The trial of Adolf Eichmann

Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, 29 May 1961, United States Holocaust Museum, Courtesy of Israel Government Press Office. Wikimedia Commons.

One of the phrases that Arendt is most well known for is “the banality of evil”, which she coined when she went to watch the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961.

Eichmann was a war criminal who had escaped to Argentina. In 1960, he was captured by Israeli secret services, the Mossad, and brought to Jerusalem for trial. It was an extraordinarily important moment in the world’s coming to terms with the Holocaust.

Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” is often misunderstood as her saying that Eichmann was kind of innocent because he was just part of this banal system. But, actually, what Arendt was trying to get at takes us back to the issue of thinking – or the opposite of thinking, which is thoughtlessness.

Thinking without bannisters

When Arendt arrived in Jerusalem, she said to her mentor and former teacher, Karl Jaspers, I have to go and look at this man face to face and try to work out what’s happening.

She thought the trial was terribly important because it did things the Nuremberg trial wasn’t able to do. She understood that the unprecedented nature of the Nazi crime produced new challenges for law, for judgement and (you guessed it) for thinking. She was very worried about Nuremberg because she thought that this was a new crime. How are we going to judge it? We can’t judge it using old tools. We’re going to have to learn.

This is the first time she uses the phrase to “think without bannisters”. She goes to Jerusalem to think without bannisters. She sees Eichmann in his glass box. On the first day that she saw him, he had a cold. He was a middle-aged guy, he’d forgotten which glasses he had on and he was chuntering clichés. He seemed to have no sense of where he was or who he was talking to, though that’s not to say he was stupid or clueless. (And, actually, I think she got him wrong. He was far more cunning than she gave him credit for.) What she said was that this is a man who’s done this extraordinary evil and who has no thought about it. He did it unthinkingly. She said – and I’m trained as a literary critic, so this is very important to me – that it comes across in his language. He’s just using self-aggrandising, ridiculous clichés. He’s like your worst uncle at the worst wedding ever, lecturing you on Brexit or Trump.

The banality of radical thoughtlessness

Arendt’s definition of a crime against humanity is very interesting. She says a crime against humanity is a crime against human diversity. I think that’s something really worth holding onto. But Eichmann wasn’t, as it were, a kind of radically evil person who had talked himself into doing wrong.

She compares him to Shakespeare’s Richard III. There’s that wonderful soliloquy near the beginning of Richard III, where Richard’s persuading himself to do crime. Shall I prove myself a villain? Am I a villain? OK, I am. It’s in this inner dialogue that Richard decides that he will be a villain.

Eichmann, Arendt says, has no sense of that inner dialogue whatsoever. That is his banality: the banality of radical thoughtlessness. Eichmann is full of these explosive comments, which are completely banal. He’ll say things like, ‘I can’t stand the sight of blood. I once went to a camp and saw some blood moving up from the mud and I nearly fainted.’ Or, ‘I’m a great humanitarian. I could see that there were too many people in those cattle trucks, so I decided there should be fewer people in the cattle trucks.’ He was sending them to their deaths!

Not all villains are Nazis

View of the Großer Wannsee from the villa at 56–58 Am Grossen Wannsee, where the Wannsee Conference was held in 1942. Near Berlin, Germany. By JG Howes 1995. Wikimedia Commons.

It’s this kind of radical thoughtlessness that Arendt thought defined modern criminality: the crime of thoughtlessness. We can think about that today: how the most outrageous things happen, but without there seeming to be an evil intent.

Think, for example, about COVID-19 in France, Spain and the United Kingdom. We had this outrageous moment when old people were being sent back into care homes. There was a real sense that they were being allowed to die of COVID. Now, there wasn’t some great Wannsee moment, where our health ministers looked over a lake and said, look, there’s only one thing for it, let’s eradicate the old. That didn’t happen. But someone along the line thought, oh, we’re just going to have to let this happen. This is OK. We’re going to develop policies which do this.

Think about migrant policy in Europe. There was a moment several years ago where the UK home secretary, Amber Rudd – a very intelligent woman – said without a trace of irony that we have to make the crossing from Calais really difficult and dangerous in order to save the children.

These kinds of obscenities are a banality, which is why Arendt thought that thinking was a prophylactic against the thoughtlessness of modern criminality. It’s easy to say that this person is evil, they’re anti-American, they’re racist, they’re this and that. It’s easy to have villains and perpetrators and innocents and human rights defenders. What’s more difficult to think about is those moments of thoughtlessness, which are structural.

Political accountability in the age of social media

It’s not just institutions but also social life that can produce these kinds of banal thoughtlessness. Arendt is often misunderstood. She believed quite dogmatically in divisions between private life, which she wanted to protect, the social, which she thought was tyrannical, and the political realm, where she wanted people to make judgements. She saw the social as attacking both politics, in which all politics becomes a question of social tastes or norms, and, just as catastrophically, private life.

As a feminist, you might have issues with this because a lot of what happens to women, as well as a lot of race struggles, are based on what happens in private life, which doesn’t get to see the light of day. But if we think about the growth of the social, we think about how social media has pushed out a sense of politics being a space for debate and for accountability, and how it has encroached radically on our private lives. There’s not a moment when we’re not somehow performing a version of ourselves for social consumption.

So, this isn’t about bureaucratic, heavy-handed Soviet or Nazi institutions. It’s about what happens in our versions of the social, and, as Arendt would add, what happens to political accountability in that mode.

There’s a sense, and I’m not the only person to commentate on this, in which we’ve almost switched over. What should be publicly known – who gets what contract, how things are being paid for, who owns the money, what kind of system is working for which politicians – is now going to be private. Those are considered private questions that we can’t ask our politicians. It’s completely switched around from the way that Arendt thought it should be. We need to be very watchful about that. When Arendt uses that phrase “an attentive facing up to reality”, maybe the key word there is “attention” – attending to what is happening in front of us, rather than this endless consumption and creation of social anxiety and social pleasure, which blinds us to what is happening.

Nothing sacred in merely being human

Photo by Mykola Komarovskyy

Thinking, of course, is never enough. It’s really significant that we think about Arendt through refugee crises, as they appear, because her first political action was as a refugee activist. When she left Berlin, she went to Paris to work with agencies that were taking Jewish children from Europe – from Poland and then increasingly from Germany and Austria – training them up and taking them to Palestine. This wasn’t because she was a committed Zionist. She was very critical of Zionism and of a one-nation ethnic State under any circumstances. But she knew she had to take action, because the thing about the refugee or stateless person, Arendt realised, is that if you don’t have citizenship rights, you don’t have national rights. If you don’t have political rights, then all you are is merely human.

She had this striking phrase, which worked for the 1930s and 1940s and works now: “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of merely being human.” That’s a critique of human rights, which simply says that everyone’s human and everyone has human rights. In Arendt’s opinion, that’s a nice idea, but actually it’s us in a political community who give each other rights and who give each other a sense of humanity. So, if people are just relying on an abstract notion of humanity, all they’ll get is a cut-price humanitarianism, at very best; and other things, at the very worst. Her sense would be that you have to take action to maintain a community in which you can have what she called “the right to have rights”. Rights are not gifts from the wealthy to the poor. Rights are things we have to work out, compete for, fight about, give each other and agree upon what they are.

Discover more about

radical thoughtlessness

Stonebridge, L. (2012). Writing After Nuremberg: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of the Trauma Trial. In M. Rawlinson, & A. Piette (Eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature (pp. 101–110). Edinburgh University Press.

Stonebridge, L. (2011). The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg. Edinburgh University Press.

Stonebridge, L. (2018). Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees. Oxford University Press.

Stonebridge, L. (2021, April 10). The flight's lost moment. Arendt Studies.

Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil