Arendt reading about Eichmann’s trial
From the reading of Arendt of the Eichmann trial, another important issue is derived for the subject we are analyzing and is the one that has to do with how the trial was conducted, and therefore with the reasons of Israel, and with the nature of ajudgment itself. Arendt argued that sometimes the trial was a spectacle, and therefore did not fulfill the single function of administering justice to an individual, regardless of who he was or what he believed. In the book Arendt states that the trial was built not on the acts that Eichmann had committed but above all the damage that the Jews had suffered. This was clearly seen in the election of more than 50 witnesses whose testimony was not directly related to Eichmann’s actions and therefore did not contribute to discerning the accused justice or injustice of the accused. There was a trial before trial. They had declared him guilty long before. This is evident in the pamphlets that were distributed during the 1961 Jewish World Congress. However, the purpose of any trial is to do justice, the accused, the victims and the society in general. The questions should not have been part of it, although perhaps more transcendent of: how could this happen? Why did it happen? Why were the perpetrators precisely the Germans and the victims precisely the Jews? What role did other responsible nations have in this tragedy? How was it possible for Jews to cooperate, through their leaders, in their own destruction? And yet these were the questions around which the trial was developed. The object of the trial should be Eichmann’s performance, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people, nor the human race, not even anti -Semitism or racism.
There were several reasons to judge Eichmann, but mainly there was a historical reason: Ben Gurion sought to give a show to the rest of the world, to give lessons to the entire world: first, that public opinion knew that not only Nazi Germany was responsible for thedestruction of 6 million European Jews;And second, he wanted to alert the Jews of the diaspora who would always face a hostile world. Another reasons was to discover other Nazis and other Nazi activities. Arendt says:
“If these had been the only justifying reasons to submit Adolf Eichmann to the authority of the Jerusalem Court, the trial would have been a failure in many aspects. From a certain point of view, the lessons were superfluous and from another point of view, they were misleading ”45.
For Arendt, the purpose of a trial is to do justice and nothing else, but this trial had many other purposes. You might think that what is the problem, the crime being so serious and so clear the complicity of Eichmann, to a greater or lesser extent, in letting trial was a symbolic event. Why abstract responses arise about such thorough issues:
“From the point of view of the accusation, the story was the object around which the trial revolved. ‘In this historic judgment, it is not an individual who sits on the bench, it is not the Nazi regime, but secular anti -Semitism’. This was the guideline set by Ben Gurion at the beginning of the trial46 ".
Eichmann was considered by Israel as a symbol, that is clear in the words of Ben Gurion before trial: but the question that can be asked is: a symbol of what? Of anti -Semitism? Nazism? And what is precisely that anti -Semitism? A feature of the Germans, therefore implying the guilt of all Germans? Daniel Bell explains that Arendt also considered Eichmann as a symbol, however the categories that were decisive for Israel, namely "gentle" and "German", for her they lacked importance. Eichmann was a unique individual, but in turn Arendt made him "every man", neither perverted nor sadistic but "terribly normal47".
However, beyond this legal purpose of discerning the guilt or innocence of a man with respect to the law, moral judgment was impossible. The previous idea that Eichmann was a perverse and evil individual represents a moral judgment that the Jerusalem Court was incapacitated to perform. This is precisely because all moral judgment implies that not only actions are judged but above all intentions and motivations. Therefore, although for the legal trial and the verdict of guilt the "banality of evil" that Arendt attributed to Eichmann was irrelevant, it was for the moral judgment that the court, and with him many other Jews, wanted to make. It was precisely the insinuation that to some extent a totalitarian system that would incapacitate or hinder in such a great extent personal thinking could somehow reduce a man’s responsibility for his actions, which deeply offended public opinion.
The historical judgment of which Ben Gurion spoke involved morality, not only legality, since history is composed of individual and concrete actions, each attributed to an individual person with a personal responsibility, only there, there is freedom and it is these concrete actions thatThey build the story. Judging the story would therefore imply each of these individual actions and the individuals who committed it, not only legally but also morally. Ben Gurion wanted to say, both Germany and other nations, which they had also been guilty of the horrors that had been committed against the Jews. And this was nothing more than a magnification of what was tried to do with Eichmann and that was not successful, since what was manifested in the trial, as Arendt shows, was precisely the impossibility of judging the morality of a man48, ofknowing their true intentions, motivations and how concrete circumstances (in this case the generalized moral collapse of German society during the Nazi regime) could have affected their action.
There was a third type of trial, a political trial, which in Arendt’s opinion was achieved. The trial to history, and with it all nations, was impossible, but the political and legal judgment could be achieved.
“You say it was‘ historically false ’, and I feel uncomfortable seeing that the spectrum of history stands in this context. In my opinion, it was politically and legally (and the latter is in fact the only thing that mattered) not only correct, but it would have been impossible not to reach that sentence49 ”.
The political trial was carried out because it made clear the rest of the nations that, thanks to Hitler, the anti -Semitism was discredited, perhaps not forever but for the moment. He left Germany that they were guilty, as guilty as Eichmann. A collective guilt, which we have already argued that it is impossible since it is not possible to make a moral judgment on a specific individual even less over a whole nation and all its individuals. As Arendt points out:
"Justice, not mercy, is the purpose of any judgment, and at no other point is so happily unanimously unanimous opinion, anywhere in the world, as in that no one has the right to judge others,".
Just judge general trends, but never a particular individual, that says public opinion. According to Arendt as ridiculous, it is the total fault of the German people as the collective innocence of the Jewish people. This is not equivalent to denying political responsibility, which exists with total independence of the acts of the specific individuals that form the group and consequently cannot be legally judged or subject to the action of a court of justice. Nor in strict sense can be morally judged, although that impossibility of a definitive historical judgment on their actions does not dilute its responsibility. At this point where the concept of legitimacy or political illegitimacy comes into play.
Every government assumes the political responsibility of the good and bad acts of its predecessor and every nation of the good or bad events of the past. All generation, having been born in an area of historical continuity, assumes the burden of their parents’ actions and benefits from the glories of their ancestors. But an individual, only metaphorically, can be "guilty" of something that their ancestors have made. Morally, it’s almost so bad to feel guilty without having done anything to feel free to have done it. It should be conceived that there is an international court that judges the political responsibility of the nations, but not that such a court pronounced on the guilt or innocence of certain individuals. The question of individual guilt or innocence, the act of doing justice to both the defendant and the victim, is the sole purpose of a criminal court. The purpose of the report that Arendt was asked was to determine to what extent the Jerusalem Court managed to meet the demands of justice.
One thing is that a government or people inherit the political responsibility of previous governments and another is that people of a certain people inherit a moral guilt. Arendt recriminates their attitude to Germany: total indifference that the country was infested with criminals and mass murderers. But really, can you ask you to have another attitude? When the crime becomes the general rule and most Germans were involved, whether with tacit or actively assent and when the rest of the world is responsible for reminding them of what happened and that they were the executioners, what other attitude could be expected? Isn’t it normal for try to reconcile with your past? Why did they shut up? Because they also felt guilty. The heirs of the Tätergeneration do not interpret evil as banal. It was not banal for the Germans after the event, but lived the damage violated by their ancestors as a moral fault. The Zweite Generation, the children of the war, feel heirs of history and also heirs of the fault of their parents. But in reality, the guilt they inherit is not a real guilt, but symbolic, patriotic, political, because real guilt has to do with personal responsibility for actions. They did not commit those actions with which it is absurd to assume that a real guilt falls on them.
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