Rethinking the "Banality of Evil"

Rethinking the "Banality of Evil" David Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Times, and Trial of a "Desk Murderer" (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2004). 458pp. $18.00 (paper), ISBN: 9780306815393.

More than 60 years after the Holocaust, we are now able to see it as the most notorious episode in a series of policies of genocide and elimination occurring throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century in such diverse places as Cambodia, Iraq, East Timor, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Darfur. Humanity's capacity for genocide has not diminished, and it likely still lurks in the shadows of the policy repertoire of virtually every nation. Yet questions remain. How does a nation decide to utilize genocide as a public policy? How does one become complicit in state-sponsored mass murder? These, especially the latter, are the questions explored in David Cesarani's biography of Adolf Eich- mann, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a "Desk Murderer. "This is an excellent book for learning about Eichmann's life and his role in the Holocaust. Cesarani creates an engaging narrative that chronicles Eichmann's descent into the world of Nazi mass murder. Yet in the end, Cesarani rejects Hannah Arendts concept of the banality of evil, which explains Eichmann as an unremarkable, ordinary bureaucrat who turned into the archetype of administrative evil. Instead - wrongly, in our view he turns to explanations that consider Eichmann as a product of a virulently anti-Semitic culture that supported with enthusiasm the policies of the Nazi regime and the activities of its servants.

Life and Crimes

Through Cesarani, the reader gets to know Eichmann and how his life evolved toward his role as a desk murderer and one of the twentieth century's most notorious criminal defendants. Throughout the narrative runs a continuous theme of questioning Eichmann's motives: Did he join the Nazis because he was a hardcore anti-Semite seeking an outlet for his hatred of Jews? Or was he an opportunistic careerist who learned and cultivated his anti-Semitism as he advanced in the ranks of the Nazi Party and the SS?

Early in his career, Eichmann made his way through post- World War I Austrian society by taking the advice and accepting the help of others, including Jews, who were in positions to advance...