The Eichmann Trial (19 page)

6

T
he cover of the February 16, 1963,
New Yorker
featured an artist’s rendering of the recently completed and much-debated Pan Am building looming over the iconic Grand Central Terminal and a beflowered Park Avenue. Inside was the first of a series of five articles by Hannah Arendt on the trial. Eventually published as
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
, they would generate a virulent public debate. Arendt’s perspective would be condemned as “tasteless,” “wicked,” “pervaded by vanity,” “inaccurate and curiously unfeeling,” “gratuitous and distorted.”
¹
Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper dismissed her as “arrogant” and her book as filled with “half-truths … loaded language and … double standards of evidence.”
²
Her most extreme critics branded her as “sympathetic” to Eichmann and her writings as “claptrap.”
³
Her fans were no less effusive. Stephen Spender, who would become Poet Laureate of the United States, described her work as “brilliant.”
⁴
Former Poet Laureate Robert Lowell deemed it a “masterpiece.” Arendt’s close friend, the novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy, proclaimed it “splendid and extraordinary.” McCarthy did more than just praise Arendt. She defended Arendt, by categorizing her critics according to their ethnic identity. Describing the attacks as a “pogrom,” McCarthy contended that Jews were critical of Arendt. Non-Jews, on the other hand, apparently able to see the bigger picture and to react unemotionally, were favorable. Non-Jews who opposed Arendt were summarily dismissed by McCarthy as “special cases.” Dwight MacDonald, a former editor of
Partisan Review
and a
New Yorker
and
Esquire
writer, who declared the book “a masterpiece of historical journalism,” joined McCarthy and dubbed the “hostile” reviews an expression of “Jewish patriotism,” and the non-Jews who criticized Arendt as “Honorary Semites.”
⁵

Today the passion has ebbed but echoes of that debate linger. To many people, Arendt was a more central character in the Eichmann story than Eichmann himself. And certainly, from an intellectual perspective, she was. Her book and the controversy it aroused put this trial on the intellectual map. Her perspectives on both perpetrators and victims continue to constitute the prism through which many people’s view of the Holocaust is refracted.

Arendt was the product of a highly acculturated upper-class German Jewish family in which, she claimed, the word “Jew” was never spoken. She said that she first encountered the term when children taunted her. A Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg, where she completed a dissertation on Saint Augustine, she had studied philosophy and Protestant theology. As Bernard Wasserstein notes, during her educational career she was exposed to and absorbed a view of Jewish history that ends shortly after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (70 C.E.) with the rise of Christianity. According to this Weltanschauung, Judaism emerged into a higher and more finely developed form—that is to say, Christianity.
⁶

She watched her homeland begin its seamless slide into anti-Semitic totalitarianism. Incarcerated briefly in 1933 for helping Zionists, she fled to Paris. There her Zionism became more pronounced. Working for Youth Aliyah, she helped refugee children reach Palestine. When the Nazis invaded France, she was briefly interned. She obtained an American emergency visa and settled in New York, where she taught at Brooklyn College and wrote for
Aufbau
, a German Jewish newspaper. She fought for the creation of a Jewish army to fight in Europe alongside the Allies. Though many of the supporters of a Jewish army were Zionists, her reasoning was different: “You can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as.” For Jews to defend themselves as Englishmen or Frenchmen, when they were being attacked as Jews, would be to fail to defend themselves.
⁷
After the war, she became executive director of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, which tried to recover the Judaica the Nazis had looted. In 1951, she published
Origins of Totalitarianism
, in which she argued that totalitarian societies, such as the Third Reich, by totally dominating all aspects of an individual’s life, are capable of compelling people not only to perform horrific acts, but to perceive them as essential. This book established her academic reputation.

When Israel announced the date for Eichmann’s trial, she proposed to
New Yorker
editor William Shawn that she cover it for the magazine. Shawn, who had just published James Baldwin’s series on the African American community, accepted readily. For Arendt this was to be both an intellectual and a personal excursion. She considered her presence in Jerusalem as a chance both to validate her theories of totalitarianism and to fulfill “an obligation” that “I owe my past.”
⁸
Her expectation that the trial would illuminate the nature of totalitarianism put her at immediate odds with both Ben-Gurion and Hausner, who were not interested in proving anything about the nature of totalitarian societies. Her perception of what should happen in Jerusalem, like her sense of the Final Solution itself, was diametrically opposed to theirs. She wanted the trial to explicate how these societies succeeded in getting others to do their atrocious biddings, while the prosecution wanted a laserlike focus on Nazi Germany’s wrongs against the Jewish people. Moreover, she perceived of the Holocaust not as a crime against the Jews but a “crime against humanity,” perpetrated on the Jews. Eichmann, Arendt posited, was not another link in the long line of anti-Semites but someone who participated in a revolutionary new crime. Hausner, as he made clear from the very first paragraph of his speech, believed him to be
the
ultimate link in that chain.

However, it was not just history that separated Arendt from the prosecution. Her view of how the trial should be constructed was as narrow and formalistic as Hausner’s was expansive. She believed the trial should be limited to Eichmann’s deeds—“not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.” Hausner’s decision to give pride of place to the victims, particularly those with no direct connection to Eichmann, infuriated her. She considered most of the witnesses entirely irrelevant. Her view of what the trial should be was far closer to the judges’ than Hausner’s. Not only did she completely differ with Hausner’s forensic premise, but she was incensed by his courtroom style. She grew infuriated as he allowed the witnesses to tell their stories in an unrestrained fashion. She considered the trial a Ben-Gurion–orchestrated and Hausner-executed “mass meeting” designed to affirm Zionist ideology and highlight the notion of
us
(Israelis) versus
them
(the rest of the world).
⁹

In her letters from the trial, she voiced a personal disdain for Israel that bordered on anti-Semitism and racism. In a letter to her husband she complained that “honest and clean people were at a premium.” She described to her teacher and friend Karl Jaspers the “
peies
[side curl] and caftan Jews, who make life impossible for all reasonable people here.” She was full of praise for the judges, but even that contained a note of German Jewish disdain for
Ostjuden
, Eastern European Jews. The judges were “the best of Germany Jewry,” whereas Hausner was “a typical Galician Jew.… one of those people who don’t know any language.” (Since he presented his case in multiple languages, she may have meant that his German was not up to her standard.) He spoke “without periods or commas … like a diligent schoolboy who wants to show off everything he knows.… [He has a] ghetto mentality.”
¹⁰
She had shown her contempt for East European émigrés and their concerns as early as 1944, when she denigrated the European émigré press in the United States for “worrying their heads off over the pettiest boundary disputes in a Europe thousands and thousands of miles away—such as whether Teschen belongs to Poland or Czechoslovakia, or Vilna to Lithuania instead of to Poland.” As Tony Judt observed, “No
‘Ost-Jud’
would have missed the significance of these disputes.”
¹¹
Her scorn for Hausner’s Eastern European roots are noteworthy given that she had Russian grandparents and her mother spoke German with a thick Russian accent. (It is striking that one of her closest friends, Alfred Kazin, who spent great swaths of time with Arendt and her husband, learned of this only in a 1985 biography.) Her comments about Hausner typified her inclination to adopt, according to Bernard Wasserstein, “the virulent vocabulary and imagery of anti-Semites like Edouard Drumont and J. A. Hobson in denouncing Jewish capitalists.”
¹²

However, it was Middle Eastern, often called Oriental, Jews who elicited her most acerbic comments. “The country’s interest in the trial has been artificially whetted. An oriental mob that would hang around any place where something is going on is hanging around in front of the courthouse.” (In another letter, she again used the term “oriental mob.” It was clearly not a slip.) She felt as if she were in “Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country.” She showed particular contempt for the Israeli police, many of whom were of Middle Eastern origin. “Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would obey any order.”
¹³
Such a comment by Arendt, who believed this trial was about obeying orders, gives one pause. Her critic and longtime friend, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem would accuse her of “suffering from a lack of
ahavat Yisrael,
” love of the Jewish people.
¹⁴
Had he known of these comments, he might have accused her of far more. Even the fact that the trial was being conducted in Hebrew, Israel’s official language and one she had trouble learning, irked her.
¹⁵
She described the “comedy of speaking Hebrew when everyone involved knows German and thinks in German.”
¹⁶

Her critique of Israel spilled over into her analysis of aspects of the trial. At one point, Hausner mentioned the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which prohibited marriages between Jews and “Aryans.” Arendt described his references to the law as “breathtaking” in both “irony” and “naïveté” because, she claimed, Israel had a similar law. How could the attorney general criticize Nazi Germany when Israel also banned such marriages? Arendt overstated the case. There is no Israeli agency empowered to perform
civil
marriages, even those between coreligionists of any faith. However, any marriage performed elsewhere, including a mixed marriage, is fully legal and is recognized as such by the Israeli government. (The fact that there is no civil authority in Israel that can perform marriages rightfully upsets many Israelis, as does the exclusive power the Orthodox rabbinate has in relation to Jewish marriages.
¹⁷
)

While these comments about Israelis are troubling, it was her evaluation of the relationship between the victims and the perpetrators that unleashed the avalanche of criticism. Where others saw Nazi intimidation of the Jewish leaders, she saw cooperation, if not collaboration. Whereas her critics saw one side holding all the cards and the other with none, she saw a level playing field. Her critique began with the Zionists. Arendt argued that the Nazis considered Zionists “decent” Jews because, in contrast to assimilated Jews, they thought in “national” terms. Without providing any data to justify her accusation, she charged that Zionists “spoke a language not totally different from that of Eichmann.” Accepting at full face value Eichmann’s protestation that his lifelong dream was to put land “under the feet of the Jews,” she described him as a Zionist. She asserted that his idea for settlements in Nisko and Madagascar were evidence of the Nazi regime’s “pro-Zionist policy.” She seemed to fail to consider the fact that the Third Reich was unequivocally opposed to the creation of an independent Jewish state and that the settlements envisioned by Eichmann and his cohorts would have been draconian police states in which the inhabitants would have been exterminated by “natural” means.

She considered the 1933 Ha’avara Agreement between the German and the Zionists an act of collaboration. As a means of enriching their own coffers and making life miserable for Jews, the Nazis blocked the funds of those Jews planning to emigrate. Most Jews could not get even a small portion of their assets out of Germany. (This is one of the enduring ironies of Nazi anti-Semitic policy. During the initial years of the Nazi regime, Reich policy was to get Jews to emigrate. Yet the Nazis placed numerous obstacles in the Jews’ path, often making it impossible for them to do so.) The Ha’avara Agreement allowed Jews immigrating to Palestine to transfer a portion of these blocked funds to the Zionist organization. The organization, in turn, bought German goods that were needed by the Palestinian Jewish community. When the émigrés arrived in Palestine, they received credit for their funds. This distasteful boycott-breaking arrangement was an effort to help Jews salvage some of their savings while developing the Yishuv’s infrastructure. At the same time, it worked to the Germans’ advantage by creating a market for German goods.
¹⁸
However, it was hardly a form of collaboration. As with all other forms of negotiations Jewish groups had with the Reich during this period, the other side held all the cards.