Books

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt

A year of Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s favourite books

Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Photograph: Gjon Mili/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images

Lucy Sweeney Byrne
Sat Nov 14 2020 - 06:00

The central idea Hannah Arendt expresses in this book caused outrage at the time of publication (originally written as articles in the New Yorker). It is that evil is banal. By this, she means that it is evident in ordinary people, in ordinary or extraordinary circumstances, who refuse to question the overriding morality and ethics of their situation.

Evil is in all people who accept things as they are, however abhorrent, however much pain it might be causing others. Evil is, according to Arendt, blind faith, in that it is the relinquishing of one’s individual responsibility to discern right from wrong in all or any of one’s doings.

After the war, what was perhaps so especially disturbing to the Allied consciousness, which smugly lathered itself in its own righteousness (and still does, if statues and Hollywood are anything to go by), was the implication that Adolf Eichmann, in his willingness to follow orders, however terrible their consequences, could be any of us. It was that we all contain the capacity for such evil, not just the Nazis, who were not, Arendt makes clear, exceptions to the rule of humanity. They were the rule, taken to its furthest, most awful, extremity.

I assume (but then, one can never assume these days) that the anger met by Arendt’s ideas at the time must now seem naive to most western readers, who are so much more familiar with the subtle soft power and bureaucracy of evil. We who are daily faced with the evil of “your call is important to us” or “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do”. The evil of credit ratings, of extortionate rents, of being tracked by cookies on the internet, consent or no.

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It’s the evil of photographs of children dead on beaches in Turkey printed alongside advertisements for pillows or wine, and of high-street fashions made by underpaid women in overcrowded factories. Nowadays, Arendt reads as a harbinger of what proved inevitable – our own constant complicity (although Kafka saw it coming first, of course).