| Abstract | [Hannah Arendt] changed none of her views on these questions in [Adolf Eichmann] in Jerusalem, but the phraseology of the "banality of evil" and of "thoughtlessness" which she used to describe Eichmann's deeds was greatly misleading. Arendt forced the English language into a procrustean bed to convey her own complex, and perhaps even ultimately confused, reflections on the issue of "personal responsibility under dictatorships." She did not mean that what Eichmann had cooperated in perpetrating was banal or that the extermination of the Jews, and of other peoples, by the Nazis was banal. It takes either a great deal of hermeneutic blindness and ill will or both to miss her meaning in the usage of this term, although of course one may disagree with the assessment of Eichmann's psychology. The phrase the "banality of evil" was meant to refer to a specific quality of mind and character of the doer himself, and neither to the deeds nor to the principles behind those deeds.(35) Rereading Eichmann in Jerusalem one can feel Arendt's bafflement at Eichmann's persona and conduct before and during the trial. Writing in the "Postscript" that she would have welcomed a general discussion of the concept of the "banality of evil," she continues:
Inasmuch as she questioned the justifiability of the circumstances surrounding Eichmann's capture, Arendt did not differ from [Karl Jaspers]. Yet while the latter wanted Israel to hand over the jurisdiction of the trial to an International Court or body, she defended Israel's right to bring Eichmann to trial and to pass judgment upon him.(47) There were three kinds of objections raised to the trial: first was the objection raised in the case of the Nuremberg trials as well, that Eichmann was tried under a retroactive law and appeared in the court of the victors. Arendt thought that the Israeli court's reply to this objection was justifiable: the Nuremberg trials were cited in the Jerusalem court as precedent, and the Nazi Collaboration (Punishment) Law of 1950 in Israel was based on this precedent. Her observations on the principle "nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege" (no crime, no wrongdoing without the law) are interesting. She observes that the principle of retroactivity, that no one can be condemned for an act that was not against the law at the time it was committed, only "meaningfully applies to acts known to the legislator."(48) If a previously unknown crime makes its appearance in human history, such as the crime of genocide perpetrated during the Holocaust, justice in this instance demands a new and unprecedented law. The Eichmann trial did not violate the principle of retroactivity, for prior to the Nuremberg trials there had been no law established by a human legislator under which he could have been tried.(49) The Nuremberg trials established such a law through the Charter (the London agreement of 1945), and Israel invoked its own law against genocide of 1950 which was based on the 1945 Nuremberg Charter. Arendt was not, therefore, particularly concerned with the argument that the justice meted out at the Nuremberg trials as well as in the case of Eichmann was the "justice of the victor" (Siegerjustiz), since she held to the view that the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime were of such an unprecedented nature that one needed new categories, new criteria for judging them. The Eichmann trial posed the dilemmas of judging "without bannisters," i.e. without recourse to established precedents, for everyone involved, from the jurors to the journalists and to world public opinion.
|
