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toggle_fow 's review for:
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
by Hannah Arendt
We read excerpts of this in college, so I always meant to go back and pick up the whole thing. You never want to be the guy using "the banality of evil" as a slick code phrase for "I'm really smart" in conversation while not actually knowing anything about what Arendt wrote.
This book purports to be a report on the Israeli show trial of Eichmann after the Mossad kidnapped him from Argentina in the sixties. It's actually a whole lot more than that. Some of this book deals with Eichmann as a person and some of it with the trial, but I would say the bulk of it is simply a history of the Final Solution, with Eichmann as the vehicle through which the story is told.
I learned a lot. Even with Arendt's explanations, it is hard to figure out what the heck is going on in the byzantine Nazi bureaucracy. I knew very little of the history of Germany and the Jews pre-WWII, and the gradual progression from emigration to deportation to "resettlement" was something I hadn't realized before. Also, the history of each individual German-occupied or German-allied European territory's reaction to being incorporated into the Final Solution was deeply interesting.
Overall, a very educational book. I'm glad I finally got around to it. Some parts were dense; the arguments regarding the legality of the trial and the definition of genocide were particularly difficult to parse. And some parts were not dense at all. For example, the excerpt she includes of the court's judgment:
This book purports to be a report on the Israeli show trial of Eichmann after the Mossad kidnapped him from Argentina in the sixties. It's actually a whole lot more than that. Some of this book deals with Eichmann as a person and some of it with the trial, but I would say the bulk of it is simply a history of the Final Solution, with Eichmann as the vehicle through which the story is told.
I learned a lot. Even with Arendt's explanations, it is hard to figure out what the heck is going on in the byzantine Nazi bureaucracy. I knew very little of the history of Germany and the Jews pre-WWII, and the gradual progression from emigration to deportation to "resettlement" was something I hadn't realized before. Also, the history of each individual German-occupied or German-allied European territory's reaction to being incorporated into the Final Solution was deeply interesting.
Overall, a very educational book. I'm glad I finally got around to it. Some parts were dense; the arguments regarding the legality of the trial and the definition of genocide were particularly difficult to parse. And some parts were not dense at all. For example, the excerpt she includes of the court's judgment:
"...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 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. That is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang."