Though both her venue and her mode of expression exacerbated the intensity of the attacks on her, it is ultimately what she said that caused the storm. She saw symmetry between the Nazis and their victims where there was none. She extolled non-Jewish heroes, like Anton Schmidt, but identified no Jewish ones. She saw Jewish victims—particularly in terms of their response to persecution—as one undifferentiated whole. Ultimately, her accusations were simply not supported by the data. Even some of her defenders had to acknowledge her errors, though they tried to minimize them. John McGowan argued, “Inevitably she got some facts wrong, but none crucial enough to discredit her argument.”42 Hans Mommsen acknowledged, “She frequently relied on insufficient study of the available primary sources to support the far-reaching conclusions she drew.”43 Regarding her comments about the Jewish Councils, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, with a somewhat greater degree of candor, conceded that her “knowledge of conditions in the Eastern European ghettoes … was not always extensive enough to support her generalizations.”44 Young-Bruehl and Mommsen are too kind. McGowan is simply wrong. She got far more than “some facts wrong.” The primary source material is far from “insufficient” to support many of her conclusions. It contradicts them. Tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of Soviet Jews were murdered without council leaders designating who was to be taken. There were no Jewish police at Babi Yar. She was particularly wrong regarding Eichmann’s role. As Raul Hilberg, on whose work she heavily relied and which she often quoted (but to whom she gave less than proper credit45), observed:
She did not recognize the magnitude of what this man had done with a small staff, overseeing and manipulating Jewish councils in various parts of Europe, Austria, and Bohemia-Moravia, preparing anti-Jewish laws in satellite states, and arranging for the transportation of Jews to shooting sites and death camps.… She did not discern the pathways that Eichmann had found in the thicket of the German administrative machine for his unprecedented actions. She did not grasp the dimensions of his deed.46
Yaacov Lozowick, who, prior to studying the bureaucrats who carried out the Final Solution, agreed with her thesis, observes that Eichmann and his colleagues were completely cognizant of their crimes. Their only regret was of being caught. Christopher Browning, who relies on her theoretical framework for his analysis of the perpetrators, believes she was “fooled” by Eichmann’s courtroom strategy.47 Michael Marrus, who considers the attacks on her unfair, acknowledges that she had a tendency to “pontificate … rather than to muster evidence” and that there were “serious inaccuracies in depicting both the Nazis and their victims.”48 Ironically, in the wake of the debate over her work, Arendt—who had been cavalier with history—called upon historians, reporters, and even poets to “stand guard over the facts.”49
Even her fans have used her arguments in a questionable fashion. It is hard to imagine that she would have approved of the widely praised putative documentary The Specialist by Eyal Sivan and Rony Brauman, even though they credit Arendt as their inspiration. They spliced together different portions of the trial without letting their viewers know that they had done so. They mixed the audio from one portion and the visuals from another. They inserted laughter where there is none. They selectively quoted from witnesses’ testimony, thereby distorting the import of their words. In so doing they created scenarios that never occurred. For example, they cited the first portion of Franz Meyer’s testimony. He had negotiated with Eichmann in Berlin in the mid-1930s and found that Eichmann had then behaved as a “clerk” or a “bureaucrat” who simply fulfilled his duties. However, they omitted the next sentence in which Meyer described Eichmann’s subsequent behavior in Vienna. He acted as an “autocrat controlling life and death, [who] received us impudently and crudely.” Since the filmmakers’ objective is to portray Eichmann not just as a “clown” and an “everyman,” but as someone unfairly prosecuted—if not persecuted—by Israel, including the second portion of Meyer’s testimony would have been problematic, though honest, for them. Most reviewers, unaware of the film’s creative approach to the facts, took what they saw on the screen as a legitimate portrayal of the trial.50
There is another troubling aspect to her report. Many people—both her supporters and her critics—still consider Eichmann in Jerusalem as Michael Marrus described it, a “journalistic”—that is, eyewitness—account of Arendt’s “overall impression of the trial.”51 They assume it was an eyewitness account because she gave every impression that it was. She begins with the words “Beth Hamishpath,” the Israeli equivalent of “Oyez, oyez, oyez,” and a detailed description of the courtroom. In a note to the reader she states, “I covered the Eichmann trial at Jerusalem for The New Yorker.” She rejected some of the accusations against her by writing, “I would have never gone to Jerusalem if I had shared these views.”52 The eyewitness nature of her report is crucial to her evaluation of the man in the glass booth. “Everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster.’ ” “The longer one listened to him …”53 But she was not in the courtroom during the most crucial moments of his testimony. In fact, she was absent for much of the trial.
Present when it began on April 11, she was by May 10 vacationing in Basel.54 She returned five weeks later and heard Servatius examine Eichmann. She left just before Hausner began his cross-examination.55 Anyone who has witnessed a trial knows that the demeanor of a defendant, particularly in a contentious case such as this, is entirely different when he is being examined by his lawyer from when he is being cross-examined, even more so when that cross-examination is being conducted by a prosecutor intent on proving that he is a murderer of millions. If she had been present when Eichmann was locked in an adversarial exchange with Hausner, might she have gathered some insight from his demeanor and body language? Might she have seen the “passion and rage” described in France-Soir? Conversely, had she been absent when Abba Kovner told Anton Schmidt’s story, she would not have witnessed the “sudden burst of light” and the way the public paid him tribute.
Zindel Grynszpan, the father of Herschel, the young man whose murder of a German official gave the Nazis the excuse to launch Kristallnacht, testified early in the trial. Seeing his demeanor in the witness box almost made her change her opinion about witnesses.
This story took no more than perhaps ten minutes to tell and when it was over—the senseless, needless destruction of twenty-seven years in less than twenty-four hours—one thought foolishly: Everyone, everyone, should have his day in court.… [The] story needed a purity of soul, an unmirrored, unreflected innocence of heart and mind that only the righteous possess. No one either before or after was to equal the shining honesty of Zindel Grynszpan.56
Had she only read the transcript of his testimony, would she have felt that “shining honesty”? Writing about much of the trial from transcripts does not, of course, invalidate Arendt’s conclusions. Many great trial books have been based solely on transcripts. However, her agency derived, in great measure, from her status as a witness. Her failure to reveal that she was not there for significant portions of the proceedings constituted a breach of faith with readers. One wonders how The New Yorker, known for rigorous fact-checking, failed to acknowledge this.
Hannah Arendt spoke with many voices. One modulated itself for the likes of Mary McCarthy and her set, many of whom delighted in and felt liberated by a Jew’s severe critique of Ben-Gurion, Israel, and her fellow Jews.57 Her comments freed them from having to self-censor when they spoke of Jewish matters. This Arendt was flippant, cruel, glib, and got many of her facts wrong. This Arendt may also have been subliminally writing for her teacher and former lover, the revered philosopher Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, ejected Jewish professors from the university where he served as rector, affirmed Nazi ideals, and never recanted his wartime actions. His claim to have embraced Nazism as a means of protecting the university is, at its very best, untrue. In 1960, a few months before the trial, Arendt considered dedicating one of her books to Heidegger bu
t decided not to, because it might upset others. In an unused dedication, she described him as “my trusted friend to whom I have remained faithful and unfaithful.” She helped resurrect his postwar career by minimizing his Nazi affiliations and fighting to get him readmitted to the scholarly world. When Der Spiegel exposed his wartime record, she protested that people should “leave him in peace.”58 This Arendt was intellectually inconsistent when it served her purposes. She castigated Hausner for not limiting his focus to Eichmann’s deeds and introducing all sorts of irrelevant material. Yet, as Leora Bilsky observes, by insisting that the topic of the Judenräte should have been included as a means of demonstrating the victims’ complicity, she was guilty of doing precisely what she faulted Hausner for: introducing ancillary topics. Both Hausner and Arendt had extrajuridical agendas for the trial. He acknowledged his (educating Israeli youth and delivering a Zionist message). She failed to acknowledge hers (warning about totalitarian regimes) and brutally castigated Hausner for his.59
But Arendt had yet another “voice,” one whose cadence was decidedly different from the one she used in her New Yorker dispatches and her letters of the time. She began her first lecture in Germany after the war with the statement “I am a German Jew driven from my homeland by the Nazis.”60 This Arendt worried deeply about the security of Israel. After visiting Israel in the wake of the 1967 War, she told Jaspers how “really quite wonderful that an entire nation reacts to a victory like that not by bellowing hurrah but with a real orgy of tourism—everybody had to go to have a look at the newly conquered territory.” She seemed to understand the Israeli psyche in a way she had not six years earlier. “As far as the country itself is concerned, one can clearly see from what great fear it has suddenly been freed.” She subsequently wrote McCarthy, “Any real catastrophe in Israel would affect me more deeply than anything else.” In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, she lamented the “frightening news from Israel” and the “amount of sheer hatred and the complete isolation” directed at Israel at the UN.61 These were not the words of an enemy of the Jewish state.
Her observations about Grynszpan, Schmidt, and the few Germans who broke with the majority cannot fail to enter the heart and the mind. She correctly deduced that there was something entirely unprecedented about this crime: Germany wanted to wipe out an entire people, leave no witnesses, and cover up the evidence. She understood that this was not simply anti-Semitic persecution of tremendous proportion, and that it therefore deserved special attention and offered important warning signs in a nuclear world that has raised genocide to an almost common occurrence. In fact, today it is a “truism” in precisely those circles from which her critics came that the Holocaust was a crime against the Jews and against humanity, and that it constitutes a warning about the possibility of evil. It was an unprecedented crime that far surpassed any preceding act of anti-Semitism. No one had ever tried to annihilate a people and then erase any vestige either of them or of the crime. It was this argument that Holocaust survivors, among others, used to justify a Holocaust museum adjacent to America’s sacred public space, the National Mall, and for London’s Imperial War Museum to devote an entire floor to the Holocaust. It was this argument that they used to push for the introduction of the topic into public-school syllabi. This mesh of the particular and the universal has ensured that the Holocaust is “remembered” outside the confines of just the Jewish community. However, it has also allowed people to ignore the obsessive Jew hatred that was at the heart of the Final Solution. Some people mourn the victims yet turn their animus toward the State of Israel in a way that borders on anti-Semitism.
And then there was the Hannah Arendt who seemed unable to acknowledge that the Final Solution, despite its “universal” implications, was not a great rupture in all that had come before, but was the outcome of the anti-Semitism that was scripted culturally and theologically into the bedrock of European culture. Eichmann and his cohorts did not randomly go from being ordinary men to being murders. They traversed a path paved by centuries of pervasive anti-Semitism. They “knew” this road and, given the society in which they lived, it seemed true and natural. Arendt, so deeply and viscerally committed to the European culture that nurtured the animus, seemed unable to acknowledge this reality. Though she protested—methinks a bit too much—that she wrote as the neutral observer, in fact she was torn between the particularism of her Jewish roots and the universalism of the intellectual world to which she was so wedded. (Much of that world was, of course, inhabited by Jews, who were universalists in a mode unique to Jewish intellectuals.)62
She was rightfully criticized for her ahistorical comments about the Judenrat. Yet it must be acknowledged that she raised painful and important questions in relation to leadership and individual responsibility. In notes for a lecture given at Wesleyan before her articles appeared in The New Yorker, she wrote, “If you say to yourself in such matters: who am I to judge?—you are already lost.”63 The Judenräte leaders were not the collaborators she paints them to be. They had no cards to play. They lacked the power to halt the Nazis’ resolute determination to murder Jews. However, can we afford to shy away from asking if they had the right to arrogate for themselves the choice of victims? Who gave them the authority to withhold crucial information from people who voluntarily boarded deportation trains? Who empowered them to decide who should board those trains? I cannot answer—much less even fully pose—these questions, but Arendt reminds us that they hover in the gray zone.
As a woman—and one cannot deny that some of the passionate fury against her was intensified because she was a woman—with an acerbic mode of expression, Hannah Arendt sometimes seemed more interested in turning a good phrase than on understanding its effect. She wanted to needle her readers to examine their assumptions. Yet, in order to do so, one must write in a manner that will allow one’s words to be heard. She was guilty of precisely the same wrong that she derisively ascribed to Adolf Eichmann. She—the great political philosopher who claimed that careful thought and precise expression were of supreme value—did not “think.” She wanted to provoke her readers to re-evaluate their assumptions, but she either did not care or did not fully consider how her caustic comments might be heard by them. Many of the important things she had to say were lost in the din she created with her cruel statements and haphazard treatment of historical data. Ultimately, though she claimed to be shocked and deeply hurt by the wrath she had provoked, she was the author, writ large, of her own misfortune.
On some level, of course, it is ridiculous to speak of “misfortune” in relation to an author whose work has shaped contemporary perceptions of the Final Solution. Yet her work, even as it tried to explain critical aspects of the most extensive genocide in human history, submerged the most fundamental and indispensable element of this event. She ignored the bedrock of the Holocaust: the long, tortured (torturing) history of anti-Semitism. It may have taken German National Socialism to pull from the thick soil of Jew hatred the means to murder millions. However, without a pre-existing animus that was so deeply ingrained in Western culture—both secular and religious, enlightened and unenlightened—the Nazis could never have accomplished what they did. Any attempt to separate anti-Semitism from the ignominious legacy of the Final Solution is to distort historical reality. There was an animus that prompted perpetrators to murder with impunity and bystanders to close their countries’ doors to those seeking refuge.
Some people, particularly in the Jewish community, will tell you, year in and year out, that anti-Semitism is always increasing in intensity and danger, and that this year the situation is exponentially worse than during the preceding one. These repeated assessments—it’s always terrible, and getting more so—have, until recently, been contradicted by reality. Simply put, they were wrong. In North America and Europe, the pessimists based their claims on minor acts of vandalism and rather inane expressions of anti-Semitism. One cannot dismiss these acts, but they never constituted an existential threat. Sometimes the fear of
anti-Semitism has been mobilized to motivate Jews to observe rituals, donate to philanthropic causes, or take a particular political position. As someone who delights in her Jewish identity, I cringed whenever I heard someone suggesting that we should “be,” “do,” or maintain our Jewish identity because “everyone hates the Jews.”
However, in the past decade matters have changed dramatically. With the marked exception of North America, the level of anti-Semitic rhetoric has reached new proportions. Though anti-Semitism still emanates from the far right, its increase is due to an embrace by select portions of the Muslim community and by parts of the left as well. In Iran, the ability of a man who is an overt anti-Semite and Holocaust denier to wreak havoc in the world increases daily. Distasteful and historically absurd comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis. The existence of this anti-Semitism, while deeply troubling, surprises me far less than that so many people accept it with great equanimity. Jews are often admonished, including by fellow members of their “tribe,” for overreacting even when the body blows are real. Gross accusations against Israel—rooted in traditional anti-Semitism, as absurd as the charge that an Israeli medical team went to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake to harvest body parts—are accepted by scholars, journalists, and politicians as matters worthy of investigation. While Holocaust deniers do not surprise me, for they are at heart naught but traditional anti-Semites who have found an attention-grabbing tool, I am surprised by the number of serious people who, at least until my trial, thought these anti-Semitic charges should not be taken seriously.
One cannot and should not draw a direct line from Arendt’s view of the Eichmann trial to those who berate Jews for making too much of contemporary anti-Semitism. Nor, however, can one dismiss the way in which she so seamlessly elided the ideology that was at the heart of this genocide. She related a version of the Holocaust in which anti-Semitism played a decidedly minor role. Others who have found her work a convenient foil for their own political views have picked up the ball and run with it, some of them in order to justify views she would probably never have condoned.
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