Its view of human life is far from optimistic. The Hebrew Bible soberly understands that mystery. In the 1950s, Niebuhr wrote that modern culture has been completely oblivious to the abiding mystery of evil in human life. I find myself agreeing with the Christian thinker, Reinhold Niebuhr. That was what made Eichmann so frightening, and so dangerous - how utterly normal he was. Eichmann, despite his evil, was not a visible ghoul, not something that was dredged up out of a horror film. Leonard Cohen was urging us to see Eichmann - not as good, but as not monstrous. In fact, one doctor remarked that Eichmann was actually more “normal” in his habits and speech than the average person.Īrendt said that Eichmann was a nothing, a nebbish, a mediocre bureaucrat - thus, the subtitle of her iconic work - “the banality of evil.” (For a fuller assessment, both of Eichmann and of Hannah Arendt’s response, read Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial - especially to learn about some rather quirky Jewish responses to the trial). In one sense, he was re-stating Hannah Arendt’s famous assessment of this war criminal, in Eichmann in Jerusalem.ĭuring his imprisonment before his trial, the Israeli government sent six psychologists to examine Eichmann.
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