Journal of Political Power
- (2013) the world continues to await an adequate historical
account of the trial of Adolf Eichman.
- Compares works from: Gideon Hausner, Hannah Yablonka,
Arendt
- Highlights Lipstatd’s “the eichman trial”, in that it “presents
itself as the much needed account of the Eichmann trial.
 However her primary thesis is different to excepts as a
result of the way she friend her restorable analysis.
 She discloses the intention of reconstructing the trials
history and the way that dispenses with Aaron did
scepticism towards prewar views on folk moral
psychology
- Arendt’s “Eichman and Jerusalem”: created controversy as the
author stated that Israel looked foolish by using folk moral
descriptions of mental states I did not fit the reality of the trial
they were prosecuting.
- Commits to reversrsing Arendt’s verdict rather than correcting
it’s inadequate historical accounting of the trial itself.
- Lipstadt provides more thorough account whilst at the same
time insists on moral realism that has little currency in light of
advancements in understanding human brain
- Lipstadt implies through past pain inflicted upon by antisemites, nazis and deniers, permits her to operate on
assumption of moral authority
- Evaluates intanglement with holocaust denier David irvi
Fictions of Eichman: The authentic self, authenticity,
and the facts of atrocity.
- Was a trial of Absolutes, in which neither truth nor moral
judgement could exist in fragments or parts
- Hannah Arendt, describes the law as unequipped to deal, on a
human, political level with a guilt that is beyond crime and an
innocence that is beyong goodness or virtue
- Decription of Nazi’s as “beyond crime” may have been a way of
underscoring the extremity of Nazi brutality.
- “path of poetry”
- In her view it was unclear what eichmans testimony was meant
to prove since his guilt was it already largely manifest
- “A thesis on the banality of evil”: question about the nature of
evil self as much as an inquiry into eichmans crimes
This report return away from the courts assessment of the
evidence provided within the trial and shifted towards a
meditation all the evidence meant in a sphere of cosmological
moral judgement
-she makes the point that the spectacle of the trial to prove
something else apart from whether eichman was guilty of the crimes
for which he stood accused
-was more than just an illegal tempt to authenticate the facts of his
crimes, but found centre of gravity in a moral purpose – in an
attempt to pinpoint the nature of his evil
-after this statement she looks into the witness testimony ( see paper
for detail)
-in her perspective the testimony locked capacity to solve the
unresolvable question of where ‘morals and ethics arises’
-continue to describe the panel quality of Eichmann’s evil, the quality
that becomes impossible to render in legal and dramatic terms. As
banality has no roots, is not rooted in evil motors or urges or
strength of temptation and rather banality was doing as everybody
else did, being swept away by the judgement of others and never
giving the matter much thought
-it is this in which the author concept of Eichmann banality is
precisely that it is both plotless and agentless, that Eichmann lacked
an ‘authentic self’, that evil lacked and a central motivating force
-the aim of the designs of the proceedings never was to establish the
facts reality of his crimes but rather sought to evidence a form of evil
that to seem to defy logic within a legal and moral form of
judgement
-she notes the contradictions between the courts and to establish
the authenticity of radical evil and its insistence on breaking such an
evil down into recognisable, Banally logical, factual terms
-see page 1248 for her encounter with Eichmann in the Jerusalem
court
-Arendt finds that in the Eichmann trial, between what the evidence
could prove that what he had done, and the enormity of what his
actions had caused, lies a deeper contradiction
This contradiction being between the individual facts of evil doing
and the horrifying some of these factual parts
-characterises eichman as a ‘reflective consciousness whose actions
and utterances are the outcomes of, also the response to what he
understands his situation to be
-His evil only consolidated upon the witness stand in which his
inability to conceptualise his acts and his role in producing the mass
murder of Jews was vital.
-notes eichmans inability to understand the relationship of course
and effect between his Beno orders and horrific outcomes
-eichmann himself put it, my name became a symbol. That
symbolism and played more than the incomprehensibility of
imagining the atrocity itself 1252
-
from Nuremberg to Hollywood, the Holocaust and the
court room in American feature film
First trial to be televised, was watched in great numbers. These
broadcasts were probably the first exposure American audiences had
to the use of the word Holocaust to describe the Nazi persecution of
European jewry.
-the significance of being televised is found in the way it’s spurred at
least some American authors and playwrights, to deal with it
psychological effects and moral questions
-is it possible for traumatic historical events like the Holocaust to be
appropriately and adequately explored, either by art and literature
or by fields like psychoanalysis and law
Eichmann’s mind: psychological, philosophical, and
legal perspectives by José Brunner
-the essay discusses various representations of items mind that were
fashioned on the occasion of his trial in Jerusalem in 1961
-provides insight into Gideon Hausner’s perspective in depicting
Eichmann as daemonic
- And similarly describes Hannah Arendt’s perspective as
describing the defendant as banal or thoughtless
-knowledge is the widely discussed perspectives of Gideon and
Hannah and instead notes you’ll be talking about the perspective
formulated by the mental health experts who examined Eichmann
for the prosecution
-Hannah arendt covered the trial for the New yorker
-makes a valuable comments in regards to analysing personal
psychology. He reads we have only limited and indirect access to the
inner workings of the mind based on interpretation of phenomena
believed to hold evidence of its hidden, internal dynamics. Since our
in the life is intangible and cannot be examined directly, it is open to
contradictory interpretations, none of which can be fully
corroborated or falsified
- José Brunners interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s comments on the
trial. In fact referred to the finger wagging figure out the house and a
cut of the trial. However, as we shall see below, she seems to have
taken some poetic license in her reporting. And that throughout
most of the trial he is portrayed either as a daemonic character or a
Beno individual, this essay argues that even at the time of the trial,
these two opinions were not the only ones available
-analysed the expert Report conducted during the trial and
summarises that the Kulscars in the article, describe him as a week
and also in the core of his psyche, yet governed by a Nazi Morocco
they did not allow for any weakness. In order to conceal his
weaknesses from self and others, he learnt to play the role of a
strong man who was never passive and had no need for help from
others
-continued reading into the psyche report and analysis and the fact
that according to the psychologist, I can lived in the “throes of
existential fear”, yet at the same time, he was consumed by
aggression, which caused him anxiety “he feared the forces that
resided in him, because he felt he was unable to dominate them.”
- Kulscars observations continue to state that I’ve been as an anxious
man who spoke too much, was attached from his feelings, with no
close friends, and afraid of strangers – a feature that may not be all
that’s apprising in relation to another criminal waiting a probable
sentence of death
-“ his language… Like his view of the world, was lifeless and
mechanical, formalised and humanise”
-Shlomo Kulscar argued, although Eichman did have some capacity
for empathy, he used it only for exploitatively and regarded others
not as full human beings but as extras or props.
-this conclusion is contradicted with the fact that eichman exhbits
alarm whenever confronted with violence or aggression in the tests.
-this came to form that both the scientists were inclined to believe
that instead of eichmans avoidance and denial of aggression as a
ploy and see it as evidence of a deep seated feature of his
personality
- Read into the analysis of Szondi “the test subject was a criminal
with an insitiable killing intention”
- Eichman homicidal tendencies were scientifically certified by
means of a test developed by a Jewish Holocaust survivor who
certify these tenancies on the basis of theories not unlike those
that had lain at the foundation of the Nazi ideology
-goes into the perspective of Hannah Arend, in that perspectives
previously discussed in his paper had dramatically opposed her own
-summarises that had his perspective was that she argued that the
enormous Evil conducted by the Nazis cannot be attributed as a sign
of daemonic in a life on the part of those she had planned and
executed it
-Hannah supported the previous note saying that if I can really was
as dangerous and carried an insatiable urge to kill, he belonged in an
insane asyum
- these statements by Hannah were rejected by the Kulcsars, on the ground
that Shlomo Kulcsar had been the only psychiatrist who had met I can
personally
-continues to interpret Hannah’s perspective quoting Hannah herself “the
longer one listen to him, the more obvious if I can do he’s an inability to speak
was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the
standpoint of somebody else”
-“he did not think”
-hannah, the activity of thinking-insofar as it was of relevance to the question
of arguments evil deeds – meant something like empathy or the ability to
identify with points of views of others
-Hannah “the soul experts”, Arend’ts dismissive attitude to psychologists,
psychiatrists ad their crafts
-for José Hannah presented her form of understanding as transcending the
division between exterior and interior, performance and reality, appearance
and truth. For her, the essential was not beneath the surface. Rather, the
surface of human conduct itself revealed uniqueness, plurality, and splender of
life
-QUOTE FROM HANNAH “everybody is swept away I’m thinking about what
everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding
because they’re refusal to join is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of
action. In such emergencies, it turns out that the purging component of
thinking is political by implication… Has a liberating affect on another faculty,
the faculty of judgement, which one Michael was with some reason the most
political of men’s mental abilitie”
-Hannah asserted a close connection between thinking and judging, notion to
which he intended to devote the never written in third volume of the life of
mind.
-I come in in Jerusalem attributed the necessity of putting Eichmann on trial to
thoughtlessness. Legal judgement had become a central because I can lacked
the mental capacity for moral judgement, as Hannah illustrated in her chapter
on the 1C conference of January 1942, whether decision on the final solution is
made at which I can acted as secretary.
‘Eichman is my Father’: Harry Mulisch, The Eichmann
Tiral and the question of guilt:
-Pepijn Cordwener
-within this article Corduwener compares the perspectives of Hannah
Arendt and Harry Mulisch
-“the signigficance of the trial lies in it’s after life”, with it’s legacy
being largely shaped by Hannah Arendt’s Eichman in Jersusale. A
report on the Banality of Evil.
-Interprets Hannah’s report as an attempt to hold a middle way
between a historical narrative of the Holocaust, a biography of
Eichmann’s life and description of the trial in Jerusalem
-
- Is that Sophia Hannah neither antisemitism nor insanity was
behind icons conduct and instead was a not too clever but
ambitious man who nearly followed orders
- And the fact that he liked the ability to Think empathetically
and this was the essence of the banality of evil that he has
come to epitomise
-