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Tuesday, October 27, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, please join me and Marci Shore for our Second Annual Hair-Raising Halloween Costume Party and book club event. Shore, an intellectual historian who wrote The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, and whose brilliant insights often appear in my work, will be offering us a master class on one of the scariest books I have ever read: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Costumes are optional.
More on our guest here:
Dr. Marci Shore is an American Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Toronto. She left her position at Yale University in the US – with her husband, historian Timothy Snyder – in August 2024. She is an expert in European history and the author of The Ukrainian Night, and Caviar and Ashes.
More on German political philosopher Hannah Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem:
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt, who is among the most quoted and influential scholars of totalitarianism and a renowned 20th century political theorist. The Jewish historian fled Germany during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and was hired to by The New Yorker to report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key organizers of the Holocaust. The reports evolved into a book and Arendt’s subtitle introduced the term, “the banality of evil,” as Eichmann claimed he was just “doing his job” and “obeying the law.’
It is a troublesome read, as people who look back at the evil period want monsters. What Arendt delivers in her documentation is bureaucrats. (More on this in my upcoming review of the book.)
Here are some excerpted quotes from Shore on her essay, Hannah Arendt on the Jewish question (from the English original of an essay Adam Michnik asked Shore to write for Gazeta Wyborcza when a collection of Arendt’s writings on Jewish questions was published in Polish):
“You know, what was decisive was not the year 1933, at least not for me. What was decisive was the day we learned about Auschwitz,” Hannah Arendt said in a 1964 interview. “That was in 1943. At first we didn’t believe it. . . It was as if an abyss had opened.”
In 1961, Arendt had traveled to Jerusalem for the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had organized the transports to Auschwitz. In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she maintained that what was striking about Adolf Eichmann was that he was so ordinary. Not especially intelligent, Eichmann was an obedient bureaucratic interested in career advancement. “The subject of a good government is lucky,” Eichmann said in his own defense, “the subject of a bad government is unlucky. I had no luck.” Arendt found Eichmann to be “incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.” In her opinion, this man, whom the Israeli prosecutors desperately wanted to portray as the embodiment of the demonic, failed to emerge as a monster. On the contrary, she wrote, “it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.”
What she learned from Eichmann, she believed, was that the nature of evil was its shallowness, its lack of depth—in sharp contrast to our longing for the demonic. She understood that this insight was unsatisfying. Discussing the Eichmann book, she told one conversation partner, “it seemed only too obvious to us all that we needed to demonize the catastrophe in order to find some historical meaning in it. And I admit, it is easier to bear the thought that the victim is the victim of the devil in human disguise. . .the victim of a metaphysical principle, rather than the victim of some average man on the street who is not even crazy or particularly evil. What all of us cannot cope with about the recent past is not the number of victims, but the shabbiness of these mass murderers lacking any sense of guilt and the mindless shoddiness of their so-called ideals.”
Here is some extra credit homework if you want to learn more about Shore’s research on Arendt:
Links to Shore’s books:
Please keep scrolling for the event registration.
Look forward to seeing many of you in the squares… in costume :) for this very important and timely conversation.
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