Eichmann in Jerusalem

Dan Stone, author of The Holocaust: An Unfinished History says: Supposedly a ‘trial report’ of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the man who organised the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, Arendt’s book is the key to understanding why, more than sixty years since its first publication, its author remains so bitterly divisive. Her sarcastic tone and her scathing assessment of the role played by the Jewish Councils – set up by the Nazis in occupied Poland to administer the ghettos and, ultimately, to assist in the deportation process – shocked readers then, as they do now. Yet Eichmann in Jerusalem went on to spawn a whole sub-discipline of history: perpetrator studies; and it is one of a small number of books that has stamped our age thanks to Arendt’s coining of the much-contested term, ‘the banality of evil’, to describe Eichmann. Along with her The Origins of Totalitarianism, this one of the essential books of the twentieth century, and still crucial for understanding the twenty-first.