Eichmann in Jerusalem: Postscript Summary & Analysis

As Arendt shortly reveals, she wrote this postscript for the second edition in order to respond to the enormous controversy that Eichmann in Jerusalem created in the international intellectual world (and particularly its Jewish corners). Accordingly, she first emphasizes her sources in order to prove that even her most criticized arguments are verifiable and shared by other well-informed scholars.

Arendt attributes both the controversy and campaign to the same problem on which she blames Eichmann and the German people’s participation in the Holocaust: the insistence on putting collective moral norms above individual moral judgments. While the “campaign” was driven by moral outrage, this outrage was in turn driven by the same political considerations that motivated the prosecution’s biased case against Eichmann. The tendency to blame inherent “Jewish” traits for Jews’ failure to resist, beyond blaming the victims, perpetuating anti-Semitism, and falsely assuming that community norms drive all behavior, also reflects a refusal to attempt empathy or confront the possibility that, from the standpoint of the Holocaust’s Jewish victims, rebellion may have made less sense than hopeful waiting.

While Holocaust survivors see how the Nazis created fractures within the Jewish community, Jewish leaders try to erase these differences and insist that there was only one Jewish experience under the Third Reich. This parallels how Israel argues that all Jews were passive victims who went meekly to their deaths, but now all Jews are powerful because they are protected by the heroic Zionist state.

Like the Eichmann trial according to the prosecution, Arendt’s book is called to stand for much more than it is meant to. Just as the judges insisted on restricting the scope of their judgment to the question of justice, Arendt insists on restricting the scope of her book to the trial in order to prevent it from being twisted to unintended and unproductive purposes through generalizations.

The distinction between stupidity and thoughtlessness is that Eichmann understood what he was doing but did not realize it; he consciously knew how the concentration camps and gas chambers worked, but never consciously or morally connected the horror he felt upon observing them to the day-to-day work he did for the R.S.H.A. While technical knowledge can remedy stupidity, only moral reflection can remedy thoughtlessness, forcing people to think through and take accountability for the consequences of their actions.

Although she is subtle about this distinction, Arendt thinks the Nazis’ actions exceed genocide because they reflect a totalitarian attempt to maintain power through death, fear, and the instrumentalization of others. While anti-Semitism led the Nazis to direct their violence against Jews, the principle of their violence was the notion that murder can be a regular principle of government and not merely a principle of war—indeed, they often “euthanized” their own citizens. As in the Epilogue, Arendt insists that too many observers conveniently replace action-based explanations with motivation-based ones. If, as she has argued, legal punishment is designed to correct violations of a moral order, then they rely not on intent but on acts, even if performed thoughtlessly.

“Acts of state” cannot simply mean that governments may do whatever they wish; the very concept of justice requires that no one stand above the law. The question is not whether “acts of state” excuses state crimes, but rather who has the legitimate authority to try state crimes; Arendt has already argued that this requires an international tribunal. A curious related question is whether “acts of state” can legitimately excuse Israel for kidnapping Eichmann. While this was not strictly necessary to maintain peace in Israel, it was necessary for the sake of justice, i.e. to maintain the moral order.

There are two senses of the word “criminal” at play here. Morally “criminal” acts, like Eichmann’s, should not be obeyed, but under Nazi Germany legally “criminal” acts, like anything that contradicted Hitler’s will, were in fact morally correct.

Conventional laws like Israel’s seem to think in terms of legal, not moral, criminality. Arendt obviously thinks this must change—Israel gave Eichmann just punishment only by twisting its own unjust laws to stick him with the death penalty he deserved. In fact, the Nazi regime should prove that moral rules must always supersede a state’s law, because the laws of the Third Reich operated in polar opposition to morality.

For Arendt, it is insufficient that the court arrived at the right sentence by the wrong laws; its convoluted judgment proves that crimes against humanity require an entirely new legal framework, and one great moral challenge posed by the Holocaust is coming up with an adequate one.

Arendt sees the characteristic features of totalitarianism as latent in the modern world at large. The erosion of morality, she believes, was not unique to the Nazi state; rather, it seems to be a general trend, and the law’s increasing failure to live up to morality threatens to accelerate this erosion. While stories of resistance prove that individual moral judgment is always possible for some people in some contexts, it seems decreasingly common.

People’s increasing opposition to targeted moral judgment is central to the broader erosion of morality. Justice, it turns out, rests firmly on something of a paradox: people need not be morally pure to render proper moral judgment on others. As part of moral judgment, Arendt certainly values empathy—imagining oneself in another’s shoes—but saying that one must occupy another’s position would mean people can only ever judge themselves.

Arendt points to the distinction between guilt and responsibility. For reasons of historical accident, one can be responsible for something one is not guilty of causing, but generally not vice-versa. Germans are responsible for addressing the Nazis’ crimes; a doctor is responsible for treating their patient’s illnesses; both are guilty only if they fail, and then only of their failure and not of the original offense. The law is where these two combine: courts take responsibility for determining guilt. But the Jerusalem court was also responsible for determining the criteria for guilt in a case like Eichmann’s, and while its determination of guilt was correct, its failure was its blindness to the proper criteria for it.