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Eichmann in Jerusalem

a reading: the banality of evil at source — the phrase the blog has used all along through Zimbardo, and the thoughtlessness it actually names.

The full post

← home · a reading of one book, with notes
Contents 11 sections
  1. 1. What the blog owes, and the measurement that shows it
  2. 2. The book: what it is, and what it refuses to be
  3. 3. The thesis, in her own words, and her own qualification
  4. 4. What “banality” names
  5. 5. The office, the position, and the language system
  6. 6. The controversy, from the book’s own account
  7. 7. The Jewish councils: the structure of the argument, scoped
  8. 8. The structure/type question: no motives, and personal responsibility
  9. 9. The counterweight, and the gap
  10. 10. What a reading is for
  11. Notes

Eleventh of the readings — the phrase the blog has carried at third hand, read at source at last, and found to name a faculty rather than a structure

Eleventh of the readings, and the one with the longest transitive chain. The banality of evil appears in the blog three times and never once from its source: the Lucifer Effect post carries it inside Zimbardo’s preface, as the position he sets out to invert; the follower post and the empty leader post carry it inside the title of Haslam and Reicher’s 2007 paper, “Beyond the banality of evil”. The name Hannah Arendt appears nowhere in content/. So the phrase has been in the blog’s mouth and the book has never been in its hands: the source has been reached through the people arguing with it. This post reads the source. The label post set the rule this reading has to keep — describe structures, diagnose no one — and this book tests that rule harder than any reading so far, because Arendt diagnoses a person, deliberately, at book length, and her whole legal frame requires that she do it.

Status. This post reads one source: the revised and enlarged edition of 1964 of Eichmann in Jerusalem (all fifteen chapters, the Epilogue, the Postscript and the Note to the Reader). Quotations are verbatim, checked character for character against a complete digital text of that edition, and cited by chapter or section; its typographic quotes are rendered as straight ASCII quotes, nested quotations as single quotes, its en dashes as em dashes inside quotations, and every departure from the text — five scan artefacts in all — is listed in 1. The text also carries three pieces that are not the book — Bernard J. Bergen’s afterword, the record of Arendt’s 1964 broadcast conversation with Joachim Fest, and Amos Elon’s introduction — and where this post uses one of them it says so. The book’s thesis is not adopted here. No person is diagnosed; the dispute over the Jewish councils is described and not adjudicated; nothing here validates or disqualifies anyone’s experience.

1. What the blog owes, and the measurement that shows it

Three sites, no source. That is the audit, and it is exact: a case-insensitive search for “banality of evil” across content/ returns three lines — the Zimbardo preface quotation in the Lucifer Effect post, and the bibliography line in the follower post and the empty leader post carrying the Haslam and Reicher title. A search for “Arendt” across content/ returns nothing; the name survives only in the tree’s planning note, which lists her among the library’s unmined sources. So the blog has been quoting a phrase inherited from a psychologist arguing against it and two social psychologists repositioning it, and has never read the book that coined it — the transitive pattern the series has paid off before with Egregores, Star.Ships and Lifton, in which the bill is always the same: the source is narrower than the use, and more careful.

A second fact belongs before the reading proper, because it is the most surprising thing in the text. The phrase is almost absent from the book. Across the text of this edition, “banal” or “banality” occurs three times: twice in the Postscript and once in the closing sentence of the last chapter — plus the subtitle on the title page.2 The book names its own thesis once, at the end, and then defends the naming in a postscript. Nearly everything the phrase has done since has been done to it.

The correction this post owes is stated here and argued below. The blog has been running “the banality of evil” as a statement about structure; Arendt’s target is a faculty. Her word is thoughtlessness, and she is explicit that it is not the smallness of the crime, not the stupidity of the man, and not the situation. What the book supplies is the structural reading’s ancestor — how an office and a language can occupy the place where thinking would have been — and it supplies it as a circumstance of one man’s crime, never as an explanation that displaces his responsibility. The blog’s rule (describe structures, diagnose no one) can take the ancestor and cannot take the claim, and the place where they diverge is exactly where Arendt erects her firewall: explaining is not excusing. One correction, three consequences: cite the source, stop letting a slogan stand where a faculty-claim belongs, and keep her distinction if the phrase is kept at all.

2. The book: what it is, and what it refuses to be

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is Hannah Arendt’s account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, written for The New Yorker and published as a book in May 1963; the text is the “revised and enlarged edition”, dated June 1964 in the Note to the Reader. That note is short and does one thing the blog has to register, because it tells us where the book’s own argument is: the additions, it says, are technical — except that “These new sources are discussed in the new Postscript, which deals with the controversy that followed the original publication.”3

Fifteen chapters report the trial from the arraignment to the execution. The Epilogue then stops reporting — she says so in the Postscript: “I have attempted to go into some of these problems in the Epilogue, which ceases to be simple reporting.”4 And the Postscript is a reply to critics written after the first edition.

What the book refuses to be is as important as what it is, and it says so itself:

“This book, then, does not deal with the history of the greatest disaster that ever befell the Jewish people, nor is it an account of totalitarianism, or a history of the German people in the time of the Third Reich, nor is it, finally and least of all, a theoretical treatise on the nature of evil.”4

The scope is the trial of one man, and the book keeps to it by an argument, not by modesty. The Epilogue states the frame in its first paragraphs: “The purpose of a trial is to render justice, and nothing else”.5 The objections the book answers at length — retroactive law, the court of the victors, and the charge “against the Jewish people” rather than against humanity — are jurisdictional, and the material most often mined from the book sits in that Epilogue. A reading that wants the title’s phrase has to take the book in this order: the report first, the argument second, the defence of the argument third.

3. The thesis, in her own words, and her own qualification

The qualification matters more than the thesis, and it is in the Postscript, in the middle of her reply to critics. She writes that she can imagine an authentic controversy over the subtitle, and then:

“for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial.”4

Then she says what she saw, in the passage that comes closest to a definition:

“Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation, pouring out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that he reached only the rank of lieutenant colonel in the S.S. and that it had not been his fault that he was not promoted.”4

Three corrections to the way this is usually carried. First, the text’s OCR reads “lago” where the allusion requires Iago; the reading is restored.1 Second, the sentence is usually given as saying that Eichmann sat facing a German Jewish leader — this post’s own observation about the secondary literature, not a claim sourced here. The book says “a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation” — the man he talked at was the police examiner, and the point is the unimaginable interlocutor, not the communal dignitary. Third:

“In principle he knew quite well what it was all about, and in his final statement to the court he spoke of the ‘revaluation of values prescribed by the [Nazi] government.’ He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness — something by no means identical with stupidity — that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.”4

We are not talking about stupidity, and we are not talking about ordinariness is what that paragraph says, in that order. And then the sentence that keeps the claim from becoming a theory:

“That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man — that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.”4

A lesson, not a theory; and in the same paragraph she names what she is declining to do: “Seemingly more complicated, but in reality far simpler than examining the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil, is the question of what kind of crime is actually involved here”.4 The strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil is her own summary of what the subtitle points at, and it is a claim about the relation between a faculty and a deed.

The other end of the book says it in the report’s register. The Epilogue’s central paragraph, on the prosecution’s need for a monster:

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”5

And the last chapter’s last sentence, after the execution, is where the phrase is coined:

“It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”6

Note where that sentence sits: at the end of the report, not the argument. The book’s argument about the phrase is the Postscript, and the Postscript’s argument about it is a disclaimer.

4. What “banality” names

The book’s word for it is thoughtlessness, and the passage that explains the word is in chapter III, inside an account of Eichmann’s speech. He apologized for it himself: “Officialese [Amtssprache] is my only language.”7 She comments:

“But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.”7

And then the sentence the blog’s structural reading is downstream of, whether or not the blog knew it:

“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”7

That is the faculty claim in one line: thinking, defined operationally as thinking from the standpoint of somebody else, and a defect of that operation. Everything the blog has done with the phrase as a description of positions and systems is downstream of this, at a level Arendt does not herself work at.

It is worth recording that the German word usually attached to the claim is not in this text: Gedankenlosigkeit returns 0 hits across the text, as do “radical evil” and Schreibtischtäter.8 What the text has is the English “thoughtlessness”, Amtssprache rendered as “officialese”, and Sprachregelung — “language rule” — discussed below.

Two witnesses from this edition’s appendices are worth having, because both are hers. In the 1964 broadcast conversation with Joachim Fest, in German, she says of the man:

“Eichmann war ganz intelligent, aber diese Dummheit hatte er. Das war die Dummheit, die so empörend war. Und das habe ich eigentlich gemeint mit der Banalität. Da ist keine Tiefe — das ist nicht dämonisch! Das ist einfach der Unwille, sich je vorzustellen, was eigentlich mit dem anderen ist, nicht wahr?”9

Which is, in my translation: “Eichmann was quite intelligent, but he had this stupidity. It was the stupidity that was so outrageous. And that is what I actually meant by the banality. There is no depth there — it is not demonic! It is simply the unwillingness ever to imagine what is actually the case with the other person, isn’t it?”10 The appendix’s formulation and the chapter III formulation are the same claim: a failure of imagination directed at another person’s standpoint, in a man who was quite intelligent.

The same appendix contains her direct refusal of the reading the blog’s slogan most resembles:

“Man hat geglaubt, was banal ist, ist auch alltäglich.” … “Ich habe keineswegs gemeint: der Eichmann sitzt in uns, jeder von uns hat den Eichmann und weiß der Deibel was. Nichts dergleichen!”9

People believed that what is banal is also commonplace … I by no means meant that Eichmann sits inside us, that each of us has the Eichmann and the devil knows what. Nothing of the kind. That is from an appendix of this edition and not from the book, and it is still hers, said within a year of the Postscript. The claim about a faculty was never a claim about us.

5. The office, the position, and the language system

The book’s structural material is real, and it is the part the blog can use — with one condition, which the book attaches itself. It comes in three pieces.

The language system. The administration ran its murder correspondence under Sprachregelungen, and chapter VI describes them:

“The prescribed code names for killing were ‘final solution,’ ‘evacuation’ (Aussiedlung), and ‘special treatment’ (Sonderbehandlung)”11

and then says what the rules were for:

“The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, ‘normal’ knowledge of murder and lies.”11

That is a mechanism the blog should recognise: a vocabulary inserted between a deed and the knowledge of the deed, so the deed cannot be recognised as what it is. She adds the man to it: “Eichmann’s great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for ‘language rules.’”11 And the language was indexed to position, not to person — in Hungary, negotiating with the Zionist rescue committee rather than with the Jewish Council, “Even ‘language rules’ were suspended, and most of the time a spade was called a spade.”12 The language was a function of the office and of the interlocutor’s standing, and it came and went with them.

The position. What the office supplied was a conscience:

“not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a ‘respectable voice,’ with the voice of respectable society around him.”13

And it supplied, internally, the absence of any counter-voice: “his murderous zeal was not altogether unconnected with the ambiguity in the voices of those who at one time or another tried to restrain him”.13 This is the structural claim at its strongest: a man whose conscience speaks in the accent of the surrounding institution. It connects to the follower post’s finding that a follower is a position and not a type,14 and to the Lucifer Effect post’s third level, the System.15

The condition. Here the book takes the structural reading back, in the same argument, and this is the part the slogan drops. The Postscript answers the defence’s “tiny cog” and the prosecution’s “actual motor” together:

“I myself attributed no more importance to both theories than did the Jerusalem court, since the whole cog theory is legally pointless and therefore it does not matter at all what order of magnitude is assigned to the ‘cog’ named Eichmann.”4

She grants the sociology and then refuses it as an explanation of the individual:

“Of course it is important to the political and social sciences that the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them. And one can debate long and profitably on the rule of Nobody, which is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is. Only one must realize clearly that the administration of justice can consider these factors only to the extent that they are circumstances of the crime — just as, in a case of theft, the economic plight of the thief is taken into account without excusing the theft, let alone wiping it off the slate.”4

Circumstances of the crime is the load-bearing phrase, and the next sentence gives the reason it has to be: “all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court forthwith transformed back into perpetrators, that is to say, into human beings.”4 The position explains the deed; it does not become the defendant.

6. The controversy, from the book’s own account

The controversy is documented inside this edition by the two sections that answer it. The Note to the Reader gives it one sentence, already quoted: the Postscript “deals with the controversy that followed the original publication”.3 The Postscript then separates the argument from the noise around it:

“It is only natural that the campaign, conducted with all the well-known means of image-making and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than the controversy, so that the latter was somehow swallowed up by and drowned in the artificial noise of the former.”4

She locates the mechanism of the noise — quoting Mary McCarthy for the phrase “out of a mimeographing machine” that describes the pieces written against the book “and more frequently against its author” — and the cause: the clamor “centered on the ‘image’ of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.”4 Of the debate itself she says only that “The debate — if that is what it was — was by no means devoid of interest.”4

Her inventory of what came up follows. The question the prosecutor had already raised, whether the Jews could or should have defended themselves, she says she had dismissed at the time: “I had dismissed that question as silly and cruel, since it testified to a fatal ignorance of the conditions at the time.”4 The conduct of the Jewish leadership she accepts as a serious question — recording that a former Jewish police chief in a Polish town was tried in Israel and exonerated on appeal, an outcome whose reasoning, she notes, “exonerated the Jewish Councils in general”, and that on this “the Jewish Establishment is bitterly divided”.4 She records the two ways the debate went at it: a survivor’s summing-up, “The Jewish people as a whole behaved magnificently. Only the leadership failed”,4 against the identifying of a people with its leadership — “the most vocal participants were those who either identified the Jewish people with its leadership”.4 And she distinguishes what belonged to the book from what did not: “While these issues had indeed some connection with this book, although they were inflated out of all proportion, there were others which had no relation to it whatsoever.”4 The most extreme item is a caricature drawn from the book’s image rather than a reading of it: certain reviewers concluded that she “allegedly had claimed that the Jews had murdered themselves”, and explained the claim as “selfhatred”.4

Two verification results belong here, because the brief for this reading expected otherwise. Gershom Scholem is not named anywhere in the book. The name occurs once in the whole text, in a list of Arendt’s published correspondence in the appended Elon introduction. The exchange of letters between Arendt and Scholem over the book — the one whose objection is usually given as her lack of Ahabath Israel, love of the Jewish people — was published separately, as “Eichmann in Jerusalem: An Exchange of Letters”, Encounter 22, no. 1 (January 1964), 51-54, and is not part of this edition.16 Likewise “the voice of the mob” is not in the text at all: “mob” occurs sixteen times as a string: thirteen inside “mobile”, two inside “mobilized”, and once standing alone — inside Arendt’s quotation of a Nazi official’s phrase, “the Jewish mob”.8 The Postscript’s controversy is the one it conducts: the campaign, the councils, the “ghetto mentality” and “death wish” attributions, the question of who may judge, and the subtitle. Two of its concessions are worth having — that the case raises “problems of a general nature which go far beyond the matters considered in Jerusalem”,4 and that “I would not have been surprised if people had found my treatment inadequate, and I would have welcomed a discussion of the general significance of the entire body of facts”4 — the second being the sentence immediately before she names the subtitle and explains, “only on the strictly factual level”, what it means. The Postscript is not a defence of the phrase. It is an account of what the phrase was a report of, and a refusal to promote it further.

7. The Jewish councils: the structure of the argument, scoped

This is the book’s most contested material and this post’s hardest boundary. The rule here is the blog’s: describe what she argued and where the dispute lies, and stop. Nothing below is an assessment of anyone.

What she argues, in chapter VII, is a claim about administration and its place in the machinery:

“The Jewish Councils of Elders were informed by Eichmann or his men of how many Jews were needed to fill each train, and they made out the list of deportees.”13

Her generalisation is sweeping, and it is hers — though it carries its own hedge:

“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.”13

She attaches a counterfactual to it, which is the form the claim takes and the reason it was read as an accusation:

“The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really 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 people.”13

She names Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews as the documentation — the subject was exposed there “for the first time in all its pathetic and sordid detail”13 — and gives her verdict in one sentence, the sentence the objection fastened on:

“To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.”13

Read in its place, the sentence is about the role and about what she calls it. The chapter’s own question is not “why did they comply” but “the problem is how it was possible for them to succeed”,13 and the chapter’s stated stake is the collapse of a moral order, not the character of a group:

“the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society — not only in Germany but in almost all countries, not only among the persecutors but also among the victims.”13

She also reports what the court did not ask. The prosecution’s question to every witness except the resistance fighters was “Why did you not rebel?”, and she argues it was doing other work: that question “actually served as a smoke screen for the question that was not asked”, namely “Why did you cooperate in the destruction of your own people and, eventually, in your own ruin?”13 And the gravest omission she found in the prosecution’s picture was exactly that: “the gravest omission from the ‘general picture’ was that of a witness to testify to the cooperation between the Nazi rulers and the Jewish authorities”.13

That is the shape of the argument: a claim about administrative cooperation, documented from Hilberg, made in order to name a moral collapse that ran through the persecutors and the victims, with a finding that the court declined to put the cooperation before it. What the dispute was about is equally clear from the book’s own account: the claim read as an accusation of the dead, the counterfactual read as a distribution of blame, and the sentence about “the darkest chapter” read as a verdict on a people. Arendt’s Postscript records those readings as misreadings of an “image”; that they were carried as the book’s substance is this post’s own observation about the response, not a claim sourced here. This post reports both records and adjudicates neither.

What the book supplies, inside itself, is a counter-instance the slogan loses — the same author making the opposite measurement. Chapter X’s Denmark: the Jews were hidden by “all sections of the Danish people, from the King down to simple citizens”, and, decisively, the community’s own leaders behaved in the opposite way to the councils, because “They, in marked contrast to Jewish leaders in other countries, had then communicated the news openly in the synagogues on the occasion of the New Year services.”17 And her measurement of the Danish case is the thesis’s own falsifier: “They had met resistance based on principle, and their ‘toughness’ had melted like butter in the sun”.17

8. The structure/type question: no motives, and personal responsibility

Everything in §3 and §4 points one way and the Epilogue’s close points the other, and the resolution is the part of the book the blog most needs and least resembles. The Epilogue ends with an imaginary address from the court to the defendant. Its hinges — the defendant’s plea, “you said you had never acted from base motives, that you had never had any inclination to kill anybody, that you had never hated Jews, and still that you could not have acted otherwise and that you did not feel guilty”,5 and then the answer to the argument that where everyone is guilty nobody is:

“What you meant to say was that where all, or most all, are guilty, nobody is. This is an indeed quite common conclusion, but one we are not willing to grant you.”5

then:

“guilt and innocence before the law are of an objective nature, and even if eighty million Germans had done as you did, this would not have been an excuse for you.”5

then the ground of the sentence, which is not motive but participation:

“Because he had been implicated and had played a central role in an enterprise whose open purpose was to eliminate forever certain ‘races’ from the surface of the earth, he had to be eliminated.”5

and then the sentence usually quoted alone, which needs its predecessors to be read correctly:

“For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations — as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world — we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”5

The apparent paradox — a man with no motives, held personally responsible — dissolves once the two claims are put on their proper levels. The absence of motive is a fact about his inner life, and she insists on it because the prosecution’s case required a monster. The responsibility is a fact about what he did, and she insists on it because the law has nowhere else to stand. Motives are what a court looks for when grading an offence; this offence does not need them. The Postscript states the whole firewall in the language of the sociology it is refusing:

“True, we have become very much accustomed by modern psychology and sociology, not to speak of modern bureaucracy, to explaining away the responsibility of the doer for his deed in terms of this or that kind of determinism.”4

She does not deny that such explanations may be true — she says whether they are right or wrong is debatable. What is not debatable, she says, is that “no judicial procedure would be possible on the basis of them”.4 Explanatory factors are “circumstances of the crime”, not an acquittal. That is the exact place where the blog’s phrase has been doing a different job all along: a structure can be a circumstance and cannot be a defendant, and the difference must be kept even when the structure is enormous and the man is nothing. One more condition is in the book, and it is the sharpest thing in it about the surrounding society. Chapter VIII’s last paragraphs: “Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it — the quality of temptation”,18 and then, of the overwhelming majority who were tempted not to murder, “But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.”18 The structure did not remove the choice; it reversed its polarity, so that the temptation ran toward not murdering.

9. The counterweight, and the gap

The blog should not take the thesis. Four reasons, two of them the book’s own and two of them gaps.

The literature’s claim is not hers. Haslam and Reicher’s abstract glosses “the broader ‘banality of evil’ thesis” as “the idea that ordinary people commit atrocities without awareness, care, or choice”;19 Zimbardo’s preface glosses it as the position that “ordinary people can be responsible for the most despicable acts of cruelty and degradation of their fellows”.20 Both are claims about ordinary people in situations. Arendt’s sentence is about one man in one courtroom and the operation of thinking in him, and her “strictly factual level” refuses exactly the generalisation both glosses make. The blog cited the two social psychologists and never the source, so their glosses are what it inherited; attaching the phrase to a structural argument is not a misreading of them but a misreading of her.

The thesis is conditional, and the book supplies the condition. The lesson as chapter XIV states it is “under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not”,21 and the Denmark section is the author’s own worked exception: leaders who communicated openly, a population that hid its neighbours, perpetrators whose “toughness” melted when they met resistance based on principle.17 A structure-slogan has no room for the exception, and the exception is the only thing the book has to offer a reader who is not on trial.

The gap: a missing term. The blog’s rule is a prohibition on explaining people; the book’s rule is a requirement to judge one. Arendt can judge a person because she has a faculty claim to hand — thinking, and the failure of it — and that is what lets her hold “no motives at all” and “you must hang” in one argument. The blog has no account of thinking as a faculty, only of structures and descriptions. So it cannot take the thesis without the firewall that makes the thesis usable, and the firewall is the harder half. This reading gives the blog a source and a distinction, and leaves it one term short.

The disputed chapter stays disputed. The blog should record, not resolve, that this is the argument for which Arendt was most severely attacked, that the charges are on the record, that she answered some and not others, and that the appended introduction in this text records the reception — “Most Jewish readers and many others were outraged. Friendships broke over it.”22 Nothing above depends on that chapter: the language system, the “circumstances of the crime” firewall, the “it did not happen everywhere” condition and the refusal of the cog theory are all in the book’s uncontested material, and the corrections in §1 stand on the Postscript alone.

10. What a reading is for

The reading’s result is four short items, and none of them is the book’s thesis.

The correction. The phrase is cited from now on, not inherited, and the blog’s own word for what it has been describing is structure — not banality. Arendt’s word names a faculty: the operation of thinking from another’s standpoint, and what happens to a man when that operation is not running while everything else is. If the phrase is kept, it is kept with her qualification attached: “only on the strictly factual level”, about a man and not about us, and never as an explanation that displaces a responsibility.

The usable finding. The Sprachregelung material in chapter VI is the blog’s own subject reached from the moral-philosophy side: a vocabulary that does not hide a deed but prevents it from being equated with what it is, operated by a man whose speech was already all cliché. It belongs next to the label post’s finding about what a describing vocabulary becomes in use,23 and it is more exact than that finding, because Arendt specifies what the vocabulary is for: not concealment but the interruption of recognition. The same chapter gives a second usable thing — the language was indexed to the position of the person addressed rather than to the person speaking: rules for the councils, plain speech for the rescue committee.

The firewall. “Explaining is not excusing” is the one clause of Arendt’s the blog’s method has never needed, because it has never named a doer — which is the same as saying it has never tested its rule. A description that explains a person’s conduct is one thing; a description used to excuse it is another; and the blog’s vocabulary has had no way to tell them apart because it has described only structures. Arendt supplies the test in one sentence: the factors are circumstances of the crime, and no judicial procedure would be possible on the basis of explanations that became acquittals. That sentence is adopted here. It is not a claim about people; it is the difference between a cause and an excuse.

What is not adopted. The diagnosis of a person, as a method. The phrase, as a general psychology. And the book’s most contested argument, which remains hers, disputed, and undecided here. The blog now cites Arendt where it used to cite her phrase, and the phrase goes back where it came from — to the end of a report about one man, in one courtroom, in a lesson its author expressly declined to turn into a theory.

Notes

Marking: a reading. Documented — the book’s identity, edition and provenance (the Note to the Reader’s own dating and its one sentence on the Postscript); the phrase’s verified near-absence from the book (three occurrences in the book’s own text); the thesis and every qualification of it, verbatim from the Postscript; the “terrifyingly normal” paragraph and the close of chapter XV; the language-system material in chapters VI and XII; the position material in chapter VII; the cog passage and the “circumstances of the crime” firewall in the Postscript; the Epilogue’s peroration and its ground; the controversy as the book itself records it; the Jewish-councils argument’s shape, scoped, with the Denmark counter-instance and the “did not happen everywhere” condition, both the book’s own; the scoped absences and counts (the mob 0, Gedankenlosigkeit 0, radical evil 0, Scholem 1 and outside the book); the German of the appended broadcast, with my translation marked as a translation. Argument — that the blog’s use of the phrase is a structural slogan standing where a faculty-claim belongs; that the structural reading is Arendt’s ancestor and not her thesis; that the blog’s rule lacks her explaining/excusing distinction; that the phrase should now be cited and its word replaced by the blog’s own. Not adopted — the book’s thesis, the diagnosis of any person, and the Jewish-councils dispute, which is described and left undecided. Not claimed — that Arendt’s argument is settled, or that the blog can take the thesis without the firewall. Counterweights are in the body, at §7, §8 and §9, and not only here.

  1. Normalisations of the text, all of them listed. Two corruptions: “lago” for Iago in the Postscript, and “terribly an terrifyingly normal” in the Epilogue, where the “d” is dropped in the OCR. The second is settled from the text itself, which carries the paragraph twice: the detached duplicate reads “terribly and terrifyingly normal”, the printed reading, and an independent electronic copy of the same edition fetched for this post shares the corruption. The printed readings are used in the quotations. Three further scan artefacts of the same kind: “bureau-cracy”, line-break hyphenation, closed to “bureaucracy”; “taught us-the lesson”, an em dash lost to the OCR, restored as “us — the lesson”; and “obedience and Support are the same”, an OCR capital, lower-cased. In addition, and as a rendering convention rather than a correction: the typographic quotation marks the scan carries are given here as straight ASCII double quotes, quotations nested inside them are given as single quotes, which is the form this blog uses throughout, and the text’s en dashes are given as em dashes inside quotations — with one exception, the date range in the appended introduction’s “Arendt, Hannah (1906–)”, whose en dash is given as a hyphen. No other quotation in this post departs from the text, and every quotation in it was checked character for character against the text before publication.↩︎

  2. Presence and absence reported as search results, scoped to the text of this edition. Case-insensitive: “banal” / “banality” — in the book proper, three occurrences: Postscript (“when I speak of the banality of evil”), Postscript (“if this is ‘banal’ and even funny”), and the closing sentence of chapter XV (“the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil”); plus the title page (“A Report on the Banality of Evil”). Everything else is in the appended matter: 13 in Bergen’s afterword, 6 in the Fest broadcast (there the German Banalität), 1 in Elon’s introduction. “Gedankenlosigkeit” 0; “radical evil” 0; “Schreibtischtäter” 0 (the German for desk-murderer occurs in the Fest broadcast as Schreibtisch, and is not a term of Arendt’s in this text). Structure of the text: 27 watermark-delimited chunks, shuffled out of book order, carrying all fifteen chapters plus the Epilogue, the Postscript and the Note to the Reader, and the Epilogue’s paragraph on “the trouble with Eichmann” also present as a detached 726-character fragment — 673 characters of text after the chunk’s 53-character watermark.↩︎

  3. Note to the Reader (the text’s opening section), dated “Hannah Arendt, June, 1964”. “These new sources are discussed in the new Postscript, which deals with the controversy that followed the original publication.” “The revisions for this edition concern about a dozen technical errors, none of which has any bearing on the analysis or argument of the original text.” “the total number of Jewish victims of the Final Solution is a guess — between four and a half and six million — that has never been verified”.↩︎

  4. Postscript. “I have attempted to go into some of these problems in the Epilogue, which ceases to be simple reporting.”; “This book, then, does not deal with the history of the greatest disaster that ever befell the Jewish people, nor is it an account of totalitarianism, or a history of the German people in the time of the Third Reich, nor is it, finally and least of all, a theoretical treatise on the nature of evil.”; “for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial.”; “Eichmann was not lago and not Macbeth…” (OCR); “Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.”; “He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.”; “It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation…”; “He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness — something by no means identical with stupidity — that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.”; “And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.”; “That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man — that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.”; “Seemingly more complicated, but in reality far simpler than examining the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil, is the question of what kind of crime is actually involved here”. The cog passage: “it is as if a criminal pointed to the statistics on crime”; “I myself attributed no more importance to both theories than did the Jerusalem court, since the whole cog theory is legally pointless…”; “all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court forthwith transformed back into perpetrators, that is to say, into human beings.”; “Of course it is important to the political and social sciences that the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.”; “And one can debate long and profitably on the rule of Nobody, which is what the political form known as bureau-cracy truly is.” — the hyphen is the scan’s line-break, the printed word is “bureaucracy”; “Only one must realize clearly that the administration of justice can consider these factors only to the extent that they are circumstances of the crime — just as, in a case of theft, the economic plight of the thief is taken into account without excusing the theft, let alone wiping it off the slate.”; “True, we have become very much accustomed by modern psychology and sociology, not to speak of modern bureaucracy, to explaining away the responsibility of the doer for his deed in terms of this or that kind of determinism.” The controversy: “It is only natural that the campaign, conducted with all the well-known means of image-making and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than the controversy, so that the latter was somehow swallowed up by and drowned in the artificial noise of the former.”; “out of a mimeographing machine” and “and more frequently against its author”; “And this was possible because the clamor centered on the ‘image’ of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.”; “The debate — if that is what it was — was by no means devoid of interest.”; “I had dismissed that question as silly and cruel, since it testified to a fatal ignorance of the conditions at the time.”; “allegedly had claimed that the Jews had murdered themselves” and “selfhatred”; “exonerated the Jewish Councils in general, the Jewish Establishment is bitterly divided on this issue.”; “the most vocal participants were those who either identified the Jewish people with its leadership”; “The Jewish people as a whole behaved magnificently. Only the leadership failed”; “While these issues had indeed some connection with this book, although they were inflated out of all proportion, there were others which had no relation to it whatsoever.”; “There is of course no doubt that the defendant and the nature of his acts as well as the trial itself raise problems of a general nature which go far beyond the matters considered in Jerusalem.”; “I would not have been surprised if people had found my treatment inadequate, and I would have welcomed a discussion of the general significance of the entire body of facts”; “an authentic controversy might have arisen over the subtitle of the book”; “Many people today would agree that there is no such thing as collective guilt or, for that matter, collective innocence, and that if there were, no one person could ever be guilty or innocent.”; “The present report deals with nothing but the extent to which the court in Jerusalem succeeded in fulfilling the demands of justice.” “no judicial procedure would be possible on the basis of them” and “the administration of justice, measured by such theories, is an extremely unmodern, not to say outmoded, institution”.↩︎

  5. Epilogue. “The purpose of a trial is to render justice, and nothing else”. “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” — this pass of the text reads “terribly an terrifyingly normal” there, the “d” dropped in the OCR; the same paragraph is duplicated in the text as a detached fragment, and that copy reads “terribly and terrifyingly normal”, which is the printed reading and the one used in the quotation. An independent electronic copy of the same edition carries the corruption as well. “this new type of criminal, who is in actual act hostis generis humani, commits his crime — under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.” “Because he had been implicated and had played a central role in an enterprise whose open purpose was to eliminate forever certain ‘races’ from the surface of the earth, he had to be eliminated.” “you said you had never acted from base motives, that you had never had any inclination to kill anybody, that you had never hated Jews, and still that you could not have acted otherwise and that you did not feel guilty”. “where all, or most all, are guilty, nobody is. This is an indeed quite common conclusion, but one we are not willing to grant you.” “guilt and innocence before the law are of an objective nature, and even if eighty million Germans had done as you did, this would not have been an excuse for you.” “For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and Support are the same.” — the capitalised “Support” is the scan’s; the printed word is lower case. “we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”↩︎

  6. Chapter XV, “Judgment, Appeal, and Execution”. “Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity.”; “In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory.”; “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” This is the last sentence of the last chapter of the report, and it is one of the two occurrences of the phrase in the book’s own sections.↩︎

  7. Chapter III, “An Expert on the Jewish Question”. “Officialese [Amtssprache] is my only language.”; “But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.”; “his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”; “everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.”; “As we shall see, this horrible gift for consoling himself with clichés did not leave him in the hour of his death.”↩︎

  8. Absence reported as a search result, scoped to the text of this edition. Case-insensitive counts: “mob” as a word occurs once (inside Arendt’s quotation of a Nazi official’s “the Jewish mob”); the other fifteen are inside “mobile” (13) and “mobilized” (2); “the mob” 0; “Gedankenlosigkeit” 0; “radical evil” 0; “Schreibtischtäter” 0; “Scholem” 1 (the appended Elon list); “banality of evil” in the book’s own sections 2 (the Postscript and the close of chapter XV); “thoughtlessness” 3, all in the Postscript. A search shows only what it indexes, so these are statements about this text. An independent electronic copy of the same edition was fetched for a second reading of the places quoted at length here; it agrees character for character except for the two corruptions marked in [^ocr], which it shares — the two texts descend from the same scan.↩︎

  9. Not the book. Hannah Arendt im Gespräch mit Joachim Fest, “Eine Rundfunksendung aus dem Jahr 1964”, an appended broadcast text, included in the edition read here but not part of the book. German as printed: “Eichmann war ganz intelligent, aber diese Dummheit hatte er. Das war die Dummheit, die so empörend war. Und das habe ich eigentlich gemeint mit der Banalität. Da ist keine Tiefe — das ist nicht dämonisch! Das ist einfach der Unwille, sich je vorzustellen, was eigentlich mit dem anderen ist, nicht wahr?”; “Man hat geglaubt, was banal ist, ist auch alltäglich.”; “Ich habe keineswegs gemeint: der Eichmann sitzt in uns, jeder von uns hat den Eichmann und weiß der Deibel was. Nichts dergleichen!”; “die Banalität war ein Phänomen, das sich gar nicht übersehen ließ”. The broadcast text is Arendt’s own voice but not the book’s text, and §4 marks it as such.↩︎

  10. The translations in §4 are mine, offered as translations and not as quotations. A second passage from the same broadcast gives the anecdote she says she used for the word Banalität — Ernst Jünger’s farmer, on seeing starved Soviet prisoners of war, and the sentence “Der Mann sieht nicht, dass das Menschen tun, die eben verhungert sind”, “The man does not see that these are human beings who have simply starved” — and it closes with “Eichmann war ganz intelligent, aber diese Dummheit hatte er”. That is the same faculty claim once more, in an anecdote about a bystander rather than the accused.↩︎

  11. Chapter VI, “The Final Solution: Killing”. “The prescribed code names for killing were ‘final solution,’ ‘evacuation’ (Aussiedlung), and ‘special treatment’ (Sonderbehandlung)”; “The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, ‘normal’ knowledge of murder and lies.”; “Eichmann’s great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for ‘language rules.’”.↩︎

  12. Chapter XII, “Deportations from Central Europe — Hungary and Slovakia”. “Even ‘language rules’ were suspended, and most of the time a spade was called a spade.” The paragraph distinguishes the councils from the Zionist rescue committee: “one cannot fail to note that in meeting with the Zionists neither Eichmann nor any other member of the Sondereinsatzkommando employed the tactics of sheer lying that they had used for the benefit of the gentlemen of the Jewish Council.” (the sentence itself begins with ‘What is more interesting,’).↩︎

  13. Chapter VII, “The Wannsee Conference, or Pontius Pilate”. “The Jewish Councils of Elders were informed by Eichmann or his men of how many Jews were needed to fill each train, and they made out the list of deportees.”; “To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.”; “first time in all its pathetic and sordid detail” (the sentence being “it has now been exposed for the first time in all its pathetic and sordid detail by Raul Hilberg”); “the problem is how it was possible for them to succeed”; “the gravest omission from the ‘general picture’ was that of a witness to testify to the cooperation between the Nazi rulers and the Jewish authorities”; “the question the prosecutor regularly addressed to each witness except the resistance fighters which sounded so very natural to those who knew nothing of the factual background of the trial, the question ‘Why did you not rebel?,’ actually served as a smoke screen for the question that was not asked”; “Why did you cooperate in the destruction of your own people and, eventually, in your own ruin?”; “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 really 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 people.”; “the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society — not only in Germany but in almost all countries, not only among the persecutors but also among the victims.”; “not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a ‘respectable voice,’ with the voice of respectable society around him.”; “his murderous zeal was not altogether unconnected with the ambiguity in the voices of those who at one time or another tried to restrain him”. A scoping note on this chapter, since §7 is the post’s boundary: the material is a description of what the book argues, the sentences about Jewish leaders are quoted as hers, and the contest over them is reported in §6 and §9 and left undecided. Nothing here is this post’s assessment of any person or people.↩︎

  14. The follower post on the follower as “a position, not a personality”, with Haslam and Reicher cited there for tyranny as a group-identity dynamic. This reading supplies the moral-philosophy ancestor of that finding, and the term it did not have.↩︎

  15. The Lucifer Effect post on the three levels — dispositional, situational, systemic — and on the firewall the book itself has to repeat, that explaining is not excusing. The same firewall in a different register is §8’s subject here.↩︎

  16. “Eichmann in Jerusalem: An Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt”, Encounter 22, no. 1 (January 1964), 51-54; later reprinted in Arendt, The Jew as Pariah. Verified for this post as a separate publication and not a section of this edition: “Scholem” occurs 0 times in the book’s own sections of the text and once in the appended Elon introduction, in a list of correspondences. The objection usually attached to the exchange — the absence of Ahabath Israel, love of the Jewish people — is therefore not part of the book’s own account of the controversy, and this post does not attribute it to the book.↩︎

  17. Chapter X, “Deportations from Western Europe — France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Italy”. “They, in marked contrast to Jewish leaders in other countries, had then communicated the news openly in the synagogues on the occasion of the New Year services.”; “all sections of the Danish people, from the King down to simple citizens” (words she quotes from the judgment); her verdict on the Danish resistance: “It is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds.”; “They had met resistance based on principle, and their ‘toughness’ had melted like butter in the sun”.↩︎

  18. Chapter VIII, “Duties of a Law-Abiding Citizen”. “Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it — the quality of temptation.”; “But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.”↩︎

  19. Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2007), “Beyond the banality of evil: Three dynamics of an interactionist social psychology of tyranny”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33(5): 615-622, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167206298570. The abstract sentence quoted in §9 was read raw for this post from the University of St Andrews research portal record (https://research-portal.st-andrews.ac.uk/en/publications/beyond-the-banality-of-evil-three-dynamics-of-an-interactionist-s): “First, they reappraise historical and psychological evidence that supports the broader ‘banality of evil’ thesis — the idea that ordinary people commit atrocities without awareness, care, or choice.” The clause is quoted as the portal prints it, up to the end of that sentence; the abstract continues beyond it. That gloss and Arendt’s are not the same claim, which is §9’s first point.↩︎

  20. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, the Preface, as quoted in the Lucifer Effect post: “In contrast to the ‘banality of evil,’ which posits that ordinary people can be responsible for the most despicable acts of cruelty and degradation of their fellows, I posit the ‘banality of heroism’.” The blog’s first carrier of the phrase, and the post where it is quoted at greatest length.↩︎

  21. Chapter XIV, “Evidence and Witnesses”. “how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told”; “The holes of oblivion do not exist.”; “Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that ‘it could happen’ in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.” This is the passage the post leans on for the counter-instance in §7 and §9; the chapter’s own subject is the testimony of Anton Schmidt, the German sergeant who helped Jewish partisans and at whose mention “a hush settled over the courtroom”.↩︎

  22. Not the book. “The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt”, the introduction by Amos Elon carried by this text’s scan. “Most Jewish readers and many others were outraged. Friendships broke over it.” Also, on a false attribution this post does not repeat: “The entry ‘Arendt, Hannah (1906-)’ falsely states that in Eichmann in Jerusalem she had claimed inter alia that ‘the victims were partly responsible for the slaughter by their failure to resist.’ Nowhere in the book did she make this claim.” Quoted as the appended introduction’s claim, not as this post’s.↩︎

  23. The label post and its rule: “a description is not a licence”, and the argument that a mechanism can be described while a label can only be agreed with or rejected. The rule this post inherits in §7 and tests in §9.↩︎