'Brilliant and disturbing' Stephen Spender, New York Review of Books The classic work on 'the banality of evil', and a journalistic masterpiece Hannah Arendt's stunning and unnverving report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in the New Yorker in 1963. This edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt's postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, this classic portrayal of the banality of evil is as shocking as it is informative - an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling issues of the twentieth century. 'Deals with the greatest problem of our time ... the problem of the human being within a modern totalitarian system' Bruno Bettelheim

Auf der Grundlage ihrer Prozessberichte über den Eichmann-Prozess in Jerusalem schreibt die Autorin über die geplante und strategisch durchgeführte Vernichtung der europäischen Juden während der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. Die politischen Hintergründe des Prozesses und die politische Kontroverse, die mit diesem Buch ausgelöst wurde, beschreibt Hans Mommsen in einem enthaltenem Essay.

Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Arendt in Jerusalem: The Eichmann Trial, the Banality of Evil, and the Meaning of Justice Fifty Years On -- 1 Judging the Past: The Eichmann Trial -- 2 Eichmann in Jerusalem: Conscience, Normality, and the "Rule of Narrative" -- 3 Banality, Again -- 4 Eichmann on the Stand: Self-Recognition and the Problem of Truth -- 5 Arendt's Conservatism and the Eichmann Judgment -- 6 Eichmann's Victims, Holocaust Historiography, and Victim Testimony -- 7 Truth and Judgment in Arendt's Writing -- 8 Arendt, German Law, and the Crime of Atrocity -- 9 Whose Trial? Adolf Eichmann's or Hannah Arendt's? The Eichmann Controversy Revisited -- Contributors -- Index

A total and groundbreaking reassessment of the life of Adolf Eichmann—a superb work of scholarship that reveals his activities and notoriety among a global network of National Socialists following the collapse of the Third Reich and that permanently challenges Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” Smuggled out of Europe after the collapse of Germany, Eichmann managed to live a peaceful and active exile in Argentina for years before his capture by the Mossad. Though once widely known by nicknames such as “Manager of the Holocaust,” in 1961 he was able to portray himself, from the defendant’s box in Jerusalem, as an overworked bureaucrat following orders—no more, he said, than “just a small cog in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine.” How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible? How did a central architect of the Final Solution manage to disappear? And what had he done with his time while in hiding? Bettina Stangneth, the first to comprehensively analyze more than 1,300 pages of Eichmann’s own recently discovered written notes— as well as seventy-three extensive audio reel recordings of a crowded Nazi salon held weekly during the 1950s in a popular district of Buenos Aires—draws a chilling portrait, not of a reclusive, taciturn war criminal on the run, but of a highly skilled social manipulator with an inexhaustible ability to reinvent himself, an unrepentant murderer eager for acolytes with whom to discuss past glories while vigorously planning future goals with other like-minded fugitives. A work that continues to garner immense international attention and acclaim, Eichmann Before Jerusalem maps out the astonishing links between innumerable past Nazis—from ace Luftwaffe pilots to SS henchmen—both in exile and in Germany, and reconstructs in detail the postwar life of one of the Holocaust’s principal organizers as no other book has done

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The courtroom was solemn, and the judges’ attention was focused on the suffering stories they heard. They were not theatrical, and their conduct was natural. #2 The trial was not a show trial, and Judge Landau, who presided over it, did his best to prevent it from becoming one. The proceedings happened on a stage before an audience, with the usher’s marvelous shout at the beginning of each session producing the effect of the rising curtain. #3 The judges at the Eichmann trial were careful to avoid the spotlight, but they were still in it. The audience was supposed to represent the whole world, and in the first few weeks, it consisted chiefly of newspaper and magazine writers who had flocked to Jerusalem from all corners of the earth. #4 The Israeli government was extremely hostile to the idea of an international court that would have indicted Eichmann for crimes against humanity, rather than just crimes against the Jewish people.

"It is impressive to see an edited collection in which such a high intellectual standard is maintained throughout... I learned things from almost every one of these chapters."—Craig Calhoun, author of Critical Social Theory

Barry Sharpe examines Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and the controversy it spurred as a way of exploring basic features and issues of judgment. After giving careful attention to Arendt's portrait of Adolf Eichmann and the Jewish Central Councils as well as considering Eichmann in the context of Arendt's other work, Sharpe concludes that Eichmann is an unintentionally ironic example of both the need for and the blindness of distance in judgment.