Writing on the Wall (8 page)

But since Abel is not the only one to insist that Eichmann somehow got preferential treatment, he must be answered, if only as a spokesman for those less well read and less intellectually gifted than he. It is hardly credible to me that any reader, no matter how stupid, could really imagine that Miss Arendt divides the guilt equally between Eichmann and the Jews, let alone that she regards Eichmann as a lovely object in contrast to the Jewish dead. And yet this has happened, and it must be understood.

Before writing this, I have gone back and reread
Eichmann in Jerusalem
as objectively as I can. My original feeling was that the part allotted to the Jewish leadership was quite small in the whole story Miss Arendt told. It had not struck me particularly, especially since it was not new; anybody who had followed the Kastner case or had read reviews of the Hilberg book was familiar with the fact of Jewish co-operation; such co-operation, indeed, was only another facet of the story told in concentration-camp literature by Rousset, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Bettelheim, and others: the leaders of the victims co-operated with their jailers. My original feeling proved to be right: in a book of two hundred and sixty pages, eight pages are devoted to the co-operation of the Jewish leadership with Eichmann’s office, and two and a quarter pages to a discussion of privileged categories of Jews (war veterans, famous people, etc.). Both passages are certainly critical, and the second, which reviews the conduct not only of Jews but of Gentile groups in pressing the Nazis for “special” treatment for special Jews, seems to me harsher. Besides this there are passing references to Jewish co-operation or the lack of it.

Now some of Miss Arendt’s critics complain that she gave too much space and prominence to this topic (how can one measure prominence?), while others, including Abel, say that her treatment was too short. The only way to have satisfied both parties would have been to omit the whole subject, which is probably what most Jews would have liked best. My conclusion is that those who were truly shocked and pained by these “revelations” were not shocked and pained by the fact (which they must have known about at least vaguely) but by the context in which it was put. Miss Arendt’s boldness was putting this distressing material in the context of the Nazi guilt, where Jews felt it did not belong, where it was “out of all proportion.” To speak in the same breath of the guilt of Eichmann and the guilt of the
Judenräte
seemed offensive, like equating them; yet Miss Arendt never for one instant equates them, and how could she assess the activities of Eichmann while suppressing the part played by the Jewish leaders, with whom his office constantly dealt?

When she writes her famous sentence (often distorted in quotation), “To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story,” she is expressing the same pain her Jewish readers felt in reading her summary of that “dark chapter” and for which they are ready to condemn her, as a tyrant used to condemn to death the messenger of bad news. The “darkest chapter,” incidentally, does not mean the worst; it means the hardest to contemplate, for a Jew.

As for Abel’s contention that she ought to have discussed the motives and arguments of the Jewish leaders, she indicates that these motives ranged from high to low, as one would expect. Abel’s imagination was demonstrably quite able to reconstruct the arguments that must have taken place—a feat not beyond the power of the ordinary reader. Possibly what some Jews feared was that though they themselves could understand these motives, others (Gentiles?) might not. What many of her critics hold against her is that she tried to understand Eichmann and does not make the same effort for the Jewish leaders. But their behavior is quite understandable, unlike that of the Nazis. They acted the way most respectable citizens would; they temporized, tried not to think the worst, looked for a formula that would placate the enemy. The name of this in politics is appeasement. Miss Arendt, says Abel, does not mention the middle-class character of the Jewish Councils. She did not have to.

Abel claims that Miss Arendt blames the leadership for not having resisted. She does not. The question of resistance is raised on pages nine and ten of her book. Her conclusion is that resistance was impossible. But between resistance and cooperation there was a small space in which some action—or, rather, resolution—might have been taken. Miss Arendt perhaps exaggerates the size of this space, and it must have varied from country to country and town to town. The example she gives of the Danish rabbi who called his people together, told them the truth, that an order had gone out for their deportation, and ordered them to disperse, no doubt would have been impossible to follow with success in countries where the native population was hostile and physically and culturally distinct from the Jews, but in some places, at some times, it could have been followed. Miss Arendt’s other famous sentence, that without the co-operation of the Jewish Councils four and a half to six million Jews would not have perished, seems to me almost self-evidently true. Had the Nazis been obliged to use their own manpower to select Jews for the extermination camps, number them, assemble them, ticket their property, and so on, they would not only have rounded up fewer Jews, but they would have felt the drain in their military effort; had Hitler persisted in the Final Solution, at the cost of diverting troops to carry it out, the war might have ended somewhat sooner. It is clear that refusal to co-operate would have met with terrible reprisals, but these reprisals in turn might have demoralized the army and the civilian population both in Germany and in the occupied countries, and chaos, the nightmare of generals, might have been the result. The Final Solution was preferred by the Nazis to mass execution by shooting because it could be carried out smoothly and efficiently—almost peacefully. And this allowed not only the Germans and the people of the occupied countries but the Jews themselves for a long time to remain ignorant of the true destination of the cattle cars moving east, on schedule. To say this is not—horrible charge—to “desire to maximize the role of Jewish leaders in the destruction of European Jewry.” Nor is it to show a lack of sympathy for their plight. To speculate on the past, as Abel ought to know, is not to blame (it is too late for that), but merely to wish, to regret, to close your eyes and see it done differently, in some cases to admire.

Smoothly and efficiently—almost peacefully. This was the fearful characteristic of the Final Solution, and for this Eichmann, the transportation expert, was the perfect instrument. Of course six psychiatrists pronounced him normal; he
was
normal and average and therefore perfectly fitted for his job, which was to “make the wheels run smoothly,” in both a literal and figurative sense. His function was to normalize the Final Solution. With his conceit and boasting, his pompous home-made clichés and “winged words,” he was at once ridiculous and ordinary, for ordinariness carried to a zenith is absurd. No better example of the mass murderer who is at the same time a perfect family man (Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux) could be found than the ineffable Eichmann. One of his lawyers said he was like a mailman—a person you see every day on his methodical rounds and seldom notice. Naturally he got along well with Jews; it was part of his job to do so. Among the clichés he incorporated in his personality (to speak of his “character” would be a mistake) was the Some-of-my-best-friends cliché. That he could push this to the point of imagining that he had been converted to Zionism (the Jewish Final Solution) was pushing the logic of the cliché to the nth degree of complacency and self-delusion. How could Abel have missed the irony in Miss Arendt’s account of his “conversion”—a dramatic irony, furthermore, since when she tells the reader that Eichmann had been “promptly and forever” made a Zionist by reading a “basic book,” she is dryly summing up a speaker who had no idea of the effect on an audience of what he was saying? It was Eichmann, alone in the world, who considered himself a good disciple of Herzl.

According to Abel, Eichmann must have thought about Nazism politically since he thought about Zionism. But Eichmann’s “thought” was a parody of the idea of thinking. Had
Mein Kampf
been his “Bible,” he might have pressed a flower in it. His Zionist “studies” had a function; they made him an expert, at least in the circles he moved in. They made him “stand out” from his co-workers—the life-object of all mediocrities. As a specialist in Jewish emigration, he was perfectly fitted, when the time came, to arrange Jewish emigration to the next world, to Abraham’s bosom. Among his fellow-bureaucrats, he might have passed highest in a vocational aptitude test for the new job. A sadist, monster, or demon would not have qualified for the position; these “undesirables” had their place in the Nazi system as jailers and editors of periodicals, but a man with Eichmann’s responsibilities could not be a Beast of Belsen or a Julius Streicher. The fact that Eichmann was squeamish, could not bear the sight of blood, was even an “idealist” permitted precisely that distancing from reality that facilitated the administrative task—a distancing that reflected the physical and psychic space between the collective will of the German people in the homeland and its execution in the east. If Eichmann seems to have been cordial, rather than the block of ice described by one witness, this was good public relations, for one of his duties was to allay the suspicions of the Jews and other foreigners he came in contact with, so that they too would be distanced from reality.

Abel does not think that Miss Arendt should have assigned dutifulness—“a positive value”—to Eichmann, as though she were free, reporting the trial, to invent her own Eichmann like a character in fiction. I should have thought dutifulness was a relative value. But in any case the picture of Eichmann as a conscientious clown emerged from Eichmann’s testimony long before Miss Arendt wrote her book. Miss Arendt’s achievement was to reconcile this virtuous clown with his actions. The portrait she made, of course, is not the “final” Eichmann—there can be no such thing—and someday someone may square the man as he appeared with his actions in some entirely different way. But none of her critics has even tried to do this. To say that he was a monster does not meet the problem, unless a monster means someone you cannot explain, which is to declare the problem insoluble. Perhaps Abel thinks Eichmann was a play-actor?

It strikes me now that one of Miss Arendt’s offenses was to put Eichmann together with what he did, not in terms of rhetoric, but on a realistic basis, listening to him and watching him—as though this in itself were dangerous, as though the trite proverb, which one can imagine in Eichmann’s mouth (for did he not seek his judges’ “understanding,” by which he must have meant acquittal?), were an established truth and to try to understand Eichmann were to forgive him. Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon. Miss Arendt does not forgive Eichmann; indeed she unequivocally passes the death sentence on him herself, in her last paragraph—an act which may appear arrogant or which may appear as the resolute shouldering of the task of judging,
i.e.,
the taking of responsibility, which Eichmann himself always shrank from and in which he revealed his squeamishness and mediocrity.

What satisfaction would it have given Abel and others if Miss Arendt had accepted the word “monster” from the prosecutor’s lips? Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils (“a person of inhuman and horrible cruelty or wickedness,” OED, Sense 4). Such an unnatural being is more horrible to contemplate than an Eichmann—that is, aesthetically worse—but morally an Ilse Koch was surely less culpable than Eichmann since she seems to have had no trace of human feeling and therefore was impassible to conscience. Abel quotes a saying of Kierkegaard on Judas, which shows Judas as comical, and he seems to think this bears out his argument, since Judas, according to him, was a monster. But Judas was not a monster, though his act was monstrous; he was a man, the twelfth part of humanity, and his sin was that he could betray for thirty pieces of silver, like any common informer. Jesus was uncommon, not Judas. And Judas, unlike a monster, knew that he had sinned and went and hanged himself with a halter. Eichmann too knew himself to be guilty somehow, somewhere (“before God,” as he put it), though he kept this knowledge in a separate pocket of his mind, far from the actual trial, and was helped in this by the prosecutor, who by charging him with acts of cruelty he did not commit allowed him to feel innocent. What is horrible in Eichmann
is
his ordinariness, including the prompt ability to feel innocent when you are charged with a crime you did not commit though you did something infinitely worse, like a person who is accused of murder and robbery and feels put upon because it was not he who stole the victim’s watch—he “only” committed the murder.

But suppose this were just a quarrel about terms. Suppose by “monster” Abel means someone capable of sending four and a half to six million Jews to death. There is no argument if that is the definition—only a tautology. But if he means an exceptionally depraved and wicked creature, like Iago or Richard III (his examples), then it is he, it seems to me, who is building Eichmann up and making him an object of aesthetic interest.

The difficulty many people experienced in thinking about the Eichmann trial was to “make the punishment fit the crime.” The desire of Abel and other critics is to make the criminal fit the crime. And just as any punishment seemed grotesquely small and insignificant beside the murder of millions of helpless people, so the criminal seemed grotesquely small and insignificant. This was not because he had shrunk in the interim. The disproportion between the doer and the deed is a disturbing fact of contemporary history—an effect of advanced technology, like automation. On the Allied side, you had Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where our boys in the bombers and Mr. Truman in the White House were simply incommensurable with what they had done. Not that Mr. Truman and Eichmann can be considered equally as mass murderers; Mr. Truman had a motive which at least was good—the quick ending of the war. It is just that the human scale is no longer in focus, and to measure an Eichmann by the number of his victims and his individual power by their multiplied helplessness is to magnify both him and it.