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Rating: Writing "The Banality of Evil" Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a philosopher, and political theorist of German-Jewish origin who later moved to the United States, left us both a lucid chronicle of one of the most important trials of the '900s and, at the same time, a broader reflection on the origins of the totalitarian state and its inevitable deviations, the first of all, for obvious historical contingency, the Holocaust.
The book revolves around the trial carried out by the authorities of the newly formed Israeli state, held in 1960 against Adolf Eichmann, an SS officer, who had fled to Argentina after the end of World War II (passing through Bolzano and Genoa), co-responsible for the death of several million Jews, as well as Roma, homosexuals, political dissidents, and other undesirable subjects who were interned in Nazi death camps.
Unlike other SS officers, Eichmann had no active role in managing the death camps; he did not wield weapons, did not commit any acts of sadism, and probably did not meet, directly, any of his victims: because Eichmann's role in the Holocaust was essentially to organize the transport of "human material" (sic) from major German cities to extermination camps like Auschwitz, Treblinka, or Dachau, mainly using and managing railway transport. This was his specialty and uniqueness: to take an active part (not purely ideological) in an extermination, without ever torturing or killing.
On these events, which I deliberately simplify, the entire book is based, which, while following the course of the trial with almost journalistic punctuality (which we would not expect from the Author), contains many digressions about the ways in which the extermination of Jews was concretely carried out (loss of original citizenship, degradation to stateless status with consequent deprivation of civil and political rights, as well as essential diplomatic protection), regarding specific episodes in concentration camps, as well as around the possible cultural and ideological matrices of anti-Semitism and in relation to potential developments of the Holocaust (which, like clock hands, would have proceeded to exterminate Slavic, Latin, Gallic populations... leaving the Aryans alone).
I find it, however, more interesting and, within limits, useful to dwell on the many questions that this book, beyond the concrete and at the same time "exemplary" story it narrates, raises, appearing relevant and providing more than one warning for the present and the future.
What are the boundaries of individual responsibility with respect to more complex phenomena, where our action, apparently neutral in means and ends, can be functional to accomplishing a larger design? Eichmann, in his defense, claimed to have dealt with a "segment" of the Holocaust, to have woven the thread of a larger plot and a design he was unaware of in its complexity and cruelty. I wouldn’t know how to respond.
The State, public power, and its laws, originally created as the institutionalization of an aggregative phenomenon, a complex socio-legal formation aimed at protecting and guaranteeing the individual incapable of protecting himself from dangers, famines, external and internal aggression, can become, in the apparent neutrality of its means (like the "banal" organization of rail transport) an implacable tool of death and oppression, in a sort of its pathological drift? Eichmann, in the end, was a man of the State, a high public official, who as such operated, without realizing (or pretending not to) the implications of his activity, external as it was entrusted to other individuals, postulated to have autonomy in thought and action. Again, I seek a response that is not simple, but painful.
Is the cruelty of the individual innate, unavoidable, for which, having abandoned the club or put aside knives, guns, rifles, can the individual still kill with a simple stroke of a pen, deciding the fate of other individuals, "abstracting the Evil" and almost sublimating it into an act of death so bloodless in appearance when implacable in substance? Eichmann claimed indignantly, and in probable "good faith," never to have harmed an individual, to be incapable of wielding a weapon and turning it against another man, and thus not to be defined as a murderer or condemned as such. But is it enough? I don't know how to respond here either.
Many other questions are raised by this book, almost inexhaustible in the suggestions and reflections it can provide, to the reader.
A small critical note should, however, be given to a profile that, in my opinion, risks going unnoticed, not being treated with particular efficacy by the Author, but is no less important: was the trial of Eichmann respectful of the defendant's guarantees (even assuming his "criminal" nature), was it based on objective findings, or was it not, rather, a veiled form of revenge, a continuation of the personal war of Israeli intelligence services and the Israeli judges against an accomplice of the Holocaust and the death of relatives, fellow citizens, coreligionists of Mossad agents and the Court itself?
Even assuming that Eichmann embodied the Evil, in its seemingly most indifferent, everyday, and therefore "banal" but not less dangerous form, can we say with certainty that of that same Evil, the agents, his judges, and ultimately, the executioner who hanged him, were not victims, and that the Evil done in the Holocaust continued, changing form but not substance, even in the trial witnessed by Arendt? In the trial of Eichmann, therefore, did justice's scale or sword work better? The answer, in this case, could be inferred, but it's better not to give it. It might be more consolatory to give the wrong one.
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