Arendt’s Eichmann: Murderer, Idealist, Clown

This piece was originally published in Volume 1 of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College.

One may say that tragedy deals with the suffering of mankind in a less serious way than comedy. (Bertolt Brecht)

Of course that is an outrageous statement. At the same time I think it is entirely true. (Hannah Arendt)

This year — 2011 − is the fiftieth anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Most of you are familiar with the basic facts surrounding the trial, but, since facts themselves have become increasingly tenuous in our times, it may not be supererogatory to restate them briefly. Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi Higher SS officer and member of the Gestapo during the Second World War. When the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem was adopted as German policy at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, it became Eichmann’s job to organize logistically the physical destruction of the millions of Jews living in Nazi dominated Europe. When he took on that enormous task he was already widely known as an “expert on the Jewish question” − an epithet he was proud of − due to his success in handling the “forced immigration,” “evacuation,” or in plain English, the expulsion of Austrian Jews after the Anschluss or annexation of Austria by the German Reich in 1938. The Reich that was to last a thousand years collapsed seven years later with Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945. Eichmann was sought by the Allied victors to stand…