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PARTISAN REVIEW
The big unanswered question of revolution is precisely the
mix
between economic rationalization and political reason. Polarization of
these may make a stimulating treatise, but it cannot define the experimen–
tal character of most contemporary revolutions. For Arendt, the French
and American revolutions were creative opposites. For peoples of revolu–
tionary lands, both stand as selective options in search of the new. If massive
revol ution defines the century, it might be wiser to reach for new combi–
nations of policy and publics rather than to look with nostalgia upon the
Greek city-states and their prudent elitism for solutions to modern prob–
lems of caste and class.
The various strands in her thinking on law, revolution, and the social
order come together in her "report" on the Nazi destruction of the Jewish
people,
Eichmann in Jerusalem.
It
is undoubtedly the most explosive state–
ment on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, held in 1961 after his capture by
Israeli security forces in Argentina. The work originated in a commission
by
The New Yorker
to cover the trial and was finally written up in the sum–
mer and fall of 1962 while Arendt served as a fellow of the Center for
Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University. The book itself was published in
1963, with a 1964 version that carried a postscript and reply to critics.
The work has been subject to such repeated and withering assaults and
no less fatuous praise from sources remote to Hannah Arendt's way of
viewing and thinking that it is best to harken back to the text itself. The
biggest surprise is that the overwhelming burden of the book is a straight,
legal narrative of the trial of one man in one courtroom for specific crimes
against one people-the Jewish people. Arendt shares the position of the
Israeli judicial system: Eichmann was guilty of heinous war crimes, and
Israel, as the representative of the Jewish state and its people, had every
right to execute the culprit.
The largest portion of
Eichmann in Jerusalem
is taken up wi th exposi–
tion and narrative: moving from the character of the German judicial
system and its corruption under Nazism, to a biographical profile of
Eichmann, onto the stages in the development of the Nazi plan for the
genocide of the Jewish people leading up to the Wannsee Conference. The
next large portion of the work is taken up with a series of brilliant histor–
ical sketches of deportations. The firs t wave came from Germany, Aus tria,
and the Protectorates, the second wave from Western Europe, France,
Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Italy. This was followed by a third wave
of deportations, from Central Europe, especially Hungary and Slovakia. At
the level of historical sweep, Arendt's volume stands side by side with the
works of Lucy Dawidowicz and Raul Hilberg.
The controversial elements are actually restricted to the epilogue and
postscript. Indeed, even Arendt's description of the Nazi internment and
