Beschreibung

A New York Times Notable Book

A total and groundbreaking reassessment of the life of Adolf Eichmann - a superb work of scholarship that reveals his activities and notoriety among a global network of National Socialists following the collapse of the Third Reich and that permanently challenges Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil."

Smuggled out of Europe after the collapse of Germany, Eichmann managed to live a peaceful and active exile in Argentina for years before his capture by the Mossad. Though once widely known by nicknames such as "Manager of the Holocaust," in 1961 he was able to portray himself, from the defendant's box in Jerusalem, as an overworked bureaucrat following orders - no more, he said, than "just a small cog in Adolf Hitler's extermination machine." How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible? How did a central architect of the Final Solution manage to disappear? And what had he done with his time while in hiding?

Bettina Stangneth, the first to comprehensively analyze more than 1, 300 pages of Eichmann's own recently discovered written notes - as well as seventy-three extensive audio reel recordings of a crowded Nazi salon held weekly during the 1950s in a popular district of Buenos Aires - draws a chilling portrait, not of a reclusive, taciturn war criminal on the run, but of a highly skilled social manipulator with an inexhaustible ability to reinvent himself, an unrepentant murderer eager for acolytes with whom to discuss past glories while vigorously planning future goals with other like-minded fugitives.

A work that continues to garner immense international attention and acclaim, Eichmann Before Jerusalem maps out the astonishing links between innumerable past Nazis - from ace Luftwaffe pilots to SS henchmen - both in exile and in Germany, and reconstructs in detail the postwar life of one of the Holocaust's principal organizers as no other book has done

Rezension

A New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.

"[Stangneth's] comprehensive research brings the man and his circumstances firmly back into focus. . . . no future discussion will be able to confront the Eichmann phenomenon and its wider political implications without reference to this book." - Steven Aschheim, The New York Times Book Review

"Extraordinary . . . . At each stage, the meticulous quality of [Stangneth's] research and her distinctive moral outrage make the journey enthralling . . . . Stangneth's book has the flavor of a detective story . . . . [A] fine, important book." - Michael Signer, The Daily Beast

"Stangneth has combined the talents of rigorous academic research with investigative journalism in tracking down and sifting through the mounds of archival data located in diffuse venues. Her efforts at comparing, collating and interpreting the wealth of material in the hall of mirrors and blind alleys that Eichmann erected are nothing less than prodigious." - Jack Schwartz, Haaretz

"It is impossible to overestimate the meticulous care Stengneth has taken in documenting everything she says. If there is a misspelling or typographical error, she notes it . . . . This has been called 'a disturbing book well worth reading.' Yes, it is disturbing, and yes, it is well worth reading, even more than once." - Stephanie Shapiro, Buffalo News

"Thrilling in its purpose....there is no doubt of its importance: Stangneth's research, full of forgotten papers, lost interviews, and buried evidence, turns the conventional wisdom about Eichmann on its head." - Publishers Weekly
"A riveting reconstruction of a fanatical National Socialist's obdurate journey in exile and appalling second career in Argentina.... Stangneth masterfully sifts through the information.... A rigorously documented, essential work not only about Eichmann's masterly masquerade, but also about how we come to accept appearances as truth." - Kirkus ( starred review )

" Meticulously researched, compellingly argued, engagingly written. Bettina Stangneth confronts Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil" with important new evidence and nuanced insight, permitting a fresh and informed reassessment of this riven debate. Arendt would surely have applauded the Stangneth challenge." - Timothy Ryback

From the Hardcover edition.

Klappentext

A New York Times Notable Book
A National Jewish Book Award finalist

In 1960, Adolf Eichmann took to the defendant's box in Jerusalem and insisted that he was no "manager of the Holocaust," as his accusers claimed, just a smalltime bureaucrat following orders. Like countless others, Hannah Arendt-covering the trials for The New Yorker-believed him. Eichmann Before Jerusalem challenges this history for the first time, completely reassessing Eichmann's story and drawing upon a wealth of newly uncovered materials that reveal his great deception, as well as bringing to light shocking truths about Nazis in the post-war world. Mapping out the astonishing links between innumerable past adherents-from ace Luftwaffe pilots to SS henchmen-both in exile and in Germany, Bettina Stangneth reconstructs in detail the secret life of one of the Holocaust's principal organizers.

Auszüge aus dem Buch

Introduction

Ever since Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was published in 1963, every essay on Adolf Eichmann has also been a dialogue with Hannah Arendt. A Jew from Königsberg who had studied philosophy under Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger until National Socialism drove her out of Germany, Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 for Eichmann's trial. Like all philosophers, she wanted to understand. But our understanding is always mediated by our context: we bring to the task our own thoughts and experiences and our own images of the past. Hannah Arendt read about Adolf Eichmann in the newspapers for the first time in 1943 at the latest, and eighteen years later she was familiar with all the research on him. What she expected to find in Jerusalem was something she had already described in detail: a diabolical, highly intelligent mass murderer who commanded a kind of horrified fascination, the kind of murderer seen in great works of literature. "He was one of the most intelligent of the lot," she wrote in 1960. Anyone who dared to understand him would be taking a great leap toward understanding the Nazis' crimes. "Am very tempted."

Arendt, a philosopher with a gift for acute observation, was not the only person who was puzzled by Eichmann in the flesh. Regardless of where they came from, almost all the trial observers received the same impression: Eichmann-in-Jerusalem was a wretched creature, with none of the scintillating, satanic charisma they had expected. The SS Ober-sturmbannführer who had spread fear and terror and death for millions exhausted the observers' attention with his endless sentences, and his talk of acting on orders and taking oaths of allegiance. Shouldn't the fact that he was so astoundingly good at doing so have aroused suspicions, even in 1961? Voices of doubt were present, but they were very quiet and not at all popular. The crucial difference between these voices and the trial observers was that the doubters all had access to at least part of the Argentina Papers.

In 1960 Holocaust research was in its infancy, documentary evidence was scarce, and the desire to extract information from perpetrators who were brought to trial made people incautious. Hannah Arendt chose the method of understanding that she was familiar with: repeatedly read-ing Eichmann's words and conducting a detailed analysis of the person speaking and writing, on the assumption that someone speaks and writes only when they want to be understood. She read the transcripts of his hearing and the trial more thoroughly than almost anyone else. And for this very reason, she fell into his trap: Eichmann-in-Jerusalem was little more than a mask. She didn't recognize it, although she was acutely aware that she had not understood the phenomenon as well as she had hoped.

No other book on Adolf Eichmann - and probably on National Socialism as a whole - has occasioned more debate than Eichmann in Jerusalem . The book achieved the primary goal of philosophers since Socrates: controversy for the sake of understanding. However, since at least the end of the 1970s, reference to Hannah Arendt has served to distract us from the matter at hand. One cannot help but feel that the story of the trial has stopped being about Eichmann, and that we would rather talk about the debate and various theories of evil than try to dis-cover more about the man himself than a thinker in 1961 could possibly have known. And yet a major development has given us access to other sources entirely - at least in theory.

Since 1979 large parts of the so-called Sassen interviews have become available, and we can now see what Hannah Arendt and all the other trial observers were not allowed to see: Eichmann before Jerusalem, chat-ting in his friend's front room, surrounded