Arendt's analysis of the "banality of evil" characterized by Adolf Eichmann is a chilling look into how evil can be systematized, how it can be seemingly bureaucratic, and how normal people can be turned into monsters through law.

This is a great book for anyone interested in World War 2, the Holocaust, political philosophy, or getting really really depressed.

Arendt's analysis of the "banality of evil" characterized by Adolf Eichmann is a chilling look into how evil can be systematized, how it can be seemingly bureaucratic, and how normal people can be turned into monsters through law.

This is a great book for anyone interested in World War 2, the Holocaust, political philosophy, or getting really really depressed.

this book arrived from amazon in excellent condition and very quickly, especially relative to other books purchased at the same time through independent sellers.

A previous reviewer claims that Arendt's book shows the ambivalence of human nature, proving that in effect anybody could have done what Eichmann did. In fact, this is exactly the cynical point of view that Arendt opposes in this, and her other writings. Her argument here is a revision of her earlier position on 'radical evil' advanced in The Origins of Totalitarianism, a position which Heidegger claimed to find 'incomprehensible.' She argues here that banality and "sheer thoughtlessness" (akin to Heidegger's reflections on boredom) are in fact the root of Evil. To put it better, evil continues precisely because of its inherent rootlessness, its constitutive disregard of the world. Thus, the detachment of claims such as "Anybody could have done what Eichmann did" distort her intention. Evil, she insists, is not an inevitable aspect of human nature, but instead arises from an unwillingness to understand.

A previous reviewer claims that Arendt's book shows the ambivalence of human nature, proving that in effect anybody could have done what Eichmann did. In fact, this is exactly the cynical point of view that Arendt opposes in this, and her other writings. Her argument here is a revision of her earlier position on 'radical evil' advanced in The Origins of Totalitarianism, a position which Heidegger claimed to find 'incomprehensible.' She argues here that banality and "sheer thoughtlessness" (akin to Heidegger's reflections on boredom) are in fact the root of Evil. To put it better, evil continues precisely because of its inherent rootlessness, its constitutive disregard of the world. Thus, the detachment of claims such as "Anybody could have done what Eichmann did" distort her intention. Evil, she insists, is not an inevitable aspect of human nature, but instead arises from an unwillingness to understand.

"It was sheer thoughtlessness that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of the period," political theorist Hannah Arendt observes of Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the logistics behind the mass deportations of Jews and other so-called asocials to ghettos and extermination camps during the 2nd World War. The face of evil, she suggests through her portrayal of the high-ranking SS bureaucrat at his trial in Jerusalem, is not necessarily that of a radically perverse pathological mastermind, but instead and more frightening still, can come in the form of a banal and unimpressive caricature of normalcy.

In his testimony, Eichmann characterizes himself as a blameless cog who was only following orders, and even goes on to cite instances where he tried to help certain Jews who were friends of his escape their inevitable fate. His tone is that of one regaling a run-of-the-mill human sympathy story of hard luck, and his telling is rife with contradiction, blanks in memory, and ridiculous cliché. According to Arendt, this "created considerable difficulty during the trial - less for Eichmann himself than for those who had come to prosecute him, to defend him, to judge him, and to report on him. For all this, it was essential that one take him seriously, and this was very hard to do, unless one sought the easiest way out of the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them, and declared him a clever, calculating liar - which he obviously was not."

Also relevant for its criticism of the shaky legal foundation upon which the trial was conducted (Eichmann was illegally abducted in Argentina, then was brought to Israel and prosecuted there using an outdated framework that was unable to properly address the problem of genocide as specifically carried out by the Nazis).

This book is very smart, very elegantly written. The questions it raises about ethics and preconceived notions of good and evil are universal and remain relevant to the times. If it were a person, I'd sleep with it on the first date.

I am delighted to see this classic back in print. Jewish author Hannah Arendt has provided a wealth of timeless information that goes far beyond the trial of the German war criminal Adolf Eichmann. This review is based on the original (1964) edition.

Arendt (p. 39) gives the readers a taste of the scale of the Kristallnacht (November 1938): 7,500 Jewish shop windows broken, all synagogues burned, and 20,000 Jewish men incarcerated in concentration camps. In common with many others who wrote during the first two decades after WWII, Arendt (p. 5, 11-12) addresses the issue of Jewish passivity in the face of death during the later roundups and transports to the death camps.

Arendt briefly discusses the fate of Jews of some individual European nations. She mentions the conniving of the Bulgarians (with, of course, the implied freedom to do so) performed in order to avoid sending their Jews to the death camps, and the fact that Finland, Germany's ally, was never seriously pressured to turn over her 2,000 Jews to be murdered (p. 170). Clearly, the latter part of the oft-repeated statement, "Not all of the victims of the Nazis were Jews, but all Jews were victims of the Nazis" is incorrect.

Throughout this work, Arendt gives various biographical details of Adolf Eichmann. For example, she mentions that he was a Gottglaubiger (p. 27), a Nazi term for those who had broken with Christianity, and which Eichmann maintained right up to the very moment of his hanging, having refused the solace and Bible reading of a Protestant minister (p. 252).

Arendt briefly discusses Hitler's flouting of the Versailles treaty and his rise to power. While Jan T. Gross has asserted that there were Poles who praised Hitler in the 1930's, Arendt makes it clear that this was far from limited to Poland during that time: "...Hitler was admired everywhere as a great national statesman." (p. 37).

While most recent Holocaust materials focus on the real or imagined collaboration of locals in the sending of Jews to their deaths, Arendt is unsparing in her criticism of Jewish collaborators in this regard: "Without Jewish help in administrative and police work--the final roundup of Jews in Berlin was, as I have mentioned, done entirely by Jewish police--there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower. (p. 117). She adds that, because of this collaboration, only a few thousand Germans, most of whom furthermore only did office work, were able to send hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths (p. 117). Finally, Arendt concludes that: "Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million. (According to Freudiger's calculations about half of them could have saved themselves if they had not followed the instructions of the Jewish councils..." (p. 125).

Arendt (p. 42, 118, etc.) elaborates on the actions of a Jew, Rudolf Kastner (Kasztner). He made a deal with Eichmann in which 1,684 Jews were allowed to go to Palestine in exchange for Kastner's silence before and during which 476,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Jan Tomasz Gross, who has gotten a great deal of publicity for his books (NEIGHBORS and FEAR), has stated that the 2-3 million Poles who died in the hands of the Germans were largely the collateral victims of military action. Arendt knows better: "...Eichmann knew that right behind the front lines all Russian functionaries ("Communists"), all Polish members of the professional classes, and all native Jews were being killed in mass shootings." (p. 95). "At no point, however, either in the proceedings or the judgment, did the Jerusalem trial mention even the possibility that extermination of whole ethnic groups--the Jews, or the Poles, or the Gypsies--might be more than a crime against the Jewish or the Polish or the Gypsy people, that the international order, and mankind in its entirety, might have been grievously hurt and endangered." (pp. 275-276). Arendt realizes the alternative future: "The measures against Eastern Jews were not only the result of anti-Semitism, they were part and parcel of an all-embracing demographic policy, in the course of which, had the Germans won the war, the Poles would have suffered the same fate as the Jews--genocide. This is no mere conjecture: the Poles in Germany were already being forced to wear a distinguishing badge in which the "P" replaced the Jewish star, and this, which we have seen, was always the first measure to be taken by the police in instituting the process of destruction)." (pp. 217-218).

Arendt praises the Danes for saving Jews during WWII and then, without mentioning the incomparably more difficult conditions under which Polish rescuers of Jews labored, nevertheless gives the Poles their due. After listing some individual examples of Polish assistance to Jews, Arendt adds the following: "One witness claimed that the Polish underground had supplied many Jews with weapons and had saved thousands of Jewish children by placing them with Polish families. The risks were prohibitive; there was the story of an entire Polish family who had been executed in the most brutal manner because they had adopted a six-year-old Jewish girl." (p. 231).

In covering, from a moral and ethical rather than legal standpoint, the trial of former Nazi Adolf Eichmann, Arendt must have known she was jumping head first into certain controversy. While I disagree with her insistence on international law, as opposed to an Israeli-ran trial (unlike Arendt, I have the hindsight of the Milosevic trial, not to mention pretty much every other pathetic joke of international law flouted by the U.N. but to which no nation honestly adheres outside Belgium), I must say that she made a rather convincing case regarding the "banality of evil".

Her point seemed to be, to the outrage of her critics, that seemingly normal men are capable of doing terrible deeds. It doesn't take a monster to act monstrous. Her critics accused her of attempting to humanize a Nazi war criminal, but I think what most people were secretly offended at was her assertion of the duality of human nature. We like to think of history and sociology in terms of black and white, good and evil. There are good guys, and there are bad guys, and there is no blur between them...

What Arendt is saying is that, save the occasional saint, we are all capable of committing the crimes that Eichmann did. It may take years of systematic propaganda, carrots and sticks, career enhancements, and whatnot, but in the end, the leap Eichmann took from ethical civilization into barbaric genocide wasn't a far leap at all. Weimar Germany wasn't a Third World country. For an industrialized, cultured, and Western nation to descend so rapidly into the dark age of Nazism is not a sign of any inherent flaw in German civilization, but rather of how thin the line between humanity and barbarism truly is.

Whether you agree with Arendt or not, the book will make you think. There's nothing wrong with hearing a fresh and opposing viewpoint, even for debate's sake.