Can you find the original English version of this quotation of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem"?
"Un processo assomiglia a un dramma in quanto che dal principio alla fine si occupa del protagonista, non della vittima".
(H. Arendt, "La banalità del male. Eichmann a Gerusalemme", trad. P. Bernardini, Milano: Universale Economica Feltrinelli, 2008 (1964), p. 17).
5 commenti:
The original English version of this quotation is:
"It was precisely the play aspect of the trial that collapsed under the weight of the hair-raising atrocities.
A trial resembles a play in that both begin and end with the doer, not with the victim..."
Hannah Arendt goes on saying:
"In the center of a trial can only be the one who did - in this respect, he is like the hero in the play - and if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer."
(Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem)
Unfortunately the comparison between a trial and a play is "dramatically" exact...
good night, see you...
Pierluigi Oddone
Great!
I’m agree whit this interpretation of the trial… in spite of it’s not really optimistic. But I remember, (but don’t remember where I red it!), that Ippocrate said: “la vita è breve, l’arte è vasta, l’esperienza ingannevole...il giudizio difficile”
I try to translate in: life is short, art is immense, the experience is illusory, but the judgment is much difficult”
Daniela D’Annibale
Hi,
The banality of evil begins with an examination of the social conditions at the time of the process to Adolf Eichmann: second the Chambers is clear as the public (strongly influenced by the Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion) Gideon Hausner Ministry sought in any way to move the attention of the Court - chaired by Moshe Landau - from the judgment of the person of Eichmann to Nazi to deprive of credibility of the Middle East that Israel was in conflict - Recalling their sympathies for the Nazism - Arab anti-Semitism and convince the Jews among you for the world that Israel was the only place where their rights were actually protected. The Chambers critical hard the speech held by the public prosecutor Gideon Hausner.
The criticism in question is particularly the sentence pronounced by the Public Ministry. "we are not ethnic distinctions". Indeed, the opinion of Hannah Arendt, the Eichmann process was to represent spectacle, wanted by Ben Gurion, clearly used the policy of the infant state of Israel. Indeed, the accused was accused of crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity on the body of the Jewish people.
Subsequently, moves to the examination of the accused; Adolf Eichmann, born in Solingen, North, in 1906, was just brilliant student: you retired by the higher than those professional start-up schools. He worked as a miner in the parent company until these failed to find a job to the Austrian rail company for him. A his uncle - married to a Jewish - friend of the President of the Austrian oil company vacuum managed to persuade the latter to take it as a representative.
Entered in the Austrian Nazi party in 1932 without too much conviction, following his friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner uncil... I churches "why not enter into the Nazi party?"- and I answered "already, why not?" because it had no desire to work; he knew nothing of the Nazi party had not ever read Mein Kampf (like no other book), justified its political citing not accept the conditions imposed to Germany by the Treaty of Versailles (1919) and want them commitment change.
When the party Nazi Austrian became illegal, returned to Germany, where he was driven by an official military career. The author stresses as the plot framework not what a heinous criminals, as rather than a simple man whose personality figured mediocrity.
During the Nazi throughout all his life, he lived for inertia; the regime led by the parent, the friends of the situation in which he lived. Was dangerously free initiative, cultural and moral weight; it was as well as constraints that were given from the company.
According to the author, the judgment was not entirely satisfactory; the conclusion although was right, with a view as success can happen should have been finally define a satisfactory reason why Adolf Eichmann - as any Nazi - hierarch has been condemned, because in Nuremberg you raised the problem that he not had violated no law already in force. With the actually pronounced judgment you did what had (condemn to death Eichmann) by wrong, means or by keeping within the laws of Israel, by defining that really Eichmann had really done. The single hypothetical judgment for the Chambers had sense would have been based on the objections of Karl Jaspers: Eichmann it was made responsible, committing crimes against Jews, with humanity-for example, to its base, the right of everyone to exist and be different from the other - killing more breeds you denied the possibility of exist to humanity, which is this only because mixture of diversity.
This gave many to think about human nature and movements of this process. Eichmann, as I said, everything was but abnormal: this was its most appalling dowry. Would have been less formidable a monster inhumane, because in itself was difficult to you identify. But that said Eichmann and the way in which it said, was not to draw the framework of a person that could be anyone who: anyone who could be Eichmann, would be enough to be without ideas like him. Before little intelligent, he had no ideas and account of what was doing was. Was simply a person completely form in reality he before: work, try a promotion, reorder numbers on statistics, etc. More intelligence the lacked the ability to imagine what was doing.
This distance from the real reality and the lack of ideas are the fundamental assumption of the totalitarian regime which tends to expel man from the real reality replacing one, making it less than a gear in a machine. Normally violations of the law under the auspices of the status reason are justifiable because precisely as "State actions" are exceptional, violations to safeguard the existence of the same when is threatened. But in a system as the Nazi things are exactly on the contrary: is the crime the habit. As not you can use these concepts it is still better looking at the employing justification by the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials: "actions for higher order"; these were rejected because, as said the Court, "manifestly criminal actions you should not obey", principle exists in the law of each country. But as you can distinguish the crime when you live in the crime? When you are faced with a massacre organized by State? This was that the process to Adolf Eichmann would have explained.
Michele Viti
Hello!
I have not read the book but reading the comments on the blog I decided to document me in the library: Adolf Eichmann was captured in a suburb of Buenos Aires on the evening of 11 May 1960, transported by plane to Israel nine days later and conducted in front of Court of Jerusalem on 11 April 1961, he had to answer charges of fifteen, having committed, 'in competition with others', crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and war crimes under the Nazi regime, especially during World War II. Hannah Arendt goes to Jerusalem as 'New York Times' correspondent. She assists to the debate in the classroom and in articles written for the newspaper talk about moral problems, political and legal behind the Eichmann case; so she writes a book. Evil incarnate by Eichmann appears to Arendt "trivial" and terrible, because his servers more or less awareness they are not that small bureaucrats. Eichmann was not the only person that appeared normal while the other bureaucrats appeared as monsters, but there was a multitude of men perfectly "normal" whose acts were monstrous. Behind this "terrible normality" of the bureaucratic mass, which was able to commit the greatest atrocities that the world had ever seen, the Arendt traces the question of the "banality of evil." This "normal" means that some attitudes commonly repudiated by society (as the programs of Nazi Germany), we have in the ordinary citizen, that does not reflect the contents of the rules but applies them unconditionally. Eichmann brought the danger of no reflection. The problem of the Eichmann case was that of men like him there were many and terribly normal, and that normality is appalling because people commit crimes under circumstances that almost prevent realize that evil act. The analysis of relations between the faculty of thinking, the ability to distinguish between right and wrong and moral implications are the core theme of work that opens a new perspective on the understanding of evil. All this is expressed by the writer with the phrase "the banality of evil."
Bye
Giorgia Ciucci
Posta un commento