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 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.
    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.
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.
The aims of this essay are twofold. The first section focuses on the experience of Muriel Spark at the trial of the Holocaust administrator, Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, and on the author's translation ...of this event into a fictional encounter in her novel, The Mandelbaum Gate (1965). The second section considers Spark's use of the techniques of the French nouveau roman as a means of depicting Eichmann's blind faith in a system representing extreme and uncompromising order. Spark's exposure to Eichmann, I argue, had a profound and largely unacknowledged effect on the fiction she went on to write. By drawing upon the techniques of the nouveau roman in later novels such as The Driver's Seat (1970), the author articulated anxieties unique to the post-war world.
Hannah Arendt's book "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" studies Adolf Eichmann through his own words, noting what he said during cross-examinations during his trial; the book ...is a study of a criminal personality who could communicate nothing which was not officialese cliche, and this leads on to the fact the concept of the cliche does not belong to any recognised discipline. It became established in the 19C and so is not within the field of rhetoric; because it is a pejorative concept it also does not feature in the science of linguistics. Arendt's study of Eichmann does not constitute a detailed refutation of the content of what he says, but her observation of, and irritation with, recurrence, is essentially an aesthetic reaction; but this is grounded in her commitment to politics as the activity which manifests human plurality. She comments on the alternative diagnosis of Eichmann by several psychiatrists which found him to be normal, and she concludes that this judgment shows the blindness of psychology to the political dimension of human interactions.
Les deux scènes du procès Eichmann Lindeperg, Sylvie; Wieviorka, Annette
Annales : histoire, sciences sociales (French ed.),
12/2008, Letnik:
63, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Résumé Le procès Eichmann construit le génocide des Juifs en événement distinct dans la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Pourtant, l’importance de son enregistrement en vidéo, aux fins de fournir des images ...aux télévisions du monde entier, avait jusqu’ici largement échappé aux historiens. A partir des archives de l’État d’Israël et de celles du cinéaste Leo Hurwitz, les auteurs éclairent les conditions de la décision inédite de filmer le procès dans son intégralité et les négociations qui s’ensuivirent entre Milton Fruchtman (Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation), l’État d’Israël et les juges en charge de la procédure. Elles étudient le travail de préparation et la mise en place du dispositif d’enregistrement qui éclairent les intentions du cinéaste et sa vision de l’événement à venir. Elles analysent ensuite les documents filmés permettant de mesurer les principales figures de la mise en scène d’Hurwitz, les écarts éventuels entre ses idées préconçues et la réalité du procès. Elles invitent enfin à réfléchir aux interactions entre rituel judiciaire et dramaturgie télévisuelle et aux effets de production de sens inhérents à ce type d’enregistrement.
Abstract The Eichmann trial constructs the genocide of the Jews as a distinctive event of World War II. Yet historians have long ignored the importance of its videorecording for providing images to television networks throughout the world. From archives from the Israeli State and from filmmaker Leo Hurwitz, S. Lindeperg and A. Wieviorka shed light on the conditions that brought the unprecedented decision to film the trial in its entirety, and on the ensuing negociations between Milton Fruchtman (Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation), the State officials and the judges. They study the preparation and setting of the recording apparatus to explain the intentions of the director and his vision of the upcoming event. They analyze the filmed documents to evaluate the main characters in Hurwitz’s story, and the gap between his preconceived notions and the realities of the trial. They conclude on some thoughts on the interaction between the judicial ritual and the televisual dramaturgy, and on the meaning inherently produced by this type of recording.
