Glossary Term: Banality of Evil (The)

1 2 3 4 5

In the spring of 1961, The New Yorker sent Hannah Arendt to Jerusalem to report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. The desk of IV-B-4 in the R.S.H.A, to which Eichmann had been appointed in March 1941, had the task of regulating “Jewish affairs and evacuations.” Until July 1944 it played a central role in organizing the deportation of European Jews to the killing centers. Eichmann was convicted on fifteen charges, among which were crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and crimes of war. After the trial which lasted from April to December 1961, Eichmann was sentenced to death. Israel’s Supreme Court confirmed the judgment, and Eichmann was hanged on May 31,1962. Arendt’s report on the trial appeared in The New Yorker as a series of articles in 1963. From these articles she later published a book entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

 The abyss between the banality of the evil’s doer and the horror of the genocide

Arendt’s term, the expression “banality of evil,” does not refer to a theory or a doctrine, but fits “a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial” (Arendt, 1992: 287), the experience of an abyss : a lack of common measure between the gigantic scale on which the crimes (the evil) were committed and the insignificance (the banality) of the persons who were among those most responsible. Confronted with Eichmann in the flesh, Arendt felt it impossible to ascribe the phenomenon she observed to “any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction of the doer.” (Arendt, 1971: 417). As a concept created through contact with a specific situation the “banality of evil” neither referred to Shoah nor Nazism’s evil as a whole. The banality did not concern all of the agents carrying out orders [1], but specifically the evil that was committed by Eichmann. His case was all the more exemplary because he had not been simply a subordinate. Rather, his part was decisive in implementing the crimes. Arendt neither doubted Eichmann’s guilt, nor did she doubt that he deserved the death sentence.

1 2 3 4 5