Eichmann

Coming out from a screening of Claude Lanzmann Le Dernier des Injustes, a few weeks after I watched Hannah Arendt, I feel frustrated that it was not followed by a discussion.

Murmelstein, the last surviving Elder of the Jews, in the ghetto of Theresienstadt, abruptly condemns Hannah Arendt's theses of the banality of evil, which she expressed in the context of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann to whom he has being tightly confronted from 1938 to 1944.

For Murmelstein, Eichmann is a demon.

Arendt, on her behalf, went as far as to condemn the Judenräte for having helped the nazis in maintaining an order which made the Final Solution more effective than it would otherwise have been.

It is understandable that Murmelstein's aggressivity towards Arendt is thus reactive.

The context of Eichmann's trial is heavily pschychological: it is a man whom one condemns and hangs. Qualifying a man as a demon should always let us suspicious: it is all too comfortable to exclude the monster from the collectivity, as radically different from oneself. Arendt may otherwise have been tempted by a more structuralist approach toward history, attempting to unveil social laws rather than satisfy herself with moral considerations on an individual.

It is thus not so much Eichmann, whom she considers as banal, than the evil of nazi totalitarianism.