The controversial journalistic analysis of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust, from the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. This revised 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, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the twentieth century.

"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

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

Facing the Evil Maria Fernanda Palma The Banality of Evil or the Exceptionality of Good in Totalitarian Societies Paulo Otero The Eichmann Trial: Evil as a Reaction Against Evil? Hannah Arendt, the Legal and the Political Alexandre Franco de Sá From the Total State to Totalitarianism: Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt Massimo La Torre Hannah Arendt and the Concept of Law: Against the Tradition Rui Guerra da Fonseca Eichmann in Jerusalem: Between the Legal and the Political in Hannah Arendt's Thought Eichmann in Jerusalem and Hannah Arendt's Oeuvre António Araújo Hannah Arendt, Adolf Eichmann: Of Radical Evil and Its Banality Luís Pereira Coutinho The Banality of Evil as Absence of Law Miguel Nogueira de Brito When Thinking Is Acting: The Concept of the Banality of Evil as a Key to Hannah Arendt's Political Thought The Eichmann Trial Paulo de Sousa Mendes Judging Eichmann to Render Justice Kai Ambos Some Considerations on the Eichmann Case Miguel Galvão Teles 50 Years On Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Specific Mode of Criminal Law Retroactivity Reflections Starting from Eichmann in Jerusalem Augusto Silva Dias The Milgram Experiment and Criminal Liability: An Essay on the Banality of Evil Cristina García Pascual Can Absolute Evil Be Brought to Justice? Contemporary Experiences of Transitional Justice Pablo Galain Palermo and Álvaro Garreaud Truth Commissions and the Reconstruction of the Past in the Post-Dictatorial Southern Cone: Concerning the Limitations for Understanding Evil List of Contributors

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.

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

Each of the books that Hannah Arendt published in her lifetime was unique, and to this day each continues to provoke fresh thought and interpretations. This was never more true than for Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she first used the phrase “the banality of evil.” Her consternation over how a man who was neither a monster nor a demon could nevertheless be an agent of the most extreme evil evoked derision, outrage, and misunderstanding. The firestorm of controversy prompted Arendt to readdress fundamental questions and concerns about the nature of evil and the making of moral choices. Responsibility and Judgment gathers together unpublished writings from the last decade of Arendt’s life, as she struggled to explicate the meaning of Eichmann in Jerusalem. At the heart of this book is a profound ethical investigation, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy”; in it Arendt confronts the inadequacy of traditional moral “truths” as standards to judge what we are capable of doing, and she examines anew our ability to distinguish good from evil and right from wrong. We see how Arendt comes to understand that alongside the radical evil she had addressed in earlier analyses of totalitarianism, there exists a more pernicious evil, independent of political ideology, whose execution is limitless when the perpetrator feels no remorse and can forget his acts as soon as they are committed. Responsibility and Judgment is an essential work for understanding Arendt’s conception of morality; it is also an indispensable investigation into some of the most troubling and important issues of our time.