This excellent collection of essays revisits the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann from disciplinary perspectives ranging from law to history to psychology to film studies. As Rebecca Wittmann argues in her introduction, scholarship on Eichmann by David Cesarani, Bettina Stangneth, and others has overturned Hannah Arendt's long-dominant assessment of the defendant in her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), thus obviating the need for scholars to disprove Eichmann's banality itself. The task now, Wittmann writes, lies in assessing the scholarly shift within the broader focus on perpetrator motivations and their manifestations, especially as trials assess legal guilt rather than examine the nuance that defines their own legacies. Indeed, Arendt's acerbic take on the Jerusalem trial remains a backdrop against which the proceedings will always be (mis)judged, and the idea of Eichmann, personifying as it does a certain type of perpetrator, remains enigmatic.
Given Arendt's charge that Israel, owing to its dissatisfaction with the Nuremberg Trials, parochialized the Eichmann trial through the laws under which Eichmann was charged, through the trial's overtly didactic aspects, and though the prosecution's determination to stretch Eichmann's culpability into areas where his responsibility never reached, the proceedings themselves remain worthy of study. Laura Jockusch points out that Israelis were not the only Jews who thought that Nuremberg missed the centrality of the Shoah. Jewish observers in Germany were dismayed during Nuremberg itself, the World Jewish Congress even asking for a separate Nuremberg trial to address Nazism's crimes against Europe's Jews. Leora Bilsky argues, moreover, that the Eichmann trial set global legal precedents that were unappreciated for years, thanks to Arendt's critique. Despite Arendt's charge that survivor testimony in Jerusalem enjoyed “a right to be irrelevant,” the trial bestowed legal recognition to such testimony as critical evidence. In addition, the proceedings were more universal than Arendt appreciated; Eichmann's was the first trial to place genocide at its center, the UN statute reflected in the charges under “crimes against the Jewish people.” Liat Benhabib's essay notes that, for all of the courtroom's show-trial elements, the Israeli government restricted television coverage to a stunning degree. Owing to various obstacles, critical moments of the trial were not videotaped at all, and YouTube ironically became the first medium by which all tapes were made accessible to the wider world. Ruth Bettina Birn notes, however, that the determination to demonstrate Eichmann's centrality still created bad history, and not just on the prosecution's part. The judgment itself inflated flawed affidavits from Nuremberg and ignored critical evidence from earlier trials that showed the limits of Eichmann's authority.
Issues concerning Eichmann the man also remain poignant, not least thanks to Arendt's “banality of evil.” The concept, argues psychologist James Waller, shocked because it was unexpected and because Arendt framed it too breezily, and incorrectly, in Eichmann's case. Sharpened by scholarly rigor, it remains a critical measure. Most genocidaires, Waller argues, are not monsters but killers of circumstance. Fabien Théofilakis's essay argues further that Eichmann, hardly the unthinking bureaucrat, wrote some 8,000 pages in Israeli captivity. The corpus demonstrates how Eichmann defended himself by consciously playing a role, by challenging the contemporary intentionalist historiography on the Final Solution, by questioning the authenticity of critical documents, and by painting Nazism's adherents, including himself, as honorable nationalists. Eichmann now waged rhetorical war against the Jews, the stakes being how Nazism would fare in posterity.
Several of the essays sharpen our understanding of the Eichmann trial's immediate cultural and political effect. Boaz Cohen shows that in Israel, the trial did not open the floodgates of repressed public trauma so much as it sharpened the effects of a Holocaust consciousness that had surfaced repeatedly in Knesset debates, in a thriving Yiddish press, in novels and film, and in the work of Rachel Auerbach, who collected survivor testimonies at Yad Vashem on their own merits before coordinating testimonies for the trial. Dominique Trimbur and Roni Stauber consider the trial's effects on relations between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany. Trimbur discusses the Bonn government's anxiety over West Germany's image as an unreconstructed society, thanks to East German propaganda during Eichmann's trial concerning Hans Globke and other former Nazi functionaries still serving in the West German establishment. Stauber reveals the startling degree to which Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's back, owing to Israel's dependence on West German arms sales. Ben-Gurion resisted domestic pressure to flog the West Germans with the Eichmann trial. Instead, Israeli diplomats and journalists abroad echoed Ben-Gurion's insistence on the new Germany's full break with its Nazi predecessor.
Several essays hint at the Eichmann trial's contemporary legacies, not all of which are positive. Esther Webman assesses how contemporary Arab writers, determined to attack Israel's legitimacy, emphasized Zionist perfidy while not necessarily exonerating Eichmann. They downgraded the Jewish dead from nearly six million to hundreds of thousands, thus submitting that Jewish narratives were exaggerated while arguing that the Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba were comparable. They pointed to imagined similarities between Nazism and Zionism, arguing that both were virulently racist and that the former actually learned from the latter. They also wove conspiracy theories of collaboration between Zionist leaders and Nazi killers, the point being to develop a Jewish state with strong racial stock. The latter charge ironically came partly from their reading of Arendt's careless comments concerning Jewish councils. And Arab writers agreed that Israel exploited the Holocaust in order to hide its own crimes. These charges have their true believers and scholarly apologists to this day. Indeed, Michael Berkowitz's essay in the volume debunks, yet again, the notion of a Zionist-Nazi alliance, an idea fueled in part by Eichmann's insistence at trial that he admired Zionist aims and tried to further them.
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan's essay on 1960s student movements in West Germany and the U.S. might be the volume's most open-ended. For the New Left, which misread Arendt's thesis of Eichmann's unthinking banality, “Eichmann” became the architype for the postcolonial perpetrator of racist and imperialist crimes ranging from the American South to Vietnam – the ubiquitous petit bourgeois servant of atrocity reborn in the bureaucracy. Problems with this assessment were many. One was that this universalization of “Eichmann” was never applied to communist societies where the apparatchiks were more in keeping with Arendt's conceptions of totalitarianism. Another was that, for protest movements, Eichmann's crimes were divorced from their essential core, namely the destruction of Europe's Jews. Stripped of their specificity, they could be applied willy-nilly, including against Israel, an expanding bête noire of the global left.
Together, the essays in Wittmann's fine volume reflect the long reach of the Eichmann trial. Yet ironically, they also reflect the persistent reach of Arendt's reading of the trial, for Arendt's assessment, flawed though it was, influenced and still influences how the Jerusalem proceedings were understood in everything from international law to postmodern assessments of power. In that sense, the essays reflect that Eichmann's ashes, though scattered at sea after his execution in 1962, were scatted further than the Israelis ever intended. His trial is truly one without end.
