HUE AND CRY
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what applies to Eichmann, and it would take a saint, as the saying goes,
to feel pity for him.
To me,
Eichmann in Jerusalem,
despite all the horrors in it, was
morally exhilarating. I freely confess that it gave me joy and I too
heard a paean in it-not a hate-paean to totalitarianism but a paean
of transcendence, heavenly music, like that of the final chorus of
Figaro
or the
Messiah.
As in these choruses, a pardon or redemption
of some sort was taking place. The reader "rose above" the terrible
material of the trial or was borne aloft to survey it with his intelligence.
No person was pardoned, but the whole experience was bought back,
redeemed, as in the harrowing of hell.
Now it is true that intelligence, mastering the incoherence of
violence and suffering, gives it sense, i.e., form, which is necessarily
aesthetic. Miss Arendt's book tells a story. Here Abel's criticism just
misses something real. Perhaps for Jews it is too soon to have what
happened made into a story. They reject the idea that their sufferings
made sense, had a plot and a lesson.
For me, however, the plot and the lesson were almost a godsend.
For me as a reader, the episodes that stood out were those that dealt
with the Jews who were saved-the happy endings. They were the
redeeming features of an otherwise unbearable history: the stories of
the Jews of Denmark, Bulgaria, and Italy. Possibly I liked them because
the Gentiles behaved well in these chapters, but I think it was rather
because these chapters showed that it was
possible
to behave well even
in extreme situations, and it is worth noting that where the Gentiles
behaved well, the Jews did not cooperate. (A contradiction to this is
Holland.) But I took the book mainly as a parable for the Gentiles, a
lesson in what was possible for the average man, the neighbor, who is
not obliged to stay at home with the doors closed when the police cars
come for the "Jews" next door-Jews figuratively speaking, since it
might happen again, might be happening now, and the Jews of the
past may
not
be the "Jews" of the present or the future. In this parable,
as in all parables, there is a contrast. At one extreme there is Eich–
mann, who stands for all the Eichmanns in the Nazi bureaucracy, all
the "little fellows" who asked after the event, "But what could we
have done?" To them the Danes furnished an answer, which would
have been the same if there had been only one Dane to wear the
yellow star and he not a king but a "little fellow." In fact, the King
of Denmark is not shown as a king but as the
other
neighbor, at the
opposite pole from Eichmann. A whole range of neighbors, good and
evil, is glimpsed through the trial in Jerusalem, one of the most evil
