Hannah Arendt on “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship:” Better to Suffer Than Collaborate

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wikimedia Commons When Eichmann in Jerusalem—Hannah Arendt’s book about Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann’s trial—came out in 1963, it contributed one of the most famous of post-war ideas to the discourse, the 'banality of evil.' And the concept at first caused a critical furor. “Enormous controversy centered on what Arendt had written about the conduct of the trial, her depiction of Eichmann, and her discussion of the role of the Jewish Councils,” writes Michael Ezra at Dissent magazine, “Eichmann, she claimed, was not a ‘monster’; instead, she suspected, he was a ‘clown.’” Arendt blamed victims who were forced to collaborate, critics charged, and made the Nazi officer seem ordinary and unremarkable, relieving him of the extreme moral weight of his responsibility.

Raccontata daopenculture.com