Judenrat Leaders and Hannah Arendt's Fine Line Between
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Gablenz 1 (Un)Ethical (In)Action: Judenrat Leaders and Hannah Arendt’s Fine Line between Resistance and Complicity Neil G. Gablenz The State University of New York at Buffalo Hannah Arendt crafted the expression “the banality of evil” in her 1963 essay Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil as an attempt to explain the disturbing contrast between Adolf Eichmann’s actions and behavior during both the years of Hitler’s Third Reich (1933-1945), as well as at his trial in Jerusalem (1961), and the indescribably horrific results they visited upon the world. Originally published as a series of essays for The New Yorker in 1961, Arendt’s goal, as she states in Eichmann in Jerusalem, was to both cover the court proceedings as well as discover who Adolf Eichmann was and how he came to play the role of architect in the Holocaust. Little did she know Gablenz 2 that this expression attached to Eichmann would bitterly and publicly divide American and European intellectuals for years to come. Attempting to encapsulate the palpable tension that surrounded Eichmann in Jerusalem, Amos Elon remarks in his introduction: “No book within living memory had elicited similar passions. A kind of excommunication seemed to have been imposed on the author by the Jewish establishment in America” (vii). Eichmann in Jerusalem indeed caused an uproar— some audiences understood her self-expressed intent and declared her work a “masterpiece,” a “terrifying expressionist invention applied with a force no imitator could rival” (Berkowitz). Others, however, condemned Arendt’s commentary of the trial as the shameful work of a self-hating Jew. Perhaps one of her fiercest critics was noted Jewish playwright Lionel Abel who claimed that Eichmann “comes off so much better in her book than do his victims” (Ezra 149), referring to Arendt’s controversial portrayal of Eichmann not as a ruthless monster but as an ordinary man of low intellect. When Daniel Bell and Mary McCarthy publicly defended Arendt in a 1964 issue of Partisan Review, the debate between the two camps intensified. Irving Howe remarked at the time that nearly every major literary and philosophical figure in New York chose a side in what he called a “civil war among New York intellectuals” Gablenz 3 (Berkowitz). He later correctly predicted the controversy surrounding Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem would simmer and settle, only to eventually erupt again and again. Eichmann in Jerusalem has seen a renewed interest since the 2000 United States presidential election, the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent American invasion of Iraq, sparking new critical readings and interpretation of the infamous essay. Soon after the 2016 United States presidential election, Eichmann in Jerusalem (along with Arendt’s earlier 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism) reentered the socio-political ethos as many public figures wondered if evil truly is banal to the point that most people would not recognize it. Like the public’s reaction to the initial publication, this new critical consensus is just as bitterly divided. Christopher Browning wrote charitably of Arendt in a June 2013 issue of The New York Review of Books, claiming that she “grasped an important concept but not the right example” (31), meaning that Arendt’s general claim that most evildoers are normal people is not incorrect but that she incorrectly applied this claim to Eichmann specifically. Following the debut of Chris Weitz’s film Operation Finale (2018), a historical drama that tells the story of Eichmann’s abduction from his home outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina from the perspective of the Israeli Mossad agents who Gablenz 4 spirited him to Jerusalem, Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial saw yet again renewed interest. While the film does initially paint Eichmann (portrayed by Ben Kingsley) as Arendt’s uninteresting, nondescript bureaucrat, his monstrous and sadistic evil is exposed during the scenes he is interrogated by Mossad agents. Operation Finale was nonetheless met with mixed reviews regarding the portrayal of Eichmann, with some critics approving of Kingsley’s Eichmann while others wrote that it was much too similar to Arendt’s “humanizing portrait” in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Alan Dershowitz lambasted Arendt in print, calling Eichmann in Jerusalem “a mendacious screed in which she constructed a stick-figure caricature of one of the most significant perpetrators of the Holocaust” and even accuses her of deliberately distorting the history of the Holocaust for the sake of her political agenda in what he deems a grave “moral and literary sin.” Once again, the public finds itself forced to take sides. Was Hannah Arendt willfully and immorally malicious or was she simply misunderstood? And how exactly did she intend “the banality of evil” to be interpreted? This was the original question I had sought to answer as I read Eichmann in Jerusalem for the first time. As I read, however, I found myself more interested in Arendt’s portraits of other Israeli and non-Israeli Jews which reveal her own prejudices. Gablenz 5 Although Eichmann in Jerusalem is more (in)famous for the author’s portraiture of the so-called “architect of the Holocaust,” there is no shortage of contemporary scholarship interested in her own biases and positionality. Perhaps what is most striking and confusing in her essay is not her assessment of Eichmann, but her characterization of three specific Judenrat1 leaders—Jews who were ordered to maintain order in Jewish ghettos by Nazi leaders—as self-interested sycophants who relished their position of power in the ghettos. Arendt’s proclamation is, of course, striking because of its apparent callousness, but it is confusing because it contradicts assessments made elsewhere in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Moreover, such a judgment is hardly consistent with her philosophy regarding action as explained in her earlier seminal work The Human Condition (1958). As we see in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt seems to suggest that the Judenrat leaders had acted in the interest of the Nazi regime by virtue of occupying such a position. Of course, there were specific cases of Judenrat leaders abusing this power to exploit the detainees for whom they were deemed responsible, there are also specific cases of Judenrat leaders who used this power to act 1 The German word Judenrat, or “Jewish council” composed of the German nouns Juden (Jews) and Rat (council), is a singular noun. Its plural inflection is Judenräte. Gablenz 6 in the best interest of Jewish detainees. However, as we will see, Arendt states in The Human Condition that an action demands that an individual takes an initiative to set something in motion. Simply occupying a position such as leader of a Judenrat does not constitute an action. In this paper, I intend to pair the concept of acts of resistance with the Arendtian ideas regarding action and inaction as described in The Human Condition and apply them to the cases of three Judenrat leaders mentioned by name in Eichmann in Jerusalem: Chaim Rumkowski (Łódź), Leo Baeck (Theresienstadt), and Adam Czerniaków (Warsaw). By doing so, I hope to bring clarity to the nuanced natures of action, inaction, and resistance that Arendt woefully ignores. What does it mean to act? Before we further discuss these three aforementioned Judenrat leaders and their actions or inaction, we must first familiarize ourselves with Arendt’s definitions of (in)action as described in The Human Condition. Whereas Arendt’s first and arguably most influential work The Origins of Totalitarianism is narrow in focus and addresses totalitarian regimes in the 20th century, The Human Condition is much broader in scope, Gablenz 7 interrogating how human activities have been and should be understood throughout Western history, from classical Greco- Roman antiquity to the 20th century (because of this, we will only be examining Arendt’s thinking regarding (in)action for the purposes of this paper). In order to better understand this history of human activities and their future(s), Arendt begins The Human Condition by introducing us to two ideas fundamental to the text and her argument: the vita activa (active life) and its contrast the vita contemplativa (contemplative life). Within the term vita activa, Arendt designates “three fundamental human activities: work, labor, and action” which are fundamental because “each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man” (Human Condition 7). Although these three conditions—work, labor, and action—may seem closely related because of their semantic definitions and connotations in English, we learn that each condition is, in fact, quite different. Arendt begins with labor, which she describes more or less as the biological nature of one’s existence: “Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition is labor itself” (7). Simply put, labor consists of the scientific processes Gablenz 8 that our bodies either conduct subconsciously to ensure our bodies’ survival or that our bodies have no control over at all. Work, on the other hand, can be considered the opposite of labor. While labor is the activity tied to biological and material necessities for the human condition, work is the activity tied to the “unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever- recurring life cycle” (7). In this definition of work, the “unnaturalness” of the human existence should not be interpreted as not being of what occurs naturally, but as being outside of the scientific and biological processes that ensure the continued survival of a species.