The career of Hannah Arendt is surely one of the oddest on record. Doubt has been cast on claims for which she was best known. Yet her posthumous prestige as a political theorist seems largely unaffected by any refutations of her claims.

For example, in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1964), she covered the trial of the single Nazi official most directly responsible for implementing the Holocaust. Her report famously concluded that Eichmann “never acted from base motives … never had any inclination to kill anybody [and] “could not have acted otherwise … .” In Arendt’s characterization, Eichmann was a mindless clerk whose chief flaw was that he never thought to question the mechanisms of the bureaucracy that employed him. The poor fellow just forgot to think!

Today, Arendt’s “banal” portrayal of Eichmann has been refuted decisively by Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, a book that came out in 2014. While Eichmann was enjoying his comfortable exile in Argentina, his Nazi comrades, former SS men, recorded his reflections and reminiscences. There Eichmann disclosed the mindset that had motivated him to implement the Holocaust. 

     “I have no regrets!” he said. “I balk inwardly at saying we did anything wrong. No. I have to tell you quite honestly that if … we had killed 10.3 million, I would be satisfied, and would say good, we have destroyed an enemy … .”

Doesn’t sound banal to me.

For another example, there was Arendt’s defense of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who had joined the Nazi party, become Rektor of the University of Freiburg, ousted Jewish students from his classes, and – in an outstanding case of personal betrayal – removed emeritus status from his former mentor, the philosopher Edmund Husserl, who had facilitated Heidegger’s original appointment at Freiburg. 

In 1971, Arendt wrote a celebratory piece about her former professor, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty” for The New York Review of Books. In it, she explained his Nazi period as a mere “escapade” or “mistake” which her former mentor had “recognized after a short time” as a lapse due to having temporarily quit “the residence of thinking.” Like Eichmann before him, apparently Heidegger too forgot to think! 

Was it something like the flu, but strangely affecting cognition? Was it going round Germany in the 1940’s? Did everybody catch it?

It wasn’t the flu. For the time line of Arendt’s dark-and-light relations with Heidegger, her one-time philosophy professor and lifelong lover, see my chapter, ‘Spoiling One’s Story: the Case of Hannah Arendt” in A Good Look at Evil (2016). It’s written under my professional name, Abigail L. Rosenthal.

In the single evening I and some other women philosophers spent with her, I did not find Arendt discerning or accurate with regard to the real-life, present situations, having moral implications, that came up for discussion during our time with her.

With one exception, that concerned her own fate and situation. “How,” I asked her, “did you realize in time that getting out of reach of the Nazi regime was urgent and would be a matter of life and death?” 

She replied that she’d read the Nazi materials, whatever there was to read at that time, and knew that theirs was an element different from the norm of German political reflection. She was educated enough to know what the norm looked like and that this was abnormal.

So it seems that, 

when it came to her own life or death

evil was not banal.

Find A Good Look at Evil here.