The Eichmann Trial: An Ineradicable Sense of Justice

“And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations - as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang."

-- Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

The closing paragraphs of the epilogue of Eichmann in Jerusalem reformulate Arendt’s final argument that the judges of the tribunal should have delivered if they had dared to declare the definitive reason for which they sent Eichmann to the gallows. This reason has retribution at its core: Eichmann and his kind did not want to share the world with us, and he claimed the right to decide who should and should not inhabit the earth. In that case, we decided we did not want to share the world with him.

[caption id="attachment_14947" align="alignleft" width="300"] Eichmann in Jerusalem (Source: Amazon)[/caption]

Explicit in this conclusion is one of the most fundamental problems which the judgment of the case confronts us with: whilst lacking the adequate tools in our legal system on which to base our judgment and finding ourselves before a criminal towards whom our concept of guilt falls short, we know that our sense of justice has been offended by a horrendous crime, one that deserves to be punished. Even if we strenuously reject the idea that the earth shall be our judge, our conviction rests upon this knowledge, upon this evidence. Yet, upon what is this knowledge founded, and what shall we do with it? In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt ultimately seems to appeal to our archaic sense of justice, and this is what, in my understanding, we can take from her use of Yosal Rogat´s quote. However, we can also imagine that perhaps it was a certain dissatisfaction with this very appeal to an archaic sense of justice which in later years drove her to delve into the faculty of judgment, to find in an actual human capacity and in the actual community of men and women who exercise a right to judge, the place where that certainty is anchored.

[caption id="attachment_14950" align="alignright" width="300"] Portrait of German-born American political theorist and author Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975), 1949. (Source: New Yorker)[/caption]

Arendt’s meditation on the tension between our conviction that there are crimes which cry out for punishment and the difficulty of judging them - the tension between an ineradicable sense of justice and the legislations of justice - is in my opinion one of the main contributions of Eichmann in Jerusalem. For those in our political communities trying to address horrendous crimes, (and the political, judicial and moral problems related to those which Arendt describes here) this meditation has pressing and permanent relevance. How do we negotiate judicial problems related to the non-retroactivity of laws when confronted by crimes never before imagined? How do we confront the political challenge of the inescapability of a justice decided by the victors? How do we address a new form of evil executed by a subordinate agent who obeys state powers and is unaware of his responsibility? And how, under these aforementioned conditions, is it possible to establish culpabilities and responsibilities and simultaneously take on the challenge of reconstructing a political community?

The “Epilogue” to Eichmann in Jerusalem shows us, as far as I understand it, that an answer to these questions does not exist; it tells us that it is our responsibility as thinkers to acknowledge that we do not have an answer, but it also shows us that it is our responsibility as actors to respond to them.

-- Claudia Hilb

(Featured Image: Adolf Eichmann; Source: National Review)