[5] Eichmann in Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt - Review

This is much less of a review than a reflection and meditation. After all, what am I really going to be able to contribute to an insanely detailed account of a trial of an upper-echelon Nazi?

Reading a book like this makes you hyper aware of the quickness we make caricatures of the entirety of WWII and the Holocaust. You'll get accounts from people at all levels of the chaos testifying and laying blame in every direction. You'll get a feel for the giant clusterfuck that constituted the organization and mitigation of orders. You'll start to get a sense of the amount of hands involved, Jew and non-Jew alike, that had an infinite list of reasons for their compliance or resistance.

There is no more appropriate word than "banal" when it comes to how the atrocities are contemplated, tried, and explained. Eichmann is almost too much, yet too little, for words. You will never need to look further than his own words, a hodgepodge of cliches and arbitrary appeals to circumstance and concern for his career, to understand the depths of delusion, complacency, and justification.

It's just, when the numbers get reported. I have 101 friends on Facebook. You here 2,000 here "deported" 25,000 there trying to "emigrate." Most on their way to a death camp. Their possessions signed over, their families split apart, stateless, and described in utterly inhuman terms while the perpetrators find ways to consider themselves righteous in letting a few slip through the cracks to safety. Arbitrary death metted out from most countries, combated only by a handful of nations and only by semi-arbitrary edicts and ideas themselves. Like, France, happy to deport the stateless native born German-Jews, but when asked to ship out their French-Jews, NOW they switch gears and start protecting and playing hardball. Complicated immigration policy much?

I kind of feel hopeless. When you stop and contemplate the amount of people, from all levels of society, all different mixtures of nationalities. The tacit approval, in the lack of a voice against, the different experiments that were carried out at the social level to test what people were capable of. Like, you know "we won" the war, but the lessons and struggle of what it means to be "human" are so profoundly important, you wonder if when that generation is entirely gone if the message will really set in about the scale and nature of what happened.

This is absolutely something you read for the details. The gist of the trail itself or Eichmann as a person might take a chapter or two. The "mess" of people involved, how they ranked, different country policies, pacing, personal stories, different purposes the trail tried to serve and reflections and interplay of the testimony as it pertained to personal philosophy and morality are all explored.The best kind of eye-opening about the worst capacities of the human habit and soul.