The idea that evil could be “banal” still shocks us. It’s much scarier to consider that genocide could be carried out unthinkingly by the most vacuous of bureaucrats and not by intrinsically bad people acting with bad intent. This new moral category was Hannah Arendt’s now infamous reaction to witnessing the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann for the crime of helping to carry out the Holocaust. Her New Yorker dispatches, turned into a 1963 book called “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” provoked an enormous backlash from which Arendt’s reputation never really recovered. Critics assumed that by trying to understand Eichmann’s particular kind of evil, Arendt was somehow excusing his actions.
Though the question of whether evil can really be “banal” has been debated in the decades since, Arendt did seem to have the last word on Eichmann himself, shaping our understanding of the man in an enduring way. But a new book by Bettina Stangneth, an independent German philosopher living in Hamburg, has just completely overturned conventional wisdom about the man Arendt observed in that glass box in Jerusalem.
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