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WILLIAM PHILLIPS
As for Eichmann, I think in defending Hannah you overstate-as she
did, too-a tenable position. Lionel responded to the overstatement, not
to the intention, and you
in
reply defend the overstatement. What I
mean is that you try too hard to prove that Eichmann is "normal," that
he is not a "monster"-that he is just like everyone else. My reading of
Hannah is that she really was trying to indicate something else, that
Eichmann's "aberrations" came out of his society and not out of his
psyche. But she did not put her ideas clearly, and Lionel was quick to
trip her up. Now you are in effect defending the weakest part of Hannah's
arguments by trying to separate the criminal from his crime to the
point where the picture we get of Eichmann is that of a mild family
man, a man who liked Jews, a man who could not be a convinced
Nazi, because he could not understand Nazi ideas-the boring man who
lives next door to us in the country. Really, reducing Eichmann to such
personal insignificance truly makes him into some kind of monster.
I see I've gotten into the controversial spirit, and I am telling you
only what I disagree with in your piece. I should say, therefore, that
what I like most about your piece is your attempt to bring Hannah's
book into the realm of discussion from which it had been banished by
some of her critics, Gentile as well as Jewish. (It is too bad you are only
one-eighth, or is it one-quarter, Jewish.) Also, I agree with many of your
observations: that Hannah's book was not just about the Jewish leaders;
that she did not advocate resistance; that Eichmann could have been a
Nazi without being a "thinker"; that Hannah does not assign equal
"guilt" to Eichmann and the Jewish leaders; that she does not make
Eichmann palatable.
As I wrote you last fall, I agree with many of Lionel's criticisms of
Eichmann in Jerusalem,
but I do think his approach is too polemical in
that he doesn't give her any credit for the good things in her book,
an~
where there is some ambiguity or some clumsy formulation she almost
never gets the benefit of the doubt. Hence Lionel tends to overstate
his case, like a District Attorney going after someone on trial. Indeed,
Marie Syrkin, Lionel Abel, Weisberg, and other embattled critics often
sound as though they are trying
to
convict Hannah, as though she were
a criminal, not someone who might be wrong. They do not even concede
she might be only partly wrong; a criminal is always wholly wrong. But
to get back to Lionel's piece, I think he is right in saying the evidence
does not indicate that non-cooperation would have saved more Jews,
and in insisting that one could have expected the Jews to have acted as
a principled opposition only
if
they had been more 'political, more or–
ganized, if they had represented a radical force and not simply a segment
of existing society. At the same time Lionel glosses over the question of
