A Propos de l'Affaire Eichmann by Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers

 The book A Propos de l'Affaire Eichmann

by Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers published by l'Herne will add new reflections on the Eichmann trial and what it was the concept of mass extermination of people, a "modern novelty" introduced by Hitler, who was fixated with an ethnic group, the Jewish one and guns in grade to exterminate entire countries and people.

It's a short book this one but plenty of important and shocking realities.

Hannah Arendt decided to follow the Eichmann trial. She wanted to do that with all herself and what she discovered and what reported can be read in the New Yorker and in a book she wrote on Eichmann.

Eichmann was captured in Argentina: he was for the locals Ricardo Klement. 

Maybe, of all the observations made during that writings, one of the biggest one was that some jewish people in Allemand have been collaborants with Hitler and wanted the mass deportation of Jewish people: Arendt treated largely the topic in the written articles for the New Yorker and later also in Eichmann a Jerusalem introducing an expression that remained: de banalitè du Mal.

For this reason her articles and book had been lived with polemic and boycotted by some Jewish people who did not appreciated her considerations.

Eichmann has been the mind of the process of mass extermination as written before but in the trial he did not manifest any remorse for what he did. They executed tons of people without having the perception of what, in a daily base, they were doing to a large part of the population and sufferances caused.

Or better: they had completely deleted from their mind the fact that they were men; they became beasts, and they acted, till at the end, like that.

For this reason during the trial was possible to see a necrosis of compassion and understanding of what it was done as if, what it was going on during the years of conflicts in concentration camps, could be classified as natural in the order of things.

That's why, admonishes at some point Arendt, it is so important not to forget: because when a story has been lived it is more probable a repetion of it than not if an event has not yet never seen before: memories and witnesses are crucial in these cases, let's underline it.

Karl Jaspers discusses largely of the possibility of mass extermination via the most diversified ways of a lot of people: an action wanted by governments and never seen before the last world war conflict, with the mass extermination of Jewish people and the two nuclear bombs launched by the Americans in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Enjoy the reading of this book for discovering realities still unknown and for thinking at the state of the world.

Highly recommended.

I thank Editions L'Herne for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori