Whose Trial? Adolf Eichmann’s or Hannah Arendt’s?

Abstract

This chapter explores Hannah Arendt's 1963 volume on Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. Based on her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem from April 11 to December 15, 1961, this tangled controversy cast a long shadow on Arendt's otherwise illustrious career as a public intellectual and academic. The chapter shows that, although she was and continues to be severely attacked by the Jewish community, ironically this book is Arendt's most intensely Jewish work, in which some of the deepest paradoxes of retaining a Jewish identity under conditions of modernity came to the fore in her search for the moral, political, and jurisprudential bases on which the trial and sentencing of Adolf Eichmann could take place.