Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics)

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The controversial journalistic analysis of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust, from the creator of The Origins of Totalitarianism
 
Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, in addition to Arendt’s postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the twentieth century.
At the same time as living in Argentina in 1960, Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann used to be kidnapped and smuggled to Israel where he used to be put on trial for crimes against humanity. The New Yorker magazine sent Hannah Arendt to cover the trial. At the same time as covering the technical aspects of the trial, Arendt also explored the wider themes inherent in the trial, such as the nature of justice, the behavior of the Jewish leadership all the way through the Nazi Régime, and, most controversially, the nature of Evil itself.

Far from being evil incarnate, as the prosecution painted Eichmann, Arendt maintains that he used to be an average man, a petty bureaucrat interested only in furthering his career, and the evil he did came from the seductive power of the totalitarian state and an unthinking adherence to the Nazi cause. Indeed, Eichmann’s only defense all the way through the trial used to be “I used to be just following orders.”

Arendt’s analysis of the seductive nature of evil is a disturbing one. We want to think that anybody who would perpetrate such horror on the world is different from us, and that such atrocities are rarities in our world. But the history of groups such as the Jews, Kurds, Bosnians, and Native Americans, to name but a couple of, seems to suggest that such evil is all too commonplace. In revealing Eichmann as the pedestrian little man that he used to be, Arendt shows us that the veneer of civilization is a thin one indeed.

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