Eichmann’s Narrative:

To treat Adolf Eichmann as a “hero” means to construct a verifiable narrative about his criminal actions. Politically, this would allow an assembled public to witness how Eichmann disclosed himself as a distinct and unique person through his interactions with multiple speech agents, or, negatively, how he implemented policies designed to eradicate human plurality. The legal apparatus in Israel certainly did not lack means to capture the chronology of criminal acts as well as the personality profile of the accused; Eichmann was subjected to a police examination running for approximately eight months, interviewed by “half a dozen psychiatrists” (EJ, 25), and finally cross-examined at length by the defense, prosecution, and the judges during the actual trial. With access to this material, Arendt, who attended the trial in Jerusalem as a reporter, felt that she could sketch Eichmann’s initial social milieu, recapitulate his Nazi career, and describe his role in the bureaucratic machinery of genocide. She ended up producing an account of Eichmann’s life, along with a story about the proceedings in which that life was being publicly scrutinized. As a commentator has put it, Arendt became a “storyteller of the Eichmann trial”.16 Who does Arendt think that Eichmann is? Eichmann is, to bring together various statements in the first chapters of Eichmann in Jerusalem and list character traits, a “déclassé son of a solid middle-class family” (EJ, 31), a careerist driven by a distorted sense of idealism (EJ, 42), a man who is ignorant (EJ, 41), full of himself (EJ, 46), easily bored (EJ, 35), and prone to self-pity (EJ, 50) but who does possess a gift for negotiations and administrative organization (EJ, 45). In short, Arendt presents Eichmann as a man with some “common vice[s]”, and character flaws (EJ, 47). Yet the character flaw that Arendt deems most “decisive” is what she describes as Eichmann’s inability to conceive of other viewpoints (EJ, 47). This character flaw, if it can be categorized as one, entails nothing less than Eichmann’s cancellation of the personhood of others and of his own. Basing her comments mainly on the transcripts from the police examination, Arendt asserts that Eichmann’s utterances consist almost exclusively of clichés of the Nazi organizations he worked for, and that he empties every newly constructed sentence of any significance through subsequent repetitions. This perfectly standardized vocabulary cuts Eichmann off from any manifestation of difference, or erodes it by reiteration; the “striking consistency” of his speech makes it impossible to communicate with Eichman in the sense of articulating together a range of differing but interconnected points of view (EJ, 49). He therefore fails to relate to others as members of a network of plural beings, each with an individual standpoint on a shared world, and also to constitute himself as a unique being among them. His complete submission to a narrow linguistic code of stock phrases makes him unable both to express or to perceive “human distinctness” insofar as such distinctness becomes manifest in human discourse (HC, 176). The question of who Eichmann is should be rendered in the following form: who speaks when Eichmann speaks? And in Arendt’s view, Eichmann is not capable of speech. He utters sentences that reveal only a “perfect harmony” with a system of clichés and thus does not disclose the distinctness of a ‘who’ (EJ, 52). Eichmann is, one could say, only a conduit for a jargon and hence never a distinct individual who speaks with others. Arendt presents the trial forum as a device with which to bring back a criminal who has been outside the pale of human intercourse into the field of others by constructing a story of his actions and then also linking his deeds with legally decided consequences. Legal procedure is, in her view, enlisted to make up for the absence of genuinely political action, or action performed for a public. The trial is supposed to turn the criminal into the hero he never was by treating him as a doer-sufferer. Yet unlike the standard criminal who purposely evades the public realm or “who must hide himself from it” (HC, 180), Eichmann never had a notion of the presence of others who could recognize and judge him. The trial makes Eichmann available to the public realm, but what is then revealed is that, on a fundamental level, he as a person never moved among and in relation to other acting beings; he never participated in the field of human interconnectedness. As a key officer in the genocidal machine of the National Socialist state, Eichmann was able to embrace an ideology insofar as it was embodied in an arsenal of phrases, but he was not capable of articulating opinions or judgments while deliberating with others. He may have shown great facility at executing orders or cooperating with apparently like-minded partners, but he could not gauge the resistance that inevitably occurs among humans insofar as they possess innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions. In the chilling description of his absolute blindness to the existence of different viewpoints, Arendt mentions that Eichmann can only remember the Jews who were completely in his power and who, in this state of complete subjugation, could not voice any resistance. That Eichmann’s mind is completely occupied by jargon turns out to be an effective cognitive blockage of any differing viewpoint and hence of the outside world. This blindness to others also has effects on the way in which he recalls past events and groups those events into coherent stories. The interrogated Eichmann certainly does not resist talk of the past. To the contrary, he delights in discussing the course of his own life, and Arendt even reports that writing his memoirs was his “favorite pastime” (EJ, 27). But the question is what type of story Eichmann produces when telling his own life. Predictably, the memoirs or his musings about his life story during the interrogations are not veridical. Arendt repeatedly complains about Eichmann’s “unreliable [memory]” (EJ, 53), “extraordinarily faulty memory” (EJ, 54), “faulty memory” (EJ, 63 and 80), or “defective memory” (EJ, 106). Yet his memory is faulty not because he suffers from amnesia and is somehow physically unable to record occurrences, or even because he seeks to edit out incriminating episodes, but because he subordinates all the events of his life under the elements of a restricted jargon. Eichmann cannot remember any event unless it is encapsulated in a formula. This form of remembrance ends up dissolving the sequence in which the events and meetings occurred so that they can be reorganized as isolated moments around stock phrases. Eichmann does display an ability to narrate his life, despite his flawed recollection, but only by making this life conform to a convention, by subsuming it, in its entirety, under a cliché. Arendt relates how Eichmann talks of his life being ruined again and again by bad luck, a complaint that reveals the horrible self-pity of a man who helped implement the destruction of a people: “everything he tried on his own invariably went wrong – the final blow came when he had ‘to abandon’ his private fortress in Berlin before he could try it out against Russian tanks. Nothing but frustration; a hard luck story if there ever was one” (EJ, 72). The recurring pattern of obstacles of which Eichmann speaks, a pattern under which any number of experiences can conveniently be gathered as examples, does not necessarily suggest that he encountered a reality that did not agree with the dominant linguistic code. To begin with, the hard luck story indicates that his memory functioned only in respect to events “which had a direct bearing upon his career”, whether he perceived them as obstacles or as triumphs (EJ 62). More importantly, the resistance remains curiously faceless and hence signals more than an excessive preoccupation with the steps of a conventional career. Eichmann may indeed have failed at getting things done, but the obdurate reality he struggles with never indicates to him that his life is populated with other human beings. His constant talk of frustration does not point to any confrontation with another person, but rather reveals the submission of all his experiences to a clichéd scheme, namely to the pathetic script of the “hard luck story”. The possible encounter with someone whose will and intention is at crosspurposes with Eichmann’s is quickly dissolved into the cheap folk wisdom of inescapable futility.17 His ability to narrate his own life does not in any way help him to realize his own situatedness in a diverse human community. On the contrary, his storytelling is just another way that he refuses the recognition of those around him, or remains oblivious to them. For Eichmann, the self is indeed the “center of narrative gravity,” and he makes all his recollections cohere into a single story – the hard luck story of endless frustrations – but this in no way brings him closer to becoming a person in Arendt’s sense of disclosing a distinct personality in the unpredictable flow of human togetherness. Since life stories can be so banal as to reveal nothing of the distinctness of a person, the ability to craft an autobiographical story does not constitute evidence of personhood.18 The problem with Eichmann is not that he is unable to tell his life story and, for this reason, is not a full human person. The problem is rather that he already lives his life within quotation marks and can tell his own trite and vapid story far too conveniently. Everything that occurs around or with him is always assimilated to an already established code, which leaves no space for the unexpected event or the encounter that disturbs the calm of obliviousness to others. Listening to and reading Eichmann, Arendt comes to realize that Eichmann’s life is already fully narrativized, and that the neatness of this narrative is closely related to his blindness to others. For Arendt, then, autobiographical competence may be a necessary condition of personhood, but it is far from sufficient.