Hannah Arendt On The Eichmann
Hannah Arendt
She was a German-Jewish philosopher and writer, not a trained, professional historian and thus her writing on the Eichmann case was focussed on a philosophical interest she had with the nature of evil. As a Jew who fled Germany from the Nazis in 1933 and then also fled France in 1940, Arendt uses her 1963 report to focus on the ‘banality of evil’ to deny Nazism all glamour, a way of showing her utter contempt for the movement. This contempt extends to her portrayal of Eichmann, as she does not exhibit hatred towards him, instead seeing him as a man “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché”. Her portrayal of Eichmann and his motivations emphasise his normality and banality, a portrayal that stood …show more content…
His account is a very personal one, his purpose in writing being to give an account of the experience of being at the trial, an aim he makes clear at the beginning of the book. Additionally, his mother was Jewish and was only saved from deportation (ultimately organised by Eichmann) by his father who was the head of a Dutch bank that collaborated with Nazis in deporting Dutch Jews and the seizing of their property. Mulisch believes Eichmann’s motivations lie in an overwhelming belief in following the Führer’s orders. Both Arendt’s and Mulisch’s descriptions of Eichmann as a fairly normal man (a point they back up with quotes from the various psychoanalysts who interviewed him “improperly normal”…) greatly contradicted the public perceptions of the monstrous, anti-Semitic Eichmann conveyed by daily newspapers (he had “snake eyes”). At Mulisch’s time it seemed clear upon examination that Eichmann was driven neither by ideology nor anti-Semitism, but rather an obsession with following orders. However, other evidence that only became available more recently suggests …show more content…
She is also a professionally trained historian and this fact significantly contributed to her forming such a conflicting view. Additionally as she was writing four decades later, she was able to have access to documents that Arendt and her contemporaries did not, such as the Argentina Papers. These manuscripts provide a very different portrait of Eichmann than the “banal bureaucrat” that Arendt saw, revealing an ideologically motivated Nazi, committed to the “resolution of the Jewish question”. Her developed use of archival records that is integral to her empirical approach as a historian allowed her to separate herself from her original philosophical interest in Eichmann and his evil and thus discover a more factual portrait of the man, not the myth.
Claudia Koonz
Her analysis is centred around the mass adoption of the Nazi conscience and as this focus is very broad, looking at a social phenomenon, it is very different to Arendt’s which focusses very closely on only Eichmann. Eichmann’s own description of the way he joined the SS does not suggest that he was persuaded by the immense appeal of the Nazi party that Koonz describes.
David
She was a German-Jewish philosopher and writer, not a trained, professional historian and thus her writing on the Eichmann case was focussed on a philosophical interest she had with the nature of evil. As a Jew who fled Germany from the Nazis in 1933 and then also fled France in 1940, Arendt uses her 1963 report to focus on the ‘banality of evil’ to deny Nazism all glamour, a way of showing her utter contempt for the movement. This contempt extends to her portrayal of Eichmann, as she does not exhibit hatred towards him, instead seeing him as a man “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché”. Her portrayal of Eichmann and his motivations emphasise his normality and banality, a portrayal that stood …show more content…
His account is a very personal one, his purpose in writing being to give an account of the experience of being at the trial, an aim he makes clear at the beginning of the book. Additionally, his mother was Jewish and was only saved from deportation (ultimately organised by Eichmann) by his father who was the head of a Dutch bank that collaborated with Nazis in deporting Dutch Jews and the seizing of their property. Mulisch believes Eichmann’s motivations lie in an overwhelming belief in following the Führer’s orders. Both Arendt’s and Mulisch’s descriptions of Eichmann as a fairly normal man (a point they back up with quotes from the various psychoanalysts who interviewed him “improperly normal”…) greatly contradicted the public perceptions of the monstrous, anti-Semitic Eichmann conveyed by daily newspapers (he had “snake eyes”). At Mulisch’s time it seemed clear upon examination that Eichmann was driven neither by ideology nor anti-Semitism, but rather an obsession with following orders. However, other evidence that only became available more recently suggests …show more content…
She is also a professionally trained historian and this fact significantly contributed to her forming such a conflicting view. Additionally as she was writing four decades later, she was able to have access to documents that Arendt and her contemporaries did not, such as the Argentina Papers. These manuscripts provide a very different portrait of Eichmann than the “banal bureaucrat” that Arendt saw, revealing an ideologically motivated Nazi, committed to the “resolution of the Jewish question”. Her developed use of archival records that is integral to her empirical approach as a historian allowed her to separate herself from her original philosophical interest in Eichmann and his evil and thus discover a more factual portrait of the man, not the myth.
Claudia Koonz
Her analysis is centred around the mass adoption of the Nazi conscience and as this focus is very broad, looking at a social phenomenon, it is very different to Arendt’s which focusses very closely on only Eichmann. Eichmann’s own description of the way he joined the SS does not suggest that he was persuaded by the immense appeal of the Nazi party that Koonz describes.
David