It is more noteworthy that [Ben Gurion] had not foreseen, or did not care to mention, that Eichmann's capture would trigger the first serious effort made by Germany to bring to trial at least those who were directly implicated in murder. The Central Agency for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, belatedly founded by the West German state in 1958 and headed by Prosecutor Erwin Schüle, had run into all kinds of difficulties, caused partly by the unwillingness of German witnesses to cooperate and partly by the unwillingness of the local courts to prosecute on the basis of the material sent them from the Central Agency. Not that the trial in Jerusalem produced any important new evidence of the kind needed for the discovery of Eichmann's associates; but the news of Eichmann's sensational capture and of the impending trial had sufficient impact to persuade the local courts to use Mr. Schüle's findings, and to overcome the native reluctance to do anything about "murderers in our midst" by the time-honored means of posting rewards for the capture of well-known criminals.
The results were amazing. Seven months after Eichmann's arrival in Jerusalem - and four months before the opening of the trial - Richard Baer, successor to Rudolf Höss as Commandant of Auschwitz, could finally be arrested. In rapid succession, most of the members of the so-called Eichmann Commando - Franz Novak, who lived as a printer in Austria; Dr. Otto Hunsche, who had settled as a lawyer in West Germany; Hermann Krumey, who had become a druggist; Gustav Richter, former "Jewish adviser" in Rumania; and Willi Zöpf, who had filled the same post in Amsterdam - were arrested also; although evidence against them had been published in Germany years before, in books and magazine articles, not one of them had found it necessary to live under an assumed name. For the first time since the close of the war, German newspapers were full of reports on the trials of Nazi criminals, all of them mass murderers (after May, 1960, the month of Eichmann's capture, only first-degree murder could be prosecuted; all other offenses were wiped out by the statute of limitations, which is twenty years for murder), and the reluctance of the local courts to prosecute these crimes showed itself only in the fantastically lenient sentences meted out the accused.--Hannah Arendt (1963; [Revised and Enlarged Edition, 1965]) Eichmann in Jerusalem: the banality of evil, 13-15.
There has been so much journalistic and scholarly polemic surrounding Eichmann in Jerusalem (hereafter Eichmann) from even before its publication that it may come as a surprise that some of the most significant, even polemical arguments in the book have received scant attention. But since these involve unresolved issues in political life and political philosophy, I hope, dear reader, you will forgive me for ignoring the familiar issues as I return to Eichmann.
The quoted passage above introduces the second main theme in the book: this is the failure of West Germany to prosecute its own war-criminals in a serious fashion after it was founded in 1949. And Arendt notes that one of the unintended and highly welcome effects of the illegal kidnapping of Eichmann was that it created the legal and political will to start holding major "mass murderers" to account. No less important is that it created mass publicity around their deeds. For, one of the main themes of Eichmann is the failure of justice in Germany (and some other countries, including the Netherlands).
Of course, Arendt is not hopeful that justice will be served in Germany. Most trials of the mass murderers end in ridiculously low sentences in West Germany. One may suspect this was due to the failure of genuine denazification in West Germany:
There is little hope that things will change now, even though the Adenauer administration has been forced to weed out of the judiciary more than a hundred and forty judges and prosecutors, along with many police officers with more than ordinarily compromising pasts, and to dismiss Wolfgang Immerwahr Fränkel, the chief prosecutor of the Federal Supreme Court, because, his middle name notwithstanding, he had been less than candid when asked about his Nazi past. It has been estimated that of the eleven thousand five hundred judges in the Bundesrepublik, five thousand were active in the courts under the Hitler regime. (16)
And, in fact, as early as 1950 Arendt has written perceptively on the moral and political failures of denazification in Commentary.+ But Arendt leaves no doubt that the underlying problem is not a lack of political will from, as it were, the top down thwarting a more authentic democratic sensibility, but rather that the political leadership of West Germany (Adenauer) reflects the underlying sensibility all too well: "The attitude of the German people toward their own past...could hardly have been more clearly demonstrated: they themselves did not much care one way or the other, and did not particularly mind the presence of [these] murderers at large in the country." (16)* Arendt thinks this indifference blameworthy (recall her "fantastically lenient").
This naturally raises the question what the citizenry ought to feel and why this matters. Somewhat surprisingly** Arendt thinks moral indignation is the proper response. She repeatedly calls attention to its absence where it should have been apt: first, she notes explicitly that the conspirators against Hitler were "not inspired by moral indignation or by what they knew other people had been made to suffer." (100) A second, more striking occasion occurs, in the context of criticizing an argument by Martin Buber, in the final chapter of the book. (This reinforces my point that the theme discussed here frames the argument of Eichmann.) Buber had claimed in opposition to the death penalty that the execution of Eichmann would "serve to expiate the guilt felt by many young persons in Germany." Arendt is polite enough not to say that Buber is, thereby, treating Eichmann as a christ like figure whose execution thereby becomes a mechanism of atonement for those entirely unrelated to (the events leading to) his conviction. Arendt's response is instructive:
The youth of Germany is surrounded, on all sides and in all walk of life, by men in positions of authority and in public office who are very guilty indeed but who feel nothing of the sort. The normal reaction to this state of affairs should be indignation, but indignation would be quite risky - not a danger to life and limb but definitely a handicap in a career. Those young German men and women who every once in a while - on the occasion of all the Diary of Anne Frank hubbub and of the Eichmann trial - treat us to hysterical outbreaks of guilt feelings are not staggering under the burden of the past, their fathers' guilt; rather, they are trying to escape from the pressure of very present and actual problems into a cheap sentimentality.) (251)
There are a number of central issues lurking here. First, the absence of felt indignation by elder and younger Germans is evidence that the "moral collapse" which according to Arendt was omnipresent during the Nazi years has not ended with the end of war. (This is with the use of those words also a major theme of the 1950 Commentary article mentioned above.) That is to say, the effects of moral collapse become visible in the failure to feel and express relevant moral emotions. This is connected to Arendt's main criticism of the Eichmann trial: its failure to "put before the eyes of the world in its true dimensions, because it offers the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society - not only in Germany but in almost all countries, not only among the persecutors but also among the victims." (125; see also the remarks in the postscript on p. 297 ) I return to the nature and causes of such moral collapse in future posts.
So, second, the function of a trial, the meting out of justice, is not just, although this is central, to sit in judgment of a person, and, as she would emphasize (recall) in "truth and politics," ascertain the truth, but also a mechanism to channel and placate the moral indignation victims and spectators ought to feel at the sight crimes done to fellow humans.++ This reactive attitude is to be distinguished from the many various failures to take on the position of another recounted in Eichmann. The lack of such expressed indignation is a measure of the fact that what we may call the social conditions of very possibility of true justice are absent even in political and legal practices/circumstances where the form of the rule of the law is present (as exhibited by the sentencing practices in West Germany).
Third, and finally today: Arendt's comment on the youth of West Germany may strike some as unfair. She treats them as careerist (no better in a sense than Eichmann, who is revealed as a base careerist throughout Eichmann). But while it would be too simple to connect the many trials prompted by Eichmann's kidnapping and, perhaps Eichmann, to the student movement in Germany of the 60s and 70s, there is some such connection. For, while the student movement was, in one dimension an international affair, there is no doubt that along another dimension the triggers and content varied locally (as she put it in an interview in 1970, "the national differences" of the student movement "are very great"). Arendt recognized the "conspicuous moral coloration of the movement," although she also thought that remnants of nationalism were visible in it.
In West Germany part of the grounds of social unrest among the student protestors is that so many positions of authority were being held by former Nazis. (I have not found a comment by Arendt on this alas.) And so from this perspective they provide hope that a moral collapse can be reversed over time. But I don't intend to end on such hope. Rather, this student movement also turned, in part, violent eventually;*** this suggests that the inability or incapacity to express moral indignation is a problem not just for justice, but also politics.
*I added "these" because in context it is clear that these murderers are not viewed as dangerous in present conditions.
+I thank Waseem Yaqoob for reminding me of this piece.
**I say 'surprisingly' for two reasons: (i) what I am about to say fits awkwardly with the Kantianism that now frames the main scholarly approaches to Eichmann; (ii) to the best of my knowledge the recent revival of interest in philosophical approaches to anger -- recall Srinivasan, Lorde and Dotson, Olberding, Johnson and Kazarian etc. -- has not found inspiration in Arendt.
++This idea is nicely expressed by Adam Smith, and recently revived by Steve Darwall in his work on the significance of the second person.
***Most relevant here: the RAF's kidnapping and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer.
Comments