Eichmann twenty years later

...As Elie Wiesel has written, his generation invented "a new literature, that of testimony...

...and because I feel that the Holocaust will survive the ravages of time and popular entertainment only through the supremacy of fact, I have avoided discussing several interesting recent novels (these would inCommonweal: 438...

...Pluralism is regarded as an insult both by those who would force agreement among us as to ancient philosophic or religious truths and by those who would organize our lives according to the most recent truths o~ economic and political science...

...The central questions--the how and the why of it all--appe~ in each of the books surveyed here...

...While the truths at which knowledge arrives may make one intelligent -Eichmann was far from stupid -- they do not make one thoughtful...

...Such desire for truth in political affairs is the accomplice of a bureaucratic system which aims to reduce the range of human responsibility by formulating political questions within a context of truths from which policies only need to be deduced...

...He seems to have lived, like the rest of us, on cliches and popular pieties: that one must be loyal to one's superiors, that patriotism excuses many excesses, that only a few men are responsible for the crimes of many, that the individual can do very little...

...It was only after he had retired, when he was beyond the petty distractions, that he turned to his true interests, to books and the acquisition of knowledge, and to the one project which he believed would give purpose to his life--a study of the Holocaust...

...If readers of the Diary were to read Ernst Schnabel's Anne Frank: A Profile in Courage, "which 'completes' the work by supplying the details of the young girl's ending in Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen" they would "never again be able to rid (their) understanding of the original text of dimensions of terror, degradation and despair ,that it itself does not contain...

...The bestial crime which seemed to push barbarity beyotld the realm of human comprehension was to be described through the mouth of one of its principal perpetrators...

...Such shattering obliges each of us to think afresh about matters which are now obscured by accepted truths, to make up our own minds, to assume our own individual responsibility, to take our chances...

...Then quite suddenly he stopped, totally defeated by the enormity of the undertaking and by the pervasive sense that an answer was not to be had...

...Wiesel has said, that "all questions pertaining to Auschwitz lead to anguish...

...We may be a bit more prescient than he...

...Arendt's answer is affirmative...

...We may know, as Elie I I ROBERT LEITER has contributed to The Nation, Commentary, Film Heritage, and other journals...

...How could the Holocaust be accounted for within the perspective of the crime of aggressive g o . war...

...We have those...

...There are answers here as well, less abundant than the questions, but by no means less important...

...The thinking activity which conditions against evil cannot be identified, however, with the pursuit of knowledge...

...These programs are justified in terms of myths such as the siruggle of races, classes, or creeds that confer on history the logic of an idea from which events can be, deduced...

...Ezrahi is concerned primarily with creative responses to the Holocaust...

...The fact that systematic mass murder is possible without evil intent and ideological passion, the fact that evil has lost the quality of temptation by which it has been normally recognized - - these realities have shattered the framework of our Western tradition's political and judicial categories...

...For many, the Holocaust had been an unspeakable violence that ought to be mourned but could not be made intelligible...

...Such reflection dulls our sense of the genuinely exceptional event in history: the operation of a bureaucratic form of governance which allows isolated individuals not to feel responsible for participation in programs whose success requires the contribution of.vast numbers...

...Thinking's interior dialogue produces no truths but only a conscience, that other, doubting self who lies in wait when one takes stock of his deeds...

...He worked diligently for years, keeping to a strict schedule, using all available modes of research...

...The position was not owed to the city's changing role in the conflicts of international politics but to its timeless status for Jews and for all those who look toward it as the site of ultimate tests...

...What distinguished him was an extraordinary shallowness, the lack of any deep convictions, passions, or motivations with the exception of an average man's concern for his career...

...The phrase represents, first of all, her judgment of Eichmann the criminal...

...It is a purpose which is now under ,attack from many of our fellow citizens...

...I find the issue debatable, perhaps unresolvable...

...Unlike those who did nothing on behalf of the good, however, Eichmann's thoughtlessness allowed him to actively participate in crimes for which he deserved the death to which he was sentenced...

...It is a paralyzing activity of doubting that, while calling into question all codes of conduct, does not place other proprsitions or commandments in their place...

...Most importantly, he was perceived as possessing FATHER JAMES BERNAUER, S.J., is assistant, professor of philosophy at Boston College...

...It may not prevent the disasters which are always right around the corner for a society which is committed to imagining the possible necessity of nuclear war...

...As Arendt describes it, this activity of thinking is a marginal affair for society except in emergencies...

...The failure of the court to appreciate the new criminality Eichmann represents reflected the more profound failure of the modern age, of us, to understand the novelty of genocide and the changed human condition which makes it possible...

...As one witness at Eichmann's trial put it: "To understand Auschwitz would be even worse than not to understand it...

...E ICHMANN'S BANALITY is worth recalling for it may paralyze, if only temporarily, those ways of reflection to which we have become accustomed and which hide a potentially fatal thoughtlessness from each of us...

...His crime assaulted the very nature of the political realm, which has for its purpose the achievement of freedom and the preservation of pluralism...

...When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action...

...Such a view allows us to feel that we are dealing with a familiar reality for which we can repent and seek forgiveness...

...It was not the possible verdict which stirred this anticipation -Eichmann's guilt was a forgone conclusion -- but, rather, the promise of a fundamental enlightenment...

...Arendt's impression of Eichmann was a common reaction to the trial, including that of a Commonweal editorial writer: "Eichmann did not have, we must recognize, a queer or esoteric set of values, some fantastic deranged view of the universe...

...For most, its difference was in degree of seriousness but not in essence...

...What, then, is the most widely read book about the Holocaust...

...Within this perspective, the Holocaust was the culmination of long centuries of Christian anti-Semitism...

...Thinking is a quest for meanings and, continually, interrupting all our normal activities, has no end nor aim outside of itself...

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...Both authors agree that the Nazis succeeded as much through propaganda as through the manipulation of language in the camps...

...Hannah Arendt covered the trial for The New Yorker magazine which published her reflections on it in February and March of 1963...

...Aside from these moments of concurrence, the Rosenfeld and Ezrahi studies differ greatly...

...we may know at the start that consistent, systematic answers do not exist to the questions raised by the Holocaust...

...Ezrahi quotes Bruno Bettelheim: " [Anne Frank's ] story found wide acclaim because . . . it denies implicitly that Auschwitz ever existed...

...It was a silence of incomprehensiori which the trials at Nuremberg had not removed...

...The baflality of Eichmann's evil posed a critical question for Arendt: "Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually 'condition' them against it...

...Arendt criticized the justification which the Jerusalem court presented for its guilty verdict because it attempted to view Eichmann through the traditional.categories in which crime springs from evil intent...

...While his deeds facilitated the death of millions, he was neither monstrous nor demonic...

...S IDRA DeKoven Ezrahi's By Words Alone and Alvin H. Rosenfeld's A Double Dying are academic studies of Holocaust literature that approach the subject from differing perspectives but concur on several important points...

...This appetite for truth is the passion for thoughtlessness...

...What are we to make of terms like Sonderkommando, Kapo and Appel, "untranslatable because there is no precedent for them in human experience," terms signifying "not only the functions and the routine of the inmate, but also a new hierarchy of human relations, values and expectations...

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...He was simply thoughtless, unreflective about the meaning of his office and the consequence of his deeds...

...The style of thinking to which Arendt invites us will not produce a moral code of great theoretical coherence or aesthetic grandeur...

...He was regarded as a "personification of satanic principles," an arch-fiend with an unquenchable blood-thirst...

...Adolf Eichmann had been in charge of the office in the Nazi security service which was responsible for Jewish affairs and for the "evacuation" of Jews to concentration camps...

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...But what we cannot shake is that the questions persist and that, because we are human, we long for answers...

...Books: ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST ROBERT LEITER KNEW A MAN, an unassuming, selfeducated, religious man, who loved art and learning but, because of circumstance, was forced to work at a menial job for most of his life...

...It is, of course, The Diary of Anne Frank...

...and she is unshakable in her belief that there have been great successes in the genre...

...If all men are good, there never was an Auschwitz...

...N.Y., N.Y.-10022 3! July 1981:437 it ought to be remembered for they teach a lesson so fundamental that it can be easily overlooked...

...Still I like to believe that each time we approach the subject, either as readers or writers, we are secretly hoping that this time the riddle will be solved...

...But language also became an instrument of survival for inmates...

...What profundity is to be found in the Eichmann who said in an interview, as a defense of his role: "Where would we have been if everyone had thought things out in those days...

...It is a view nourished by forms of historical reflection which have accustomed us to regard our contemporary situation as the product of a long, evolutionary development about which individuals can do almost nothing...

...Arendt suggests that there may be a disturbing lesson to be draWn from the almost total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler period: Is it possible that, in extreme situations, those who will prove themselves most reliable are not those who proclaim values and adherence to moral norms but the skeptics and the doubters, those who are used to examining things, to probing, to thinking...

...He was convinced that the force of theology--in this case, Christian theology-- would crack the code of what he himself called "the worst horror known to man...

...Attention was riveted on that courtroom because a profound silence regarding our age's greatest crime, the Nazi destruction of the European Jews, was about to be challenged...

...This form of action which,at first glance, seems totally unrelated to politics was lacking in Nazi Germany not only among those who, like Eichmann, had no values but also among those who had values but who, unfortunately, did not Cr~rarnt~nwpal" 436 think enough...

...I like to think that all of us, whether we write or read books about the Holocaust, are one with this simple man...

...Rosenfel~l extends the argument, calling the Diary "one of the 'easiest' and most antiseptic works of Holocaust literature...

...June 15, 1962) The banality of Eichmann's evil is its interdependence with thoughtlessness, the defiance its superficiality poses to any attempt to discover those depths which our literary, philosophical, and theological traditions have encouraged us to believe are there...

...Often the wish to bear witness was enough to keep people alive...

...Those moments are no longer rare...

...the type of character capable of causing the Holocaust...

...The final judgment of the Jerusalem court obscured, for Arendt, the fa~t that Eichmann's participation in genocide was an attack upon human diversity itself...

...Genocide escaped the rauonahty of political and military policies...

...Although her Eichmann in Jerusalem considers a host of issues that were raised by the crime and trial, her study's major conclusion is conveyed in the subtitle she chose for it: A Report on the Banality of Evil...

...His notes alone filled volumes...

...This is no reason to despair of thinking for, as Arendt recognized, such activity "may prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments when the chips are down...

...When the trial of Adolf Eichmann opened on April I l, 196 l, the extraordinary extent of the media coverage accorded to the event reflected an intensity of expectation for the trial's significance...