporting the trial, to invent her own Eichmann like a character in
fiction . I should have thought dutifulness was a relative value. But in
any case the picture of Eichmann as a conscientious clown emerged
from Eichmann's testimony long before Miss Arendt wrote her book.
Miss Arendt's achievement was to reconcile this virtuous clown with
his actions. The portrait she made, of course, is not the "final" Eich–
mann-there can be no such thing-and some day someone may square
the man as he appeared with his actions in some entirely different way.
But none of her critics has even tried to do this. To say that he was a
