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 Tuija Parvikko
Tuija Parvikko

A Arendt ,
rendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past offers a critical
analysis of the original American debate over Hannah Arendt’s
report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. First published in 2008,

Eichmann
Tuija Parvikko’s book discusses both the campaign against Arendt
organised by American Zionist organisations and the controversy

Arendt , Eichmann and the Politics of the Past

Arendt’s report caused within American Jewish intellectual circles.
Parvikko’s analysis carefully draws from the historical background of
the report, discussing Arendt’s early studies of Zionism and her critique
of the Jewish state. The volume also gives an account of Eichmann’s and the
capture in Argentina and the reception of the report among legal
scholars and the world press.
This edition includes a new prologue in which Parvikko reflects
Politics of the Past
on her own account in connection to recent academic discussions
on the controversy. The author’s analysis also covers contributions
that have attempted to follow Arendt’s notion of thinking without
banisters. With them, Parvikko engages in debate about going beyond
Arendt’s theoretical reflections on cohabitation, sharing the world,
and discussing the new political evils of the present world without
pregiven norms and patterns of thought.

Tuija Parvikko, PhD, holds the title of docent at the University of

Jyväskylä where she works as a senior researcher at the Department
of History and Ethnology. She has published extensively on Hannah
Arendt and the politics of memory.

Pro et Contra
SERIES
Pro et Contra
SERIES
 Tuija Parvikko

Arendt, Eichmann and

the Politics of the Past

Pro et Contra 2
 Published by Helsinki University Press
www.hup.fi

© Tuija Parvikko 2008 and 2021

Originally published in 2008 by the Finnish Political Science Association

Cover design by Ville Karppanen

Cover photo: Fred Stein / Lehtikuva

Pro et Contra. Books from the Finnish Political Science Association

ISSN (Print): 2736-8513
ISSN (Online): 2736-9129

ISBN (Paperback): 978-952-369-070-7

ISBN (PDF): 978-952-369-071-4

https://doi.org/10.33134/pro-et-contra-2

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCom-

mercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License (unless stated otherwise
within the content of the work). To view a copy of this license, visit https://
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mons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.
This license allows sharing and copying any part of the work, providing author
attribution is clearly stated. Under this license, the user of the material must
indicate if they have modified the material and retain an indication of previ-
ous modifications. This license prohibits commercial use of the material.

The full text of this book was peer reviewed in 2008, when the book was
first published. The new Prologue ‘On Recent Interpretations of Han-
nah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem’ has been peer reviewed prior to
publication. For full review policies, see http://www.hup.fi/

Suggested citation:
Parvikko, Tuija. 2021. Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past.
Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://doi.org/10.33134/pro-et-contra-2.

To read the free, open access version of this book online, visit
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or scan this QR code with your mobile device.
 CONTENTS

FOREWORD (Taru Haapala & Anna Kronlund) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

PROLOGUE: ON RECENT INTERPRETATIONS OF

HANNAH ARENDT’S EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

1. HANNAH ARENDT AND ZIONISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

1.1. The Cornerstones of Herzlian Zionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
1.2. The Lazarean-Arendtian Critique of the Unworldly Hierarchies of
Jewish Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
1.3. The Crisis of Zionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
1.3.1. The Ironies of Zionist Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
1.4. Arendt’s Critique of the Jewish State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
1.4.1. The Artificial Community in the Shadow of Natural Justification . . 45
2. THE CAPTURE OF ADOLF EICHMANN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
2.1. The Capture and Diplomatic Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
2.2. The Mossad Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
2.3. Ben-Gurion’s Mission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
2.4. The Judicial Pre-trial Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
2.5.1. The Pro-Israel Defence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
2.5.2. The Tale of Adolf Eichmann in Life Magazine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
2.5.3. “Leader of World Opinion”: The New York Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
2.5.4. Monster or Bureaucrat? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
3. THE CAMPAIGN AND ITS BACKGROUND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
3.1. Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
3.2. “Declaration of War” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
3.3. Writing Against the Current . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
3.4. Arendt’s Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
4. THE ARENDT CONTROVERSY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
4.1. Aufbau, 29 March . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
4.2. Pro domo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
4.3. Eichmann’s New Crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
4.4. The Evil of Banality: Facts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
4.5. Excommunication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
 4.6. The Responsibility of the Intellectuals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
4.6.1. To Know Enough to Judge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
4.6.2. Hannah Arendt’s “Jewish Revisionism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
4.6.3. The Crisis of Jewish Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
5. ARENDT’S IRONIES AND POLITICAL JUDGEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
5.1. Irony as Trope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
5.2. “The Darkest Chapter of the Whole Dark Story” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
5.3. The Collapse of the European Political Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
5.4. Eichmann’s New Evil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
5.5. Arendt as Judge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
6. THE EICHMANN TRIAL AND THE POLITICS OF THE PAST . . . . . 229
6.1. The Eichmann Trial as a Turning Point . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
6.2. The Conceptual Revolution of the Victim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
6.3. The Eichmann Trial as a Political Trial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
6.4. The Politics of Victims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
7. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

LITERATURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
 FOREWORD

Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past, originally published by

the Finnish Political Science Association in 2008, is one of the most
sought-after titles of its book series in English. In 2017, the board of
the Association decided to renew its book series as an open access
publication. The new series was titled Pro et Contra. Books from the
Finnish Political Science Association, and its first publication appeared
in December 2020 in collaboration with the Helsinki University
Press.
In the context of the reform, the new title reflected the profile
change of the book series. While the board’s decision to turn the
series into open access format was made to reach new audiences
globally, it also aimed to promote original high-quality scholarship
in political studies beyond the borders of the discipline and the
national context. In this respect, the title Pro et Contra highlights
the effort to engage in debate about political studies, especially in the
global context.
After the launch of the Pro et Contra series, the first edition of
Tuija Parvikko’s Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past had been
out of print for some time. Over the years, the board of the Finnish
Political Science Association had received numerous inquiries about
it from booksellers as well as researchers, teachers and students of
political theory in Finland. Internationally, the first edition reached
only a handful of readers. Against this background, this edition
being in open access format will make the book accessible to a wider
audience and will allow its highly original contribution in the field of
political theory to become more known.
The decision to republish the book with a new prologue was taken
not only due to the high demand in the national context but also
because of the re-emerging controversy surrounding Arendt’s Eich-

Foreword v
mann in Jerusalem internationally. While Parvikko’s book engages
in the original American debate over Arendt’s report of the trial of
Adolf Eichmann, it also argues that the debate over the report, illus-
trating the incapacity to understand the unprecedented political evil
of the Nazi crimes, had a decisive impact on further developments
in Holocaust studies, contributing to their redirection of focus from
perpetrators to victims. Parvikko’s book shows that debates sur-
rounding Arendt’s report have never really calmed down but have
taken a number of new directions. Furthermore, it illustrates that,
around the turn of the century, readings and debates over Eichmann
in Jerusalem became disengaged and displaced from their original
context. With the recurring interest about Arendt’s pamphlet and
subsequent public debates, Tuija Parvikko’s political reading remains
a timely contribution.
The difference between the original edition and this one is that,
along with this foreword, explaining the republication context and
the continued relevance of the original version, this edition con-
tains Tuija Parvikko’s new prologue, entitled ‘On Recent Interpre-
tations of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem’. In the prologue,
Parvikko reflects on her own political reading, which was arguably
one of the first, in connection to recent scholarly contributions and
developments of the controversy. Regarding the original manuscript,
we have corrected typographical errors and spelling inconsistencies.
However, no additional language editing has been undertaken. The
manuscript has been typeset by Helsinki University Press so that
the page numbers of this new version match the original publication,
which allows readers to follow up citations to the original volume.
We would like to warmly thank, first of all, Tuija Parvikko, who
generously put her time and effort into delivering the new prologue
for the republication. We would also like to offer our thanks to the
peer-reviewers of the new prologue, who offered constructive feed-
back, as well as Anna-Mari Vesterinen and Leena Kaakinen from
the Helsinki University Press for their assistance, support and expert

vi Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past

advice during the preparation of the manuscript. Finally, we would
like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude for the financial
support of the Finnish Association for Scholarly Publishing, whose
funding was crucial in renewing the book series into open access for-
mat in the first place, and the Federation of Finnish Learned Socie-
ties, which provided funding to publish this book.

Madrid and Turku, 28 November 2021

Taru Haapala and Anna Kronlund

Pro et Contra series editors

Foreword vii
 PROLOGUE: ON RECENT INTERPRETATIONS OF
HANNAH ARENDT’S EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM

During the Second World War, the idea of “collective guilt” or the “col-
lective responsibility” of all Germans for war crimes and genocides of
enormous groups of peoples prevailed among the Allied leadership.
Winston Churchill, for instance, spoke for a permanent weakening
and even of the dissolution of Germany in order to prevent future
catastrophes in Europe. For Hannah Arendt, the problem was more
complicated. Immediately after the war, she argued that the problem
in postwar Germany was how to bear the burden of confronting a peo-
ple among whom the boundaries dividing criminals from normal per-
sons, the guilty from the innocent, had been so completely effaced that
nobody would be able to tell whether they were dealing with a secret
hero or with a former mass murderer. Most Germans had become
“irresponsible corresponsibles”, supporting the Nazi regime by follow-
ing orders and acting as cogs in a machine of mass murder. In trying
to understand what made people support the Nazis, Arendt focused
her attention on the person who boasted of being the organising spirit
of the murder. This man was Heinrich Himmler. Arendt argued that
Himmler was neither a Bohemian like Goebbels, nor a sex criminal
like Streicher, nor a perverted fanatic like Hitler, nor an adventurer
like Göring. He was, instead, a good pater familias, with all the outer
signs of respectability, incapable of betraying his wife and anxious to
seek a secure and decent future for his children. (Arendt 1945)
For Arendt, the real horror lay in the fact that this kind of a good
family man had become the greatest criminal of the century. More
precisely, the trouble with the Nazi perpetrators and their fellow trav-
ellers and followers was that they were not composed of a group of
perverted criminals with their heads full of evil motives. They were,
instead, apparently normal family men who attempted to conform to

Prologue ix
and obey the rules and practices of the society, to act decently, pursu-
ing a successful career and good standard of living for their families.
These reflections during the immediate postwar period show that
Arendt had formed her view of the character of the Nazi criminal well
before Israeli intelligence captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in
1960. However, she had not by then seen a Nazi criminal alive. There-
fore, she wanted to attend his trial in Jerusalem. This book deals with
the immense debate provoked by the report that Arendt wrote of the
trial. One of the conspicuous characteristics of the debate that con-
tinues to re-emerge every now and then is that, until recently, these
early reflections of Arendt have been systematically dismissed. While
the contributors do believe that Arendt had formed her view of Eich-
mann’s character well in advance of the trial, they claim that she did
so only based on the newspaper coverage of his capture in 1960.
The immediate postwar period from the 1940s to the trial of
Adolf Eichmann in the beginning of the 1960s in Jerusalem wit-
nessed a relatively quick turn, both in defeated Germany and other
European countries, from the mourning of victims of war and gen-
eral devastation and suffering caused by the war to looking forward
to economic recovery and restoration. Even if the postwar period is
not simply characterised by silence and lack of debate over the ques-
tions of guilt and responsibility and the fate of the victims of the
Nazi terror – as a number of historians have tried to prove – it is fair
to argue that, in general, people were more interested in rebuilding
Europe and their own lives than mourning the victims and arguing
over guilt and responsibility for war crimes and genocides.1

1. In Germany, one of the few who attempted to analytically and critically discuss the
guilt of Germans was the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who not only had an intensive
correspondence with Arendt as to how to deal with the guilt and responsibility of
Germans and the legacy of the entire Nazi period but also tried to awake ­public
debate by publishing a volume entitled Die Schuldfrage. Für Völkermord gibt es
keine Verjährung (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1946). Abbreviated English
edition The Question of German Guilt (New York: Dial Press, 1947).

x Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past

 Having concluded the Nuremberg and other major war crimes
trials, the Western powers were also not interested in hunting Nazi
criminals. Moreover, the postwar period was characterised by a
lack of exact knowledge of the volume of Nazi crimes as the first
studies on these were only just emerging. In this respect, the begin-
ning of the 1960s marked a turning point. The first serious stud-
ies over the fate of the victims of the Nazi crimes appeared, such
as Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jews (1963). Along
with the capture of Adolf Eichmann, a new interest in the Nazi
“hunt” and convicting Nazi criminals arose. Some historians, such
as Annette Wieviorka (1998), have argued that the Eichmann trial
marked the end of the period of silence and the beginning of the
era of the witness. More precisely, the Eichmann trial was the first
great public event in which the voices of witnesses and listening to
the stories of victims of the Holocaust were given a significant role.
Other historians have recently argued that the Eichmann trial alone
did not usher in an era of the witness. For instance, Henry Rousso
(2017) has pointed out that mass testimonies following episodes of
extreme violence first appeared during and after the First World
War, in particular in the writings of officers and soldiers. This was
a new phenomenon resulting from the thresholds crossed by the
conflict’s cruelty. A small number of Shoah testimonies emerged as
soon as the Second World War ended. These brought up another
set of questions, extensively debated for 30 years, about their recep-
tion and assimilation, a process that cannot be reduced to merely
counting the writings published before the 1960s (Rousso 2017,
35–36).
Hannah Arendt covered the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker.
Her report first appeared in five articles published in consecutive
issues only two years later, in 1963. It immediately caused an immense
debate among American Jewish intellectuals, which soon extended
to other intellectual circles as well. The debate became international
as the report appeared in book form, especially after the German

Prologue xi
translation appeared in 1964. The debate has continued ever since,
almost uninterrupted.
Relatively peaceful moments have been followed by furious and
heated wars of words. The original American debate focused mostly
on the themes of Jewish responsibility and cooperation with the
Nazis in Jewish councils (Judenräte), Eichmann’s evil motivations,
the character of the accused and the meaning of the banality of evil.
In comparison, the German and other European debates focused
on (the lack of ) resistance at large, voluntary collaboration with the
Nazis and the position of former Nazis and fascists in postwar Euro-
pean societies. The American and European debates overlapped only
partly, and this distinction between the US-centric and Eurocentric
debates has been largely recognisable until today.
This book was originally published in 2008. First and foremost, it
focused on the original American debate over Eichmann in Jerusalem
(1963) and discussed the question of why American Jewish intellec-
tuals took Arendt’s arguably controversial arguments so personally,
as if she had written a pamphlet on the moral mindset of American
Jewish intellectuals, instead of a report of the trial of a major Nazi
criminal and a political judgement of his crimes. Firstly, I tried to draw
a careful picture of Arendt’s own mindset and the context of writing
her book. I analysed her early studies of Zionism and critique of the
Jewish state and discussed her conception of and relation with Zion-
ism, arguing that her critical Zionist background constituted the
most important part of her personal stance on the Eichmann trial.
Secondly, I dealt with the general background of the trial, telling the
story of the capture of Eichmann and discussing the public debate
caused by it. Thirdly, I analysed the original controversy and its basic
arguments, revealing how badly Arendt’s book was misread, showing
how easily even critical intellectuals may succumb to the temptation
of ad hominem argumentation. Fourthly, I showed how important a
role irony as a trope played in Arendt’s argumentative style. Indeed,
on the one hand, I argued that Eichmann in Jerusalem was badly

xii Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past

received in the United States because hardly anybody understood
Arendt’s ironic style of argumentation. Instead, readers took her text
literally, believing that her book was meant to be an impudent and
arrogant attack against both the wartime and the postwar Jewish
establishment and intellectuals. On the other hand, I claimed that
the readership could not bear the sharpness of her argumentation in
so far as it mercilessly revealed the political weakness, conformism,
inclination to wishful thinking, and lack of political judgement of
not only the Jewish leadership and American Jewish intellectuals but
also the Western political elite at large. Finally, I discussed the lat-
est developments of the Arendt controversy at the beginning of the
21st century. I argued that the Eichmann trial marked an important
turning point in the conceptual revolution of witness and victim, and
that Arendt’s report had a decisive impact on causing this turn. More
importantly, I argued that, around the turn of the century, the read-
ings and debates over Eichmann in Jerusalem were disengaged and
displaced from the original context of the book and included in the
debates surrounding the singularity of the Holocaust and European
politics of the past in general.
Hannah Arendt’s book itself was by no means about the victims’
voices. On the contrary, Arendt harshly criticised the attorney gen-
eral, Gideon Hausner, for focusing the attention of the court on the
sufferings of the victims instead of the crimes of the accused. Further-
more, Arendt maintained that the statements of witnesses were not
reliable evidence, either for the court or for the historians, as human
memory is treacherous, even more so when traumatic experiences are
in question. Even if people do not purposefully lie to the court, they
can remember badly or only a part of an experience, or even adopt
other people’s memories as their own.2 Three other themes prevailed
in the first debate: the Jewish responsibility, the Jewish councils and
2. For example, Primo Levi has dealt with the fickleness of memory from the victim’s
point of view. See I sommersi e i salvati (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), and the English
translation, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Summit Books, 1988).

Prologue xiii
cooperation with the Nazis, the nature of Eichmann’s evil, and the
meaning of Arendt’s thesis of the banality of his evil. I showed in my
book that, underlying all these three themes of the American debate,
there was a hidden layer that dealt with the identity of American
Jews and their responsibility for what happened to their European
brethren. In addition, intertwined with this hidden layer was the
question of the fate of the Jewish state and its right to represent
world Jewry. Behind the question of why “they” did not rebel, there
was the question of why “we” did not do anything in order to help
them. While American Jewish intellectuals were wondering why
European Jews did not organise resistance and self-defence against
Nazi discrimination and violence, they were ashamed of not hav-
ing done anything to encourage and help their European brethren.
Similarly, behind the question of why “they” cooperated with their
perpetrators, there was the question of what “we” would have done in
a similar situation. It was easy to criticise the behaviour of European
Jews from the other side of the ocean. Hardly anybody understood
Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil and what she really meant when
she argued that the deeds of the criminal did not correspond to the
doer. Even today, Arendt’s critics have trouble understanding what
her thesis really means. Most critics try to find an explanation of it
in Eichmann’s perverted morality and his wicked character and end
up claiming that there is something wrong with Arendt’s own con-
ception of the relationship between morality and politics (of mass
murder). In my book, I argue, instead, that the core of the banality
of evil was that wickedness was not inscribed in the intrinsic or true
nature of human being but in her/his deeds and their consequences.
What made these deeds astounding was not their exceptional or
devilish nature but their seeming and apparent normality. More pre-
cisely, Eichmann did not do evil by personally torturing or murder-
ing somebody but, instead, by first leading the organisation of Jews’
expulsion from the Reich and then of their deportation to camps,
being one of the principal executioners of the project of annihilation.

xiv Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past

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