Visualizing Atrocitytakes Hannah Arendt's provocative and polarizing account of the 1961 trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann as its point of departure for reassessing some of the serviceable myths ...that have come to shape and limit our understanding both of the Nazi genocide and totalitarianism's broader, constitutive, and recurrent features. These myths are inextricably tied to and reinforced viscerally by the atrocity imagery that emerged with the liberation of the concentration camps at the war's end and played an especially important, evidentiary role in the postwar trials of perpetrators. At the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal, particular practices of looking and seeing were first established with respect to these images that were later reinforced and institutionalized through Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem as simply part of the fabric of historical fact. They have come to constitute a certain visual rhetoric that now circumscribes the moral and political fields and powerfully assists in contemporary mythmaking about how we know genocide and what is permitted to count as such. In contrast, Arendt's claims about the banality of evil work to disrupt this visual rhetoric. More significantly still, they direct our attention well beyond the figure of Eichmann to a world organized now as then by practices and processes that while designed to sustain and even enhance life work as well to efface it.
The trial that never ends Misemer, Sarah; Golsan, Richard J
The trial that never ends,
2017, 2017, 2017-03-17, Letnik:
27, 27.
eBook
"The fiftieth anniversary of the Adolf Eichmann trial may have come and gone but in many countries around the world there is a renewed focus on the trial, Eichmann himself, and the nature of his ...crimes. This increased attention also stimulates scrutiny of Hannah Arendt's influential and controversial work, Eichmann in Jerusalem."--
"The contributors gathered together by Richard J. Golsan and Sarah M. Misemer in The Trial That Never Ends assess the contested legacy of Hannah Arendt's famous book and the issues she raised: the "banality of evil," the possibility of justice in the aftermath of monstrous crimes, the right of Israel to kidnap and judge Eichmann, and the agency and role of victims. The contributors also interrogate Arendt's own ambivalent attitudes towards race and critically interpret the nature of the crimes Eichmann committed in light of newly discovered Nazi documents. The Trial That Never Ends responds to new scholarship by Deborah Lipstadt, Bettina Stangneth, and Shoshana Felman and offers rich new ground for historical, legal, philosophical, and psychological speculation."--
The starting point of this book is the Eichmann case, as analyzed by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), a work that results from her participation in the trial of the former SS lieutenant ...colonel responsible for the logistics of transporting Jews to the concentration and extermination camps during the Nazi regime in Germany. As the author shows, the mismatch between the monstrosity of the crimes that Eichmann helped perpetrate and his figure before the court – which did not seem monstrous or malevolent to Arendt, but completely normal and even mediocre – led her to coin the expression banality from evil. With such a notion, Arendt designates a new type of evil, which is not caused by base motives, corrupted instincts or an evil will, but by obedience to the duty of office linked to a refusal of the agent to think about what he does. With the aim of understanding what are the conditions that provide this inability or absence of thinking (thoughtlessness), the author examines, within Arendt's theoretical framework, how not only totalitarian regimes, but also the Modern Era itself, produce the experience of loneliness (loneliness) within mass society. Such an experience undermines the establishment of a common world in which human plurality can be affirmed, a condition for exercising the ability to act, feel and also think.
What is the relationship between anger and justice, especially when so much of our moral education has taught us to value the impartial spectator, the cold distance of reason? In Sing the Rage, ...Sonali Chakravarti wrestles with this question through a careful look at the emotionally charged South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which from 1996 to 1998 saw, day after day, individuals taking the stand to speak—to cry, scream, and wail—about the atrocities of apartheid. Uncomfortable and surprising, these public emotional displays, she argues, proved to be of immense value, vital to the success of transitional justice and future political possibilities.Chakravarti takes up the issue from Adam Smith and Hannah Arendt, who famously understood both the dangers of anger in politics and the costs of its exclusion. Building on their perspectives, she argues that the expression and reception of anger reveal truths otherwise unavailable to us about the emerging political order, the obstacles to full civic participation, and indeed the limits—the frontiers—of political life altogether. Most important, anger and the development of skills needed to truly listen to it foster trust among citizens and recognition of shared dignity and worth. An urgent work of political philosophy in an era of continued revolution, Sing the Rage offers a clear understanding of one of our most volatile—and important—political responses.
The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered brings together leading authorities in a transnational, international, and supranational study of Adolf Eichmann, who was captured by the Israelis in Argentina and ...tried in Jerusalem in 1961.
The essays in this important new collection span the disciplines of history, film studies, political science, sociology, psychology, and law. Contributing scholars adopt a wide historical lens, pushing outwards in time and space to examine the historical and legal influence that Adolf Eichmann and his trial held for Israel, West Germany, and the Middle East. In addition to taking up the question of what drove Eichmann, contributors explore the motivation of prosecutors, lawyers, diplomats, and neighbouring countries before, during, and after the trial ended.
The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered puts Eichmann at the centre of an exploration of German versus Israeli jurisprudence, national Israeli identities and politics, and the conflict between German, Israeli, and Arab states.
    Christopher R. Browning addresses some of the most heated controversies that have arisen from the use of postwar testimony: Hannah Arendt’s uncritical acceptance of ...Adolf Eichmann’s self-portrayal in Jerusalem; the conviction of Ivan Demjanuk (accused of being Treblinka death camp guard Ivan the Terrible) on the basis of survivor testimony and its subsequent reversal by the Israeli Supreme Court; the debate in Poland sparked by Jan Gross’s use of both survivor and communist courtroom testimony in his book Neighbors ; and the conflict between Browning himself and Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners , regarding methodology and interpretation in the use of pre-trial testimony.     Despite these controversies and challenges, Browning delineates the ways in which the critical use of such problematic sources can provide telling evidence for writing Holocaust history. He examines and discusses two starkly different sets of collected memories—the voluminous testimonies of notorious Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann and the testimonies of 175 survivors of an obscure complex of factory slave labor camps in the Polish town of Starachowice.
Should we view moments of democratic failure—when both law and the people fail to assure justice—as revealing the failure of democracy, or as revealing a contested, contingent failing that could have ...been otherwise? This is the question that Lida Maxwell examines in Public Trials via exploration of three writers’ diagnoses of, and responses to, democratic failure in three sets of trial writings:
Edmund Burke’s writings on the Warren Hastings impeachment in late eighteenth-century Britain, Emile Zola’s writings on the Dreyfus Affair in late nineteenth-century France, and Hannah Arendt’s writings on the Eichmann trial in 1960s Israel. Maxwell argues that the stakes of how we understand democratic failure are large. Viewing moments of democratic failure as indicative of the failure of democracy—as, she argues, Plato, Rousseau, and many contemporary democratic theorists do—leads to a politics of democratic deference to authority and rules that unintentionally encourages complicity in elite and legal failures to assure justice. In contrast, what Maxwell calls “lost cause narratives” of democratic failure reveal the contingency of democratic failure on behalf of showing that things “could have been” otherwise—and might yet be. A politics of lost causes calls for democratic responsiveness to failure via practices of resistance, theatrical claims-making, and re-narration. Building on the politics of lost causes, Maxwell argues for pursuing a democratic approach to justice that foregrounds the import of democratic resistance to, and contestation of, injustice.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt introduced the term 'banality of evil' to describe the 'superficial mind' of an over-conformist bureaucrat, whose organizational expertise was the emigration ...of Jews. The literature that examined the roots of Arendt's thesis on the banality of evil assumed that she had portrayed a pathological and malfunctioning rational bureaucracy, motivated by a strong culture of instrumental rationality. In contrast to this instrumental rationality thesis-and despite Arendt's own reservations about a wholesale comparison between British imperialism and Nazism-I suggest that: (a) Arendt's depiction of Nazi bureaucracy was anchored in her reading of imperial bureaucracy as analysed in The origins of totalitarianism; (b) Arendt's analysis of Eichmann's Nazi bureaucracy was, in several respects, similar to her analysis of Lord Cromer's principles of imperial bureaucracy formulated in Egypt in the early years of the twentieth century; and (c) the 'instrumental rationality' thesis overlooked Arendt's insights about the affinity between imperial bureaucracy and totalitarian bureaucracy, and particularly the relationships between race, arbitrary governance and bureaucratic aloofness. I explore the similarities between the Nazi model and the imperial model of bureaucracy in Arendt's writings, focusing on the analogies she drew between Lord Cromer and Adolf Eichmann. The analysis reveals that her 'banality of evil' argument is deeply anchored in the history of race and imperialism, and that she was not oblivious to the affinity between imperial bureaucratic repertoires and bureaucracies of genocide.
The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 did much to stimulate the debate about the remembrance and nature of the Holocaust after the 'Silent Fifties' in Europe. This article studies the interpretation of ...this trial by the Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch. It contextualizes his work in the remembrance of the Holocaust in postwar Europe and compares it with the most famous and controversial understanding of the trial, that of Hannah Arendt-who stated that she and Mulisch shared main conclusions. This article nuances her statement and argues that Mulisch viewed the trial primarily as a novelist. His empathetic approach helped not only to bring a better understanding of Eichmann's personality about, but would also contribute to the new, more universal ways of retribution of the Holocaust in later decades.
Hannah Arendt's Death Sentences Butler, Judith
Comparative literature studies (Urbana),
01/2011, Letnik:
48, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Butler approaches the Eichmann trial through Hannah Arendt's still controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Recalling the many characters and voices that populate ...the text, Butler focuses on the way Arendt herself occupies many positions, not all of which are consistent with one another. Rather than passing over these inconsistencies or--what amounts to the same thing--considering Arendt's propositions singly and out of context, Butler follows the report's rhythm and "internal antagonism." Not only is Eichmann in Jerusalem for her a text fundamentally at odds with itself but, as such, one that is bound to stage the conflicts that inhabit it. This staging is most apparent in the complex and contradictory ways Arendt addresses the defendant and judges in the text's epilogue. For Butler, what is being rehearsed in such moments is a relationship not only to an unassimilated past but also and above all to a justice that has yet to be shown or displayed, to mechanisms and terms of justice that have yet to be articulated.
