Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past

Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past offers a critical analysis of the original American debate over Hannah Arendt’s report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. First published in 2008, Tuija Parvikko’s book discusses both the campaign against Arendt organised by American Zionist organisations and the controversy Arendt’s report caused within American Jewish intellectual circles. Parvikko’s analysis carefully draws from the historical background of the report, discussing Arendt’s early studies of Zionism and her critique of the Jewish state. The volume also gives an account of Eichmann’s capture in Argentina and the reception of the report among legal scholars and the world press. This edition includes a new prologue in which Parvikko reflects on her own account in connection to recent academic discussions on the controversy. The author’s analysis also covers contributions that have attempted to follow Arendt’s notion of thinking without banisters. With them, Parvikko engages in debate about going beyond Arendt’s theoretical reflections on cohabitation, sharing the world, and discussing the new political evils of the present world without pregiven norms and patterns of thought.

Posverdad y destrucción del espacio público. Una lectura desde el pensamiento de Hannah Arendt

En 1967 y como respuesta a las críticas sobre sus reportajes del juicio en Jerusalén contra Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt publicó en las páginas de The New Yorker un ensayo titulado «Verdad y Política». Cuatro años después, y tras la filtración de los papeles del Pentágono, firmó en The New York Review of Books un ensayo hermano titulado «La mentira en la política». El presente artículo toma como punto de partida dichos trabajos para discutir la actualidad del pensamiento arendtiano en relación con el actual fenómeno de la posverdad. A través de una metodología histórico-hermenéutica fundamentada en una amplia revisión documental tanto de fuentes primarias como secundarias, el objetivo del presente artículo será analizar y valorar el concepto de defactualization, acuñado por la pensadora alemana con motivo de la publicación de los papeles del Pentágono para hacer referencia al enmascaramiento de la realidad, como un proto-concepto con el que Hannah Arendt ya nombró el fenómeno que hoy conocemos como posverdad, incluso antes de que el propio término apareciera. Partiendo de esa base, se examinan tres características que se encuentran tanto en las reflexiones de la pensadora alemana durante el pasado siglo como en las investigaciones actuales en torno a la posverdad: la irrelevancia de la verdad factual, la pérdida de confianza de los ciudadanos en la política, y la destrucción de la esfera pública; una ruptura del necesario espacio público de debate político, de contraste de ideas y de generación de acuerdos y consensos como consecuencia de todo lo anterior.

Dan Porat, Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019. 276 pp.

This chapter looks at Dan Porat's important book, Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators (2019). The focus of Porat's book is the so-called kapo trials that were conducted in Israel between 1951 and 1972. Many of the defendants were not alleged former kapos in Nazi concentration camps but rather former Judenrat (Jewish Council) members and Jewish policemen in ghettos. The legislative authority for the kapo trials derived from the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law promulgated by the Knesset in 1950. This is the law on the basis of which Adolf Eichmann was tried and convicted in Jerusalem in 1961. But, as Porat points out, when the Knesset debated and then passed the legislation, first and foremost in legislators' minds were survivors in Israel who were suspected of cooperation with the Nazis. Unlike the proceedings in Jewish honor courts, which resorted to deontological criteria — that is, whether the accused had a duty to refrain from lending a hand to the Nazis' persecution and murder of other Jews — the Israeli trials, conducted under state authority, were bound by the rules of criminal law to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused.

O DIÁRIO DE ANNE FRANK E A BANALIDADE DO MAL EM HANNAH ARENDT: OLHARES FEMININOS SOBRE OS HORRORES DO HOLOCAUSTO

Muitos são os relatos do holocausto conhecidos em todo o mundo. Parte deles resultam da análise pós-guerra, feita por cientistas políticos, cientistas sociais, jornalistas e historiadores. Parte advém da versão dos algozes em depoimentos tomados quando de seus julgamentos, como o caso mais famoso e emblemático conhecido – o julgamento de Adolf Eichmann, nazista integrante da SS e responsável pelo embarque de milhões de judeus em trens rumo aos campos de extermínio. O conhecimento dos horrores da perseguição a negros, judeus, ciganos e outras minorias também veio a púbico por relatos emocionados de sobreviventes. Mas a versão que ganhou o mundo e deu visibilidade ímpar à odiosa articulação de extermínio liderada por Hitler veio pela mão de uma vítima. Uma menina judia que retratou o cotidiano durante a guerra e não sobreviveu para ver o seu fim. O presente artigo tem por objetivo a análise da obra “O diário de Anne Frank” com o propósito de trazer à discussão o olhar da jovem autora sobre o nazismo, a partir de suas vivências contemporâneas ao holocausto. O artigo pretende ainda apresentar uma outra visão feminina, mais madura e refletida sobre o holocausto. Assim, em breves linhas, analisa o olhar da filósofa e jornalista Hannah Arendt, manifestado na obra “Eichmann em Jerusalém: um relato sobre a banalidade do mal”, escrito posteriormente à queda do terceiro Reich. Utilizando-se de pesquisa bibliográfica desenvolvida mediante emprego do método dedutivo, espera-se apresentar ao leitor a dicotomia e as intersecções de visões de duas mulheres que, apesar de idades, formações e experiências muito distintas, dedicaram-se a relatar os horrores do holocausto.

Between the ethics of forgiveness and the unforgivable: Reflections on Arendt’s idea of reconciliation in politics

The aim of the article is to examine the role that memory and oblivion, forgiveness and unforgiveness play in Hannah Arendt’s thought in relation to acts of violence in the political sphere. Political communities do not always decide to remember the crimes they have committed or the wrongs they have suffered, but neither can they always forget their mutual harms, even when there is already peace between them. Without striving to exhaust the entire subject matter of Arendt’s work, I would like to illustrate the difficulty of understanding the role forgiveness plays in her thought as well as to indicate possible solutions when forgiveness becomes unachievable within the framework of her considerations. Her reflection can be divided into two stages. The first is a focus on the idea of radical evil and the need to forgive perpetrators for their crimes. Second, under the influence of the Adolf Eichmann trial, she developed the idea of the banality of evil. This idea points to situations so terrible that they transcend all human moral judgment, making forgiveness impossible. However, even when the moral possibility of individual forgiveness has been rejected, when the legal possibility of seeking justice has been exhausted and when victims and perpetrators in the community are still unable to live together peacefully, Arendt’s thought leads us to the possibility of political reconciliation.

s.VII Anxieties, Ch.28 Hangman’s Perspective: Three Genres of Critique following Eichmann

This chapter takes Adolf Eichmann as an object of study in subjecting international criminal trials to three types of critique. First, adopting the perspective of the rule of law, this chapter engages with Hannah Arendt’s writing on the Eichmann trial to argue that international criminal trials are constantly suspected of becoming ‘show trials’. Second, turning to Shoshana Felman’s work, the chapter identifies a genre of critique according to which international criminal justice is premised on an experience of catharsis, in which the trauma of atrocity’s victims is alleviated (constituting a post-atrocity political community). Finally, this chapter analyzes a 2010 film that reveals the trauma of the man who executed Eichmann, to show the unacknowledged risks of wielding the violence of criminal justice. Based on this ‘hangman’s perspective’, the chapter suggests assessing international criminal trials in light of questions about the transnational allocation of such risks and about preexisting inequalities—economic, ethnic, and other—that determine the roles different people will end up playing in trials.