IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ
271
killing centers at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Theresienstadt, and
recitation of the evidence and eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust fol–
Iowa familiar path. There is no effort to dismiss, denigrate, or become
disingenuous about the existence of the Holocaust, or even that it was
aimed at the liquidation of the Jewish people. To be sure, it was the very
specificity of the Nazi crimes against one sub-set of humanity that permits
Arendt to reason that Israeli courts had full jurisdiction in the disposi tion
of Eichmann, no less than the precedent set by the Allied courts after
World War Two in the Nuremberg trials. So we must look at the ethical
and psychological aspects of Arendt's volume for an answer as to why her
work aroused such passions among scholars, politicians, and Jewish com–
muni ties the world over.
The problem inheres in the subtitle rather than the title:
A Report on
the Banality of Evil.
The choice of words was not casual or accidental.
Arendt was in search of the why of the Holocaust even more than opera–
tional details. She aimed to understand how this SS colonel could perform
such a hideous role in modern history, show little remorse, yet also display
keen analytical insight into the trial processes no less than the killing fields
he helped organize and supervise. Arendt located the problem in the nature
of the bureaucratic mind. In this strict sense, she felt that banality was the
most appropriate single-word description of Adolf Eichmann.
While not even Arendt's most bitter opponents would accuse her of
being a Holocaust denier, there is a problem with the word
banality.
It
strongly implies the mundane, the ordinary, the everyday inconveniences
experienced by all creatures-great and small. To use such a term to
describe Eichmann thus appeared as a form of clever apologetics, making
him into an everyday functionary-interchangeable with other unimpor–
tant people and their passive followers. At the same time, for Arendt there
is also a banality of goodness. In this category one might easily place Oskar
Schindler-womanizer, profiteer, Nazi Party member, and savior of one
thousand Jews from the ovens of Auschwitz.
It
was Arendt's special abili–
ty to appreciate the mixed motives from which human beings operate that
account for good and evil alike. In this sense, her Kantian philosophical
roots served her well as a student of the Holocaust.
The question thus arises, and Arendt admits to it, whether the trial was
actually intended to punish a single person for his specific crimes, or if it
was a symbolic assault on Germany's totalitarian regime between 1933-
1945. In response, Arendt argued that the use of the word
banal
meant
nothing more or less than a factual description of an evil man, but not a
deranged one, an ambitious bureaucrat rather than a dedicated ideologue.
Arendt observed of the judges in the Eichmann trial, "a conspicuous help–
lessness they experienced when they were confronted with the task they
