August 31, 1999

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Evil Isn't Banal

Eichmann in his
prison cell, 1963

By RON ROSENBAUM

EARLIER this month a German newspaper published excerpts from what were claimed to be "diaries" Adolf Eichmann kept while awaiting trial in Israel, in which Eichmann once again reprised his deceitful "just following orders" alibi for his key role in expediting the Nazis' "Final Solution." The Israeli government is debating whether to release the full text of Eichmann's jailhouse writings.

So perhaps now is the time to put to rest at last the intellectual rationale that gave credibility to Eichmann's lie about his role: the fashionable but vacuous cliche about the "banality of evil." It is remarkable how many people mouth this phrase as if it were somehow a sophisticated response to the death camps, when in fact it is rather a sophisticated form of denial: not denying the crime but denying the full criminality of the perpetrators.

You're probably familiar with the origin of the banality of evil: It was the subtitle of Hannah Arendt's 1963 book "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil." The phrase was born of Arendt's remarkable naiveté as a journalist. Few would dispute her eminence as a philosopher, but she was the world's worst court reporter, someone who could be put to shame by any veteran courthouse scribe from a New York tabloid.

It somehow didn't occur to Arendt that a defendant like Eichmann, facing execution if convicted, might lie on the stand about his crimes and his motives. Did she actually expect Eichmann to repeat what he's reported to have said at the end of the war:

"I shall laugh when I jump into the grave because of the feeling that I killed five million Jews"? In the absence of such an admission, Arendt chose instead to take the Nazi at his word when he took the stand and testified that he really didn't harbor any special animosity toward Jews, that when it came to this little business of exterminating the Jews he was just a harried bureaucrat, a paper shuffler "just following orders" from above.

Arendt then proceeded to make Eichmann's disingenuous self-portrait the basis for a sweeping generalization about the nature of evil. It is a generalization that suggests that conscious, willful, knowing evil is irrelevant or virtually non-existent; that the form evil most often assumes - the form evil took in Hitler's Germany - is that of faceless little men following orders, and that old-fashioned evil is the stuff of childish fairytales.

There are, of course, a few problems with this analysis. Even if it were true that Eichmann was just following orders, someone had to be giving the orders. In Eichmann's case, those orders came from Reinhard Heydrich, a fanatical hater who was relaying with enormous enthusiasm the exterminationist orders of Adolf Hitler. And as Daniel Goldhagen noted in "Hitler's Willing Executioners," a great many ordinary Germans showed a great deal of enthusiasm for the genocidal tasks to which they had been assigned.

It hardly needs to be said that Hitler and Heydrich's hatred was not in any way banal. It is closer to what Arendt herself had previously called, in "The Origins of Totalitarianism," "radical evil." In that book, she wrote of the existence of an "absolute evil" that could no longer be understood and explained by the usual motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice, but of a "radical evil difficult to conceive of even in the face of its factual evidence."

There was, in Arendt's initial response to the death camps, a kind of philosophic humility: Nazi evil was so radical, it was difficult even "to conceive of." But the humility disappeared in the Eichmann reportage. She decided she had it all figured out. "Evil is never radical," she wrote to the philosopher Karl Jaspers, "it's not inexplicable, it can be understood, defined by the phrase the banality of evil."

Since then, the phrase "banality of evil" has itself become one of the most egregious instances of genuine banality in our culture. For all its pretended sophistication, it has the effect of letting mass murderers off the hook. It wasn't their fault so much as the social conditioning that robbed them of the ability to question immoral orders. The new Eichmann excerpts attempt to blame his "childhood discipline" for the acts he committed as an adult.

There is great comfort in abandoning the "nightmare" of radical evil for the notion of banality. But the plain fact is that the Holocaust was committed by fully responsible, fully engaged human beings, and not by unthinking bureaucratic automatons. The Nazis were human beings capable of making moral choices who consciously chose radical evil.

This, the nightmare from which Arendt fled, is the truth about the perpetrators of the Final Solution. Banality plays no part in it. Let's hope that the possible surfacing of Eichmann's new "diaries" - actually the same old fraudulent alibi Arendt's bad reporting gave a fig leaf of legitimacy to - can be the occasion to bury the false consolation of that foolish cliché.

Mr. Rosenbaum is author of "Explaining Hitler" (HarperCollins, 1999) and a columnist for the New York Observer, in which an earlier version of this article appeared.