Writing on the Wall (9 page)

On the other hand, contrary to what Abel says, Miss Arendt never presents him as a “dutiful clerk”; his work was important, indeed crucial, in the Nazi scheme, and he could feel that he, as an individual, was making a significant contribution to the Fuehrer’s task. He may or may not have conceived of himself as irreplaceable; if he did this was one of his delusions—a delusion no doubt shared by other Nazi functionaries, each of whom, on the lower levels, was replaceable while all of them together were not. Eichmann was free to quit his desk and his “great responsibilities” at any time, as Miss Arendt shows; no one forced him to do this particular work. Yet his staying on the job and the zeal he brought to it do not prove that he liked killing Jews, even at a distance. He liked being a functionary and “necessary,” and if this entailed a certain amount of self-sacrifice he liked it even more, for he saw it in the preliminary terms Kant laid down in formulating the categorical imperative: that a virtuous action is one done against inclination. That an act done against inclination is therefore virtuous was Eichmann’s mistaken understanding or perhaps his rationalization. As Miss Arendt sums up in a terrible flash of insight, “Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.” In this passage, it seems to me, rereading her book, Miss Arendt’s scorn and contempt for Eichmann were mingled with a kind of pained, wry-mouthed pity. Eichmann at this time—it was at the end of the war—was pressing for the continuation of the extermination policy, in obedience to the supreme “law” of the Fuehrer’s will, long after many of his colleagues and superiors had seen the end coming and were seeking to save their skins by “saving” Jews. What she pities in Eichmann (if I do not misread her) is the extent to which he could go on doing evil when all careerist motives had disappeared and against his personal desires—to have stopped the transports to Auschwitz, in his blinkered view, would have been to yield to a temptation. If Abel wants a dramatic parallel for Eichmann, he ought to open his Ibsen. There he can find “idealists” as pernickety, as literal-minded, and nearly as dangerous to humanity. Like the simpletons in Ibsen who talk of the “demands of the ideal,” Eichmann was a fool, and what is pitiable in the Eichmann Miss Arendt sees is his foolish consistency, the way in which his inner mechanism, his “soul,” continued to tick like some trusty middle-class alarm clock, unaware that it had become an infernal machine and listening only to the sound of its own reliability, signifying that everything was normal.

And if Miss Arendt, a Jew, found it in her heart to pity Eichmann, is this a sin? Is this “aesthetics”? To a Christian, it is ethics; can this be the Gentile “blind spot”? A Christian is commanded not only to pity but to forgive his enemies. It is a hard commandment, and if the Gentile reader detected Miss Arendt showing a trace of pity for the clown that had murdered her own people, he was not shocked but moved to admiration. Abel no doubt would say that she did not extend pity (or charity) to the Jewish leaders, but they were not in need of it to the same degree, any more than they were in need of a great effort of understanding. We all, including Miss Arendt, pity them in a natural motion of feeling, but this is not the pity that counts, ethically speaking, which goes not to those nearest to us (self-pity is scarcely a virtue) but to those farthest away and seemingly beyond the reach of human sympathy. Anybody can feel compassion for the Jewish leaders, even while criticizing their behavior. But “criticizing his behavior” is hardly what applies to Eichmann, and it would take a saint, as the saying goes, to feel pity for him.

To me,
Eichmann in Jerusalem,
despite all the horrors in it, was morally exhilarating. I freely confess that it gave me joy and I too heard a paean in it—not a hate-paean to totalitarianism but a paean of transcendence, heavenly music, like that of the final chorus of
Figaro
or the
Messiah.
As in these choruses, a pardon or redemption of some sort was taking place. The reader “rose above” the terrible material of the trial or was borne aloft to survey it with his intelligence. No person was pardoned, but the whole experience was bought back, redeemed, as in the harrowing of hell.

Now it is true that intelligence, mastering the incoherence of violence and suffering, gives it sense,
i.e.,
form, which is necessarily aesthetic. Miss Arendt’s book tells a story. Here Abel’s criticism just misses something real. Perhaps for Jews it is too soon to have what happened made into a story. They reject the idea that their sufferings made sense, had a plot and a lesson.

For me, however, the plot and the lesson were almost a godsend. For me as a reader, the episodes that stood out were those that dealt with the Jews who were saved—the happy endings. They were the redeeming features of an otherwise unbearable history: the stories of the Jews of Denmark, Bulgaria, and Italy. Possibly I liked them because the Gentiles behaved well in these chapters, but I think it was rather because these chapters showed that it was
possible
to behave well even in extreme situations, and it is worth noting that where the Gentiles behaved well, the Jews did not co-operate with the Nazi authorities. (An exception is Holland.) But I took the book mainly as a parable for the Gentiles in the widest sense of that word,
i.e.,
the innumerable “others,” a lesson in what was possible for the average man, the neighbor, who is not
forced
to look the other way when the police cars come for the “Jews” next door—Jews figuratively speaking, since it might happen again, might be happening now, and the Jews of the past may not be the “Jews” of the present or the future. In this parable, as in all parables, there is a contrast. At one extreme there is Eichmann, who stands for all the Eichmanns in the Nazi bureaucracy, all the “little fellows” who asked after the event, “But what could we have done?” To them the Danes furnished an answer, which would have been the same if there had been only one Dane to wear the yellow star and he not a king but a “little fellow.” In fact, the King of Denmark is not shown as a king but as the
other
neighbor, at the opposite pole from Eichmann. A whole range of neighbors, good and evil, is glimpsed through the trial in Jerusalem, one of the most evil being that Papal Nuncio in Hungary who passed on a protest to Horthy against the deportation of the Jews, adding that the Vatican’s protest did not spring “from a false sense of compassion.”

The parable did not speak, obviously, to the mass of Jews. But it spoke to privileged Jews, those with money and connections, for to the extent that privileged Jews were privileged, entitled to special treatment, endowed with power over others, they in effect were “Gentiles.” The lesson, then, as I saw it, was addressed exclusively to the Gentiles, who were on trial through their representative, Eichmann. Some—a few—were exonerated, and no Jew, as a Jew, figured among the accused; the gassed Jews were the witnesses, bearing testimony for or against us.

No Gentile who was an adult in the years of the Final Solution can read
Eichmann in Jerusalem
without some remorse and self-questioning. American Jews, far from the scene then and now, may feel certain misgivings too, reading the book, especially the richer ones who paid large sums of money to the Nazis for the ransom of their relatives and did not concern themselves too greatly with the fate of “ordinary” Jews. Miss Arendt’s harshness on this point may seem to them unkind and inappropriate in what they still think of as a time of mourning; it is like somebody who criticizes at a funeral. But the question is whether those who merely grieve for their fellow-beings show more compassion than those who in retrospect seek remedies, since to seek remedies implies a continuing concern that what happened shall never happen again. The State of Israel promises that to Jews, politically, by offering them a homeland, an army, and a foreign policy. “You are safe now,” it tells them. Miss Arendt is not interested in the safety of Jews but in the safety of humanity. Trying to learn from history, she is thinking ahead on behalf of other “superfluous” people who may be the next “Jews” on someone’s list for “resettlement in the east.” Yet the official Israeli lesson supposedly taught by the trial—the need for a strong national state—is at very sharp variance with any parable for the Gentiles,
i.e.,
not only non-Jews but all the tribes and the peoples.

As a sample of moral fineness on the part of Miss Arendt’s critics, I offer the following sentence from Abel’s piece: “If a man holds a gun at the head of another and forces him to kill his friend, the man with the gun will be aesthetically less ugly than the one who out of fear of death has killed his friend and perhaps did not even save his own life.”
Forces
him to kill his friend? Nobody by possession of a weapon can force a man to kill anybody; that is his own decision. If somebody points a gun at you and says “Kill your friend or I will kill you,” he is
tempting
you to kill your friend. That is all.

I have already given some indication of Abel’s morality as a critic, which permits him the free use of pseudo-paraphrase and downright invention. Now I have space for only three more examples. The first is the shifting use he makes of the word “victims.” Miss Arendt criticizes the Jewish leadership; the Jewish leaders became victims; ergo, Miss Arendt criticizes the victims. The implication is that she is criticizing four and a half to six million innocent people. Second, he says he “wondered” when he read Miss Arendt’s book why she did not deal with the killing of the Jews in the Ukraine. He did not wonder long; the reason was obvious to him: because this would have destroyed her whole thesis about the role of the Jewish leaders in the extermination of the Jews. She mentions several times the
Einsatzgruppen
shootings of the Jews in the Russian territories: they were shot on the spot together with Communist functionaries, Gypsies, criminals, and insane people. There were no Jewish organizations in Russia, but there were Jewish Councils in Poland, yet she does not deal with the extermination of Polish Jewry—a thing about which I wondered myself. But since I genuinely wondered, I was able to find a genuine answer on pages 197-198. The answer is Eichmann; he had nothing to do with the shootings in the East or with the gassing of Polish Jews or the management of Polish ghettoes. He was concerned with the logistics of supplying Jews to the death camps. Here too was where the Jewish Councils came in; they were, so to speak, Eichmann’s draft board. Where the
Einsatzgruppen
shot masses of victims on the spot, there was no transportation problem, no question of selection, and no need for Jewish organizations, even if they had existed. The story of the Jews of the East was separate from the story of Eichmann, to which Miss Arendt restricted herself as much as possible.

An explanation, incidentally, of the ease with which not only Jews but other groups were rounded up and massacred in the Russian territories was offered me by a Polish friend. The Stalinist state apparatus had abolished all other social structures, and when it collapsed after the invasion, in the occupied territories there was nothing, a social void. It was impossible to hide, for there were no hiding-places—no convents, estates, private peasant farms. Most of the Jewish children who survived in Poland were hidden in convents, and villagers used to sell food to Jews hiding in the woods, which would have been impossible in a Russian collective, where everything was known. Stalin’s totalitarian state had eliminated privacy.

Returning to Abel, here is the third example. “Why did Eichmann not suspect that the killing of so many defenseless persons was evil? This Miss Arendt never tries to explain.” But he did suspect; he even knew, and this knowledge, his “conscience,” lasted for about four weeks. Eichmann’s conscience is the center of her book and explicitly the theme of several chapters. Clearly Abel is aware of this since he alludes to the subject himself, glancingly, in a typical misparaphrase: “...according to her view of what happened, the Jews of Europe were so compliant that Eichmann, their executioner, was even denied the opportunity to be conscience-stricken as he sent them off to die.” What he says in this sentence is that Miss Arendt explains Eichmann’s unsuspicious conscience by the compliancy of the Jews. She does not; the compliancy of the Jewish
leadership
(not the Jews) was one of the many factors she cites that contributed to the extinction of Eichmann’s conscience, but the chief responsibility for this, as I read it, outside of Eichmann himself, lay with respectable German society, which remained almost totally silent at the time and only came forward later to wash its hands of the affair.

As the reader can see, the attempt to correct Abel on one point at once brings up another and leads, if one will let it, into a maze. It is like arguing with a hydra.

But I must at least touch on his final charge: the damning evidence he has discovered, where it was lying low, in
The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Frankly, I am not competent and do not have the time or space to get to the bottom of this. But supposing Abel is right and there is a contradiction between the earlier book and the present one, what would it prove? That she was right then and wrong now or vice versa? His triumphant tone seems to announce that she was wrong both times, which is impossible, at least in the terms in which he states her arguments—that the totalitarian state was “all-powerful” and that it was not. However, I do not think she said it was “all-powerful” and certainly would not take his word for it. In any case the passage he quotes is about totalitarian
terror,
not about the totalitarian state. And where the terror ruled—in the camps, prisons, and ghettoes—Miss Arendt does not propose that there was any choice but to obey.

To be fair, though, to Abel, it does seem to me that Miss Arendt’s views about totalitarian rule are not as pessimistic as they were when Stalin was alive. But to change one’s views somewhat, in the light of new evidence and new events (as she does in her chapters on Hungary in the new edition of
The Origins),
is a normal consequence of thought and does not call for you to “recant” or “retract.” Unless Abel and those who agree with him are running a private Inquisition or police state.