Eichmann in Jerusalem
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First published in 1963, Eichmann in Jerusalem grew out of Hannah Arendt’s reporting for The New Yorker on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal organisers of the Nazi deportation and extermination of European Jews. Combining courtroom observation with historical investigation and political philosophy, Arendt examines the machinery of genocide, the responsibilities of individuals within totalitarian regimes, and the troubling relationship between obedience, conscience and moral judgement. Her account introduced the influential and fiercely debated idea of the “banality of evil”, challenging conventional assumptions about the nature of those who commit extraordinary crimes.
The book provoked intense controversy, particularly over Arendt’s treatment of Jewish leadership under Nazi occupation and her interpretation of Eichmann himself, and its publication remains a defining episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. Neither a straightforward trial report nor a conventional work of history, it confronts the difficult question of how ordinary habits of thought and institutional obedience can become entangled with radical wrongdoing. Unsettling, incisive and still contested, Eichmann in Jerusalem remains central to debates about the Holocaust, political responsibility and the moral necessity of independent judgement.
From the book
“The lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”
— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
On Eichmann in Jerusalem
“A brilliant and disturbing study of the character and the trial of Adolf Eichmann.”
— Stephen Spender, The New York Review of Books