SOURCE: "The Politics of Storytelling: Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem," in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 26, No. 3, Summer, 1992, pp. 201-11.

[In the following essay, Siebers analyzes Eichmann in Jerusalem in terms of memory and judgment—qualities largely absent in twentieth-century culture but inherent to storytelling.]

Few modern events have stirred the need for recollection and judgment more than the Holocaust. As time and witnesses pass on, however, its memory grows more dim, and legally speaking the atrocities of Nazi anti-Semitism have remained for the most part unjudged. The trial of Adolf Eichmann and the Nuremberg Trials assume great historical significance because they provided concrete occasions for recollecting and judging. The Eichmann trial in particular created a kind of chain reaction of judgment: the judgment of Eichmann gave way to the judgment of anti-Semitism, of Israel, of the Jewish victims, and of the lawyers and the reporters at the trial. The trial also provided an occasion for a multitude of victims to recount their tales of suffering. The judgment of Eichmann welded participants into a chain of responsibility, in which each person was linked to others in the act of judging and recollecting.

This phenomenon is itself rare, if we follow Hannah Arendt's assessment of the modern world. Arendt describes the modern epoch as one little interested in remembrance and afraid of passing judgment. To judge is to subsume a particular experience under a general rule. But people in the modern age hesitate to perform the calculation that requires them to create a general rule to account for a particular event. Rather, they remain suspended between the love of facts and the love of preexisting categories of thinking. They prefer information and formulas to the act of judging and the need to remember; and since information offers little to the experience of memory, and formulas defeat judgment, modern individuals risk losing the ability to learn from experience. Experience is lost between fact and formula. "Unfortunately," Arendt complains, "it seems to be much easier to condition human behavior and make people conduct themselves in the most unexpected and outrageous manner than it is to persuade anybody to learn from experience; that is, to start thinking and judging instead of applying categories and formulas which are deeply ingrained in our minds but whose basis of experience has long been forgotten and whose plausibility resides in their intellectual consistency rather than in their adequacy to actual events" [The Listener (6 August 1964)].

To have experience, we must judge. But to judge, we must first imagine and remember, and in a way that resists the mechanical repetition of facts and the easy pattern of formulas. Memory and judgment join in their need to tell an individual story. Stories are richer than simple facts and deeper than the preconceived patterns and cultural myths used to impose order on individual experience, and the value of storytelling for cognition thereby surpasses the contributions of history and philosophy. But to tell a story is not easy in the modern world. On the one hand, capitalism speeds up existence. It imposes commercial myths upon us and fractures our stories with its information and advertisements. On the other hand, the rise of totalitarianism works toconfound both memory and judgment; according to Arendt, the death camps were made possible only because the totalitarian system stole the power of judgment from both victims and victimizers. Totalitarianism does not want its story to be told; it relies on secrets and condemns its victims to oblivion.

In Hannah Arendt's eyes, the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem brought about a collision of the many forces defining modernity, and she saw it as an opportunity to confront the modern condition [in Eichmann in Jerusalem]. Her report on the trial is really a political treatise that attempts to describe what can be learned from Eichmann's story. More specifically, she resists modernity by trying to tell the story of Eichmann on trial in a way that passes judgment on the act of judging itself as well as in a way that defeats those forces working to obliterate memory.

Arendt's task, however, was complicated by the nature of modern thought and national movements. The Nazi movement and Israeli politics collided in the Eichmann trial, and Arendt became caught in the middle. Indeed, the trial became a situation in which people struggled not to be caught in the middle; but Arendt fought for what everyone else feared. She wanted to be precisely in the middle. Her desire to be in the thick of the conflict was partly polemical, but it also derived from her views about memory, storytelling, and judgment. The middle was the vantage point from which she could best tell the story of Eichmann in Jerusalem and render judgment on him. For the act of judging seeks not only to create a general rule to account for particular experience, but also to imagine the situations of other people. Judging, like any form of understanding, involves first reconciling oneself to the existence of the person or the event that one is judging. It is a matter, Arendt argues, of trying "to be at home in the world" [Partisan Review 20, No. 4 (1953)].

But who would want to be at home in Eichmann's world, and is it possible to judge a man who has no judgment? Is it possible to sympathize with a person who is incapable of showing sympathy? Finally, how can we understand someone who has no understanding? Judging and memory require human company, but Eichmann cut himself off from the chain of sympathy and responsibility necessary to human beings. Both judging and memory require that a story be told, but Eichmann's story could be told only with the greatest difficulty, because telling a story requires that a listener or reader be open to the story. The great test of a story is its ability to attract people who desire to become the next teller of the tale, so that the experience of the story cannot be separated from its passing from person to person. That no one wanted to listen to Eichmann's story in the first place, and that no one wanted to recount it, means that no one wanted either to know or to judge the man. In a sense, people wanted only to forget him.

Recent work on the Holocaust explains just how fragile are both judgment and memory; neither the desire to remember nor the desire to judge protects them in a climate that deliberately perverts them. We know that Hitler saw it as a disgrace to be a jurist, and we have all heard about the impossible choices imposed upon people in the camps and the ghettos. Arendt argues that the Nazis consistently confounded the act of judgment by forcing their victims to choose the lesser of two evils. If we are confronted by two evils, the argument went, we are required to choose the lesser one, because it is irresponsible to refuse the choice. Unfortunately, this logic made decision itself impossible by allowing only those choices most abhorrent to the victim. It also encouragedthose who chose the lesser evil to forget that they had in fact chosen evil. Indeed, the Nazis persecuted their victims by confronting them with evil and tempting them to feel responsibility for crimes that they had no freedom to choose. The totalitarian argument of the lesser evil remains, according to Arendt, "one of the mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and crimes."

For a long time, our only means of facing this machinery of terror and crime was to repeat in nightmarish fashion the very images that the Nazis had created. The result was a kind of Jewish gothic, a catalogue of images and terrors, which represented the camps as the ultimate experience of modern horror. These images were replayed in the media first to inform the public of Nazi crimes and then for entertainment value; the Holocaust has now evolved into a dramatic source used to boost television ratings and to sell automobiles and soft drinks. The memory of the Holocaust has been eroded by repeating plots and making stereotypes of both victimizers and victims. Consequently, those who believe that the experience of the Holocaust has value for the future must discover new ways of introducing us to the events. Claude Lanzmann's epic film Shoah, for example, deliberately avoids familiar gothic images by asking people to tell their stories and to stand where they once stood. He forges a link in memory and judgment between the past and present without using the artificial drama now associated with the Holocaust. His film makes the point in images, which others have made in argument, that the Holocaust is not a single event but a word in which the personal experience of a multitude of sufferers resonates.

Neither memory nor judgment is served by a Jewish gothic that requires fate or history to arrange an eternal combat between anti-Semite and Jew. Hannah Arendt learned this lesson in Jerusalem, to her utter surprise. She went there with everyone else expecting to catch the horrible specter of Hitler dancing in Eichmann's eyes. What she found was banality. Arendt portrays Eichmann first and foremost as a bureaucrat, and in that image of evil she moves ahead of her time. It was not acceptable in 1961, at least not outside Marxist circles, to portray evil in the character of the functionary, but today we understand and accept the image. The fact that our fictions and moral codes now turn to the character of the businessman to represent vice reveals that we have all come to accept what Arendt called the banality of evil. In a reversal of some proportions, however, we tend increasingly to stress the radical evil of that figure, rather than its baseness, thereby undercutting Arendt's idea of banality and creating a stereotype as dangerous as any other.

But Arendt did not describe Eichmann as a functionary to reveal the radical nature of evil; she found evil in that form only because Eichmann was a functionary who had succumbed to evil. Given her idea of judgment, Arendt's only choice as a reporter at the trial was to try to tell the story of this Eichmann. The choice made her into his involuntary biographer, a situation whose irony did not escape her. Just as an Israeli lawyer could not be expected to defend Eichmann without risking personal harm, a Jew could not be expected to tell his story to the world without inciting the Jewish community to anger. That Arendt chose to tell that story and not relinquish her Jewishness is a tribute to both her courage and her foolishness, for some may doubt whether the story was worth all the personal woe that befell her. The tranquility of her work was invaded by hatred. The company of fellow intellectuals was driven beyond her reach. She lost friends to tell the story of an enemy.

Clearly, Hannah Arendt believed that Eichmann's story should be told, but we may ask why. The answer again turns on Arendt's opinion that the story was a valuable experience from which to learn something about how human beings think. Of the Holocaust, Arendt once said, "in such things there is nothing but Einzelfälle [particular cases]." Eichmann's case fits that description as well, being part of the Holocaust. As Arendt saw it, the Eichmann trial held only one story, and she could not translate it into another one, no matter how ignoble it seemed. To tell another story would in fact be a form of forgetting Eichmann. Arendt saw too well the temptation to be like Eichmann: to become a person who has stopped thinking. It is easy to forget someone who has stopped thinking, but that is the greatest danger. Arendt's book takes the unexpected form of Eichmann's biography precisely because of this threat. Eichmann's story concerns one man being tried in one city, and Arendt had to emphasize its particular nature or risk losing her hold on the politics of the situation.

Indeed, that there are nothing but particular cases in the Holocaust has extraordinary political repercussions. It is precisely the particular that totalitarianism struggles to erase as it applies its generalizing and ideological rhetoric. The immediate response to it often succumbs to the temptation to meet its totalizing movement with another one, thereby becoming only a mirror image of the enemy. Arendt therefore criticizes both the press and the prosecution for presenting the Eichmann case as a model for thinking about fate, history, or anti-Semitism in general: there is "no system on trial," she concludes, "no history or historical trend, no 'ism', antisemitism for instance, but a person; and if the defendant happens to be a functionary, he stands accused precisely because even a functionary is still a human being, and it is in this capacity that he stands trial…. If the defendant were permitted to plead either guilty or not guilty as representative of a system, he would indeed become a 'scapegoat.'"

Arendt's report, then, focuses on the obstacles to judgment and remembrance created by Eichmann's own stories and by the stories told about him by lawyers, politicians, and other reporters. The latter stories, always prompted by special interests, amount to a form of static that interferes at every turn with the real story of Eichmann's life. Arendt describes the television broadcasts of the trial as being interrupted by "realestate advertising" and the outbursts, apparently "spontaneous," of the lawyers, complaining about Eichmann's lies. She also criticizes the prosecuting attorney for his showmanship. To the stories of genuine suffering told by the victims, she opposes the prosecutor's staging of the event. In his estimation, the trial should tighten its focus on the crimes of the German people against humanity, on anti-Semitism as a phenomenon, or on racism as such. Again and again, he tries to transform the trial into a history lesson on eternal anti-Semitism from Pharaoh to the present. History becomes, in his words, "the bloodstained road traveled by this people," the Jews, and assumes the character of a path necessary to accomplish their destiny. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt attacks similar descriptions of Jewish history because they blunt the seriousness of anti-Semitism and conceive of matters human in the most inhuman terms by placing a supernatural view of history above the concept of individual responsibility. Furthermore, in the report on the trial, Arendt complains that such general pictures evade the problem of Eichmann's evil, replacing it with dramas of large and tragic proportions written in the name of such abstractions as destiny and history. These dramas are easy to repeat and to remember, but they have little to do with individual human experience.

Similarly, David Ben-Gurion incited Arendt's anger because he announced beforehand those lessons that the trial should teach to "Jews and Gentiles, to Israelis and Arabs, in short, to the whole world." A lesson, or a moral, may come of a story, but if the lesson is told before the story, the story risks not being told. Ben-Gurion's lessons were clear, but Arendt doubted whether they were part of the story. Rather, Ben-Gurion had committed "the sin of trying to make a story come true," to borrow Arendt's remarks on Isak Dinesen, "of interfering with life according to a preconceived pattern, instead of waiting patiently for the story to emerge …" [Men in Dark Times]. For Ben-Gurion, the trial was supposed to demonstrate that the "Jews had always faced a 'hostile world'" and to implicate the world in the murder of six million Jews: "Let world opinion know this, that not only Nazi Germany was responsible for the destruction of six million Jews of Europe." In a sense, the trial could come to an end only when it had uncovered the Eichmann in every one of us.

No doubt, collective guilt is a powerful political device, but it risks clouding judgment, and it does not serve memory very well because it believes in no particular experience. "Morally speaking," Arendt argues, "it is hardly less wrong to feel guilty without having done something specific than it is to feel free of guilt if one is actually guilty of something." Both actions destroy judgment. Finally, if Eichmann were only one more anti-Semite in the hostile world of eternal anti-Semitism, how could he be judged? His guilt would serve in that case only as a symbol for a collective guilt spread so thin as to have no meaning at all.

In Arendt's opinion, the prosecution's image of Eichmann impeded his exposure to judgment by representing him as a symbol for metaphysical dramas of history and fate. But what distressed her more was the uncanny similarity between this image and Eichmann's own view of himself. For Arendt, Eichmann was, above all else, a man who had stopped thinking. He had adopted the most cliché expressions to describe his life and motivations; he grew elated when he spoke of himself and his destiny, lifted, as it were, by his own petard. Now Arendt discovered that others described not only the defendant but themselves in the same language.

Arendt's commentary on this language is sustained, but her major point may be easily rehearsed and briefly illustrated. Her analysis is, in my opinion, one of the most successful characterizations of "the politics of interpretation" in existence, and it is leaps and bounds ahead of anything being written today under the aegis of either deconstruction or the new historicism. She demonstrates again and again that both Eichmann and those speaking on behalf of the Jewish people used a gothic language of destiny and superhuman agency to interpret themselves. Eichmann confessed that "officialese" was his only language, but his confession was only partially true. He was equally well versed in the cliché language of Destiny, History, and Movement. He described himself as a "bearer of secrets," whose hard-luck story it was to be sacrificed to the gods of misfortune. He was, moreover, swallowed by history and its grandiose events: "everything went wrong, my personal affairs as well as my years-long efforts to obtain land and soil for the Jews. I don't know, everything was as if under an evil spell…." And as if history and destiny were not sufficient causes for his woes, Eichmann blamed the Nazi movement for his bad luck: "The subject of a good government is lucky, the subject of a bad government is unlucky. I had no luck." "I am not the monster I am made out to be," he lamented. "I am the victim of a fallacy."

Eichmann represents himself not only as a victim but as an exemplary victim, a special victim unlike any other. He views himself not as ordinary but as radical; he is a person of the kind destined to convey ultimate meanings. Indeed, Eichmann begins his memoirs by suggesting that his destiny flies above the human world and that his form is a mere envelope containing more powerful forces: "Today … I begin to lead my thoughts back to the nineteenth of March of the year 1906, when at five o'clock in the morning I entered life on earth in the aspect of a human being" (emphasis mine). The trial merely provides Eichmann with the proof of his destiny by setting him apart and marking him with the seal of a unique fate, and he gladly offers himself as a symbol to the world on behalf of the Jews: I propose, he exclaims, "to hang myself in public as a warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth." Here, then, is a man who believes himself victimized by history, fate, and international politics, but who seems all too willing to accept his martyrdom, if only it has the proper symbolic consequences and furthers his own notoriety. So misunderstood by the world in his own eyes, Eichmann simultaneously exculpates himself and offers himself as a symbol of guilt, hoping to achieve through these means an even greater power and agency in world affairs.

The prosecution and press, quite naturally, represented Eichmann as a monster, rather than as a buffoon, and they began repeating his eerie and otherworldly images of himself. He was "a perverted, sadistic personality" and "a man obsessed with a dangerous and insatiable urge to kill." Arendt is also guilty to some extent of repeating Eichmann's rhetoric when she describes him as enigmatic and thought-defying, for Eichmann would have liked to be considered "thought-defying." But, more disturbing, the prosecution and government press releases applied Eichmann's rhetoric of victimization and his sense of martyrdom to the Jewish people as well. Eichmann, when most elated, described himself as a martyr to his idea, and claimed fascination with the "Jewish question" because he saw in the Jews fellow idealists. An idealist, according to Eichmann, lived for an idea and was prepared to sacrifice for that idea everything and everyone. Eichmann's martyr complex was revealed in his fervent desire to die for his idea and in his elation before the executioner; but, in fact, the comparison between Jewish idealism and his own was perverse in the extreme, and so too was the rhetoric at the trial that represented the victims of the Holocaust either as fulfilling some grand destiny or as martyrs to the cause of Israel. The Jews were rarely martyrs, properly speaking, because they did not sacrifice themselves for an idea. Indeed, they were permitted neither the power nor the dignity of having an idea. Rather, they were sacrificed for the ideas of their murderers. They were killed simply because they were. The Nazis worked for the most obvious political reasons to eliminate the possibility of martyrdom, and only a recuperative history, designed to restore dignity and power to the Jewish state, could represent the victims as martyrs to history. Although such revisionary histories lend cohesion to state politics, and are valuable in that respect, they risk masking the fundamentally human and helpless nature of the Jewish victims.

The trial, then, did not sufficiently allow people of flesh and blood to emerge; rather, it concealed them in a garb of theatrical making, designed to summon political generalities, grandiose movements, and fateful plots. Nor did the trial allow the stories of the victims to have their full impact. Perhaps more threatening than the nature of political theater at the trial was its influence on individual testimony. As the trial became more of a stage, Arendt concludes, the events grew more tragic in the dramatic sense, but they were inevitably less personal, individual, and human. "As witness followed witness and horror piled upon horror," Arendt explains, the people "sat there and listened in public to stories they would hardly have been able to endure in private, when they would have had to face the storyteller." The fourth wall of the stage imposed itself between witness and audience, making the stories more bearable but blunting their ability to communicate as well as their essentially human character.

Arendt understands that stories exist only in communications from person to person, because an essential ingredient of any story is the bond created between speaker and listener or writer and reader. Her account of Zindel Grynszpan's testimony focuses on the inherent power of his story and the directness of its telling. Grynszpan recounts a day in his life in the autumn of 1938, when he and his family were deprived of German nationality and expelled to Poland. Some twelve thousand Jews were processed that day by the Germans and driven to the train station through the streets, black with people shouting, "Juden raus to Palestine." From the station, they were transported to the Polish border, and there the S.S. drove them like beasts for over a mile until they crossed the border and were interned by the Polish authorities in a village of six thousand—twelve thousand added to six thousand, and the majority had not eaten in four days. Arendt emphasizes that Grynszpan's story did not even remotely resemble a "dramatic moment," but it conveyed nevertheless, through its shining honesty, the needless destruction of his twenty-seven years of life in less than twenty-four hours.

A story's objective is to convey human experience, but its silences and the speaker's inability to continue are equally parts of the storytelling experience, and in the case of the catastrophic events of the Holocaust, the storyteller's own emotional fragmentation may be the most powerful communication of the events. One of the most moving and memorable scenes of Claude Lanzmann's film concerns Abraham Bomba's story about cutting women's hair in the gas chambers. He tries to tell the story of a friend, a good barber, who saw his wife and his sister come into the death chamber. The women did not know that they were there to die, and the barber could not tell them. He tried to cut their hair more slowly, a minute longer, a second longer, just to hug and kiss them, because he knew that he would never see them again. Abraham Bomba breaks down when he tries to tell the story. He turns from the camera and covers his face with his hands. The story stops and starts, interrupted this time not by noise, commercials, or political announcements but by the force of the story itself, by its own rhythms and the emotions dictating its form in a face-to-face encounter between human beings.

It is crucial to stress that Abraham Bomba's story does not fail precisely because it stops and starts. For in Bomba's emotional interruptions resides the story's humanity. It is equally crucial to recognize that the trial did not fail in Arendt's eyes, despite all the obstacles to judgment and memory, for these obstacles were put in place by human hands. The stories of Abraham Bomba and Adolf Eichmann stand at perverse extremes; but both are integral to the experience of the Holocaust, if it is to be remembered and judged, if its stories are to be told. Both stories require a form of patience, although of a very different kind: we must be willing to pass thestory from teller to teller, to have the patience both to listen to the story and to retell it. Storytelling engages the patient art of thinking, for thinking is an act of imagining from the standpoint of someone else—an act, therefore, fundamentally of conversation and communication. It implies the idea of a tradition and the desire to be at home and among others in the human community, but it is too rare in our day. The Nazi movement did all that it could to crush our patience with these stories, and now our modern urge to rush through life demands that we shorten our stories or transform them into blockbusters.

Both of these forces, called modern by Arendt, would seem to condemn the story of the Holocaust to oblivion. But, fortunately, oblivion is not so easily attained. "Nothing human is that perfect," Arendt writes, "and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible."

That we continue to tell these stories is, humanly speaking, all that judgment and memory require of us.