I wish I had gotten it together to write this while “Hannah Arendt” was still playing at The Guild, our city’s only remaining and consistently heroic arts theater. Then I could have urged anyone who hadn’t yet seen it to do so. Unfortunately, this brilliant film is no longer being shown. Perhaps popular demand might bring it back. “Hannah Arendt,” even for those who missed its Albuquerque showing, has a profoundly important lesson for us all: heinous crime is not only the province of the Hitler’s, Pinochet’s, and Bashad al-Assad’s of this world. The banality of evil is one of human nature’s least understood components.
German-born philosopher, writer and teacher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) coined the phrase “banality of evil” based on her reporting for The New Yorker Magazine on Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. Her notes from the trial were first published in five installments, and later as a book with the title Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Margarethe von Trotta directed the 2013 film, which is billed as a biopic—something between a documentary and a fictional drama. Barbara Sukowa is exceptional as Arendt, and a cast of other actors also do excellent jobs as Hannah’s husband Heinrich Blücher, philosophical mentor Martin Heidegger, close friend Mary McCarthy, among others.
Eichmann had been one of the architects of the Nazi’s “final solution.” With Germany’s defeat, he managed to escape the Nuremburg Trials where other high level Nazi leaders were condemned and executed. For fifteen years he hid in various parts of Europe, eventually making his way to Argentina where a number of Nazi criminals found refuge—always under assumed names. Eichmann went by the name of Ricardo Klement. The Israeli Mossad (Secret Service) traced his whereabouts, and in May of 1960 its agents captured him and were able to able to bring him to Israel. Eichmann’s trial, a showcase for the horrors of the Holocaust, began the following year. The defendant was charged with being responsible for the enslavement, starvation, persecution, transportation and murder of millions of Jews, as well as the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Gypsies and Poles.
Journalists from around the world came to Jerusalem to cover the trial. In a single, rather ordinary looking man, they had the opportunity of examining one of the criminals of the century. Their reportage was aimed at educating the world about what had really happened under the Third Reich. By this time the accounts of survivors, shocked stories told by members of liberating armies, books and films had revealed the unspeakable horrors of death camps and crematoriums, human experimentation and racism carried to its ultimate extreme. But the oft-repeated promise “this must never be allowed to happen again” was already beginning to break apart as genocide was perpetrated in other parts of the world.
The story of such mass-scale atrocity is almost always told in the starkly contrasting terms of “good” and “evil.” The “bad guys” utterly belie their humanity. The “good guys” are good in every fiber of their being. As regards the Nazi Holocaust, Fascism (with Hitler and, to a lesser extent, Mussolini at the helm) was the enemy. The Allies, led by the United States and Soviet Union, rescued the world from Fascism. In general terms this is true, but the official story does not take into account those crimes committed by the good guys—such as the United States refusing to accept close to one thousand Jews seeking refuge aboard the SS St. Louis, or the complicity with the Nazis on the part of the Vatican and other “civilized” governments.
Hannah Arendt, herself a survivor of a Nazi-controlled French deportation camp, who had made it to New York and was then teaching at The New School, was never one to content herself with broad brushstrokes. Already well known and respected as a deep thinker, when she went to The New Yorker and asked to be sent to the trial in Jerusalem, they were thrilled at the prospect of her byline. For some, the delight would be short-lived. The debates that resulted from her reporting were often vicious and always dramatic.
As Arendt sat at the trial, staring at the dowdy mild-mannered Eichmann and listening to him claim that he had only followed orders—that he was a small cog in a complex wheel—she was impressed most of all by his ordinariness, by his utter failure to own any criminal intent or activity. He was a mediocre bureaucrat who described himself as an idealist. If he had refused to load Jews onto the cattle cars taking them to their death, someone else would have done the job. He didn’t even admit to really knowing the destination of those trains. His had been a purely compartmentalized task.
Eichmann was convicted and hanged. Arendt returned to New York. She pondered what she had seen and heard in Jerusalem—where an entire nation had hung on every trial transcript, and where she herself had family and close friends. Then she began to write. Her understanding of the banality of evil was at the center of her articles and books. And she also wrote about those on the Jewish Councils in Germany and Poland who had helped round up fellow Jews, and had thus been complicit in the “final solution.” If they had not cooperated in this way, Arendt said, there would have been chaos and misery but far fewer Jews and others would have died.
This condemnation of some Jews was not an emphasis in her reporting. But its mere mention was enough to bring the wrath of many in the international Jewish community whose own interests, intellectual or strategic, lay in a starkly bifurcated story. Many of Arendt’s former friends turned against her. Members of her own family spurned her. The New School tried to fire her. But her students—and eventually history itself—supported the depth and discernment of her observations.
Hannah Arendt’s wisdom is sorely needed today. We are as blind to the banality of evil as we were then; and the context, if mostly less horrifying, is ever so much more complex. Our corporate media tends to report on overseas conflicts in the same old good and bad terms. If one of the United States’ wars is the subject, embedded journalists are our government’s way of making sure we get the picture they want us to have. If reporters are talking about a civil war, such as the one that has been raging for more than two years in Syria, the Assad regime’s crimes are detailed while those committed by the rebels go underreported. When it comes to a situation such as the Egyptian coup, some news anchors have been using the word coup while others refrain from doing so because calling the overthrow of democratically-elected President Morsi a coup would make it necessary for the US to withdraw billions in military aid, something it is not prepared to do.
Even as concerns individual politicians, we are conditioned to see them as good or all bad. So-called family values and high-sounding rhetoric cause us to overlook it when they consistently make decisions that hurt real people. If they repeat often enough that they are for equality for all Americans, we might not notice when their actions produce the opposite. The extreme rhetoric of false patriotism too often covers for policies that are anything but truly patriotic (in the old, more thoughtful, sense of the word). If a Pope displays a modest hominess, we forget his less than human role during his own country’s dictatorship. Too many Republicans profess to want to do “the right thing” even as they attempt to kill every bill that would make life better for a vast majority of us.
And the opposite is often also true. In the US, if an otherwise decent politician betrays his marriage or engages in some other personal misstep, he or she is generally drummed out of office. A perception of misdeed is more important than how the politician serves his or her constituency. I loved the bumper-sticker Clinton lied and Nobody Died. In Europe and elsewhere, political understanding is more nuanced and sophisticated, private life tends to remain private while the public considers what their elected officials do or don’t do on their behalf to be more relevant.
Our history is filled with examples of men and women who were “only doing their job.” If they cannot see the results of their work (the pilot of the Enola Gay when he dropped the first atomic bomb; foot soldiers who simply followed orders in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan; the specialist who sits before a computer directing drones many thousands of miles away) it is less likely they will ask questions.
This tendency to judge our actions on an all or nothing basis has sadly been endemic to US political life. When soldiers came back from Vietnam crazed and broken, many here at home received them with an anger that should have been reserved for the architects of that war. But this lack of nuance became much more ruinous following 9/11. Governmental response to that tragedy, with its thoughtless emphasis on revenge, started us down a pitiful road, where complexities are overlooked and the long-range dangers in short-term solutions ignored.
Hannah Arendt was a prophet of her time. We have such prophets today, and we need to listen to them.
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