In this 50th year following the publication of Hannah Arendt’s troubled and troubling book,  “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” a movie appears.  Titled  “Hannah Arendt” it details the furor surrounding her 1963 reports for The New Yorker ( a “civil war” among New York intellectuals), and is, as Roger Bergowitz tells us, renewing that furor.  Bergowitz, academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, at Bard College gives us an excellent short summary of her observations and analysis and of the misunderstandings that continue to flow from too shallow a reading of what has become her best known aphorism, ‘the banality of evil.”

“… Arendt never wrote that Eichmann simply followed orders. She never portrayed him, in Cesarani’s words, as a “dull-witted clerk or a robotic bureaucrat.” Indeed she rejected the idea that Eichmann was simply following orders. She emphasized that Eichmann took enormous pride in his initiative in deporting Jews and also in his willingness to disobey orders to do so, especially Himmler’s clear orders — offered in 1944 in the hope of leniency amid impending defeat — to “take good care of the Jews, act as their nursemaid.” In direct disobedience, Eichmann organized death marches of Hungarian Jews; as Arendt writes, he “sabotaged” Himmler’s orders. As the war ground to an end, as Arendt saw, Eichmann, against Himmler, remained loyal to Hitler’s idea of the Nazi movement and did “his best to make the Final Solution final.”

Misreading ‘Eichman in Jerusalem’

This would be an excellent time to re-read her most widely read work.  I plan to.