88
MARY McCARTHY
monster does not meet the problem, unless a monster means someone
you cannot explain, which is to declare the problem insoluble. Perhaps
Abel thinks Eichmann was a play-actor?
It
strikes me now that one of Miss Arendt's offenses was to put
Eichmann together with what he did, not in terms of rhetoric, but on a
realistic basis, listening to him and watching him-as though this in
itself .were dangerous, as though the trite proverb, which one can
imagine in Eichmann's mouth (for did he not seek his judges' "under–
standing," by which he must have meant acquittal?) were an established
truth and to try to understand Eichmann were to forgive him. Under–
standing is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and
we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do)
and understand what we cannot pardon. Miss Arendt does not forgive
Eichmann; indeed she unequivocally passes sentence on him herself,
in her last paragraph-an act which may appear arrogant or which
may appear as the resolute shouldering of the task of judging, as an
individual, the deeds of another individual, i.e., th.e taking of respon–
sibility, which Eichmann himself always shrank from and in which he
revealed his squeamishness and mediocrity.
What satisfaction would it have given Abel and others if Miss
Arendt had accepted the word, "monster," from the prosecutor's lips?
Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes
him less so by classing him with beasts and devils ("a person of inhuman
and horrible cruelty or wickedness," OED, Sense 4). Such an unnatural
being is more horrible
to
contemplate than an Eichmann-that is,
aesthetically worse-but morally an Ilse Koch was surely less culpable
than Eichmann since she seems to have had no trace of human feeling
and therefore was impassible to conscience. Abel quotes a saying of
Kierkegaard on Judas, which shows Judas as comical, and he seems
to think that this bears out his argument, since Judas, according to
him, was a monster. But Judas was not a monster, though his act was
monstrous; he was a man, the twelfth part of humaflity, and his sin was
that he could betray for thirty pieces of silver, like any common informer.
Jesus was uncommon, not Judas. And Judas, unlike a monster, knew
that he had sinned and went and hanged himself with a halter. Eich–
mann too knew himself to be guilty somehow, somewhere ("before
God," as he put it), though he held this knowledge far off from himself
and was helped in this by the prosecutor, who by charging him with
acts of cruelty he did not commit allowed him to feel innocent. What
is horrible in Eichmann
is
his ordinariness, including the prompt ability
to feel innocent when you are charged with a crime you did not commit
