Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past

Front matter

Tuija Parvikko and the

Politics of the Past

HELSINKI fe U P in UNIVERSITY Pro oe

Contents

PROLOGUE: ON RECENT INTERPRETATIONS OF

HANNAH ARENDT’S EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM..

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....-s+esesceeeeeoeecercoes

Foreword

Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past, originally published by the Finnish Political Science Association in 2008, is one of the most sought-after titles of its book series in English. In 2017, the board of the Association decided to renew its book series as an open access publication. The new series was titled Pro et Contra. Books from the Finnish Political Science Association, and its first publication appeared in December 2020 in collaboration with the Helsinki University Press.

In the context of the reform, the new title reflected the profile change of the book series. While the board’s decision to turn the series into open access format was made to reach new audiences globally, it also aimed to promote original high-quality scholarship in political studies beyond the borders of the discipline and the national context. In this respect, the title Pro et Contra highlights the effort to engage in debate about political studies, especially in the global context.

After the launch of the Pro et Contra series, the first edition of Tuija Parvikkos Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past had been out of print for some time. Over the years, the board of the Finnish Political Science Association had received numerous inquiries about it from booksellers as well as researchers, teachers and students of political theory in Finland. Internationally, the first edition reached only a handful of readers. Against this background, this edition being in open access format will make the book accessible to a wider audience and will allow its highly original contribution in the field of political theory to become more known.

The decision to republish the book with a new prologue was taken not only due to the high demand in the national context but also because of the re-emerging controversy surrounding Arendt’s Eich-

Foreword v mann in Jerusalem internationally. While Parvikkos book engages in the original American debate over Arendt'’s report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, it also argues that the debate over the report, illustrating the incapacity to understand the unprecedented political evil of the Nazi crimes, had a decisive impact on further developments in Holocaust studies, contributing to their redirection of focus from perpetrators to victims. Parvikko’s book shows that debates surrounding Arendt’s report have never really calmed down but have taken a number of new directions. Furthermore, it illustrates that, around the turn of the century, readings and debates over Eichmann in Jerusalem became disengaged and displaced from their original context. With the recurring interest about Arendt’s pamphlet and subsequent public debates, Tuija Parvikkos political reading remains a timely contribution.

The difference between the original edition and this one is that, along with this foreword, explaining the republication context and the continued relevance of the original version, this edition contains Tuija Parvikkos new prologue, entitled ‘On Recent Interpretations of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem’ In the prologue, Parvikko reflects on her own political reading, which was arguably one of the first, in connection to recent scholarly contributions and developments of the controversy. Regarding the original manuscript, we have corrected typographical errors and spelling inconsistencies. However, no additional language editing has been undertaken. The manuscript has been typeset by Helsinki University Press so that the page numbers of this new version match the original publication, which allows readers to follow up citations to the original volume.

We would like to warmly thank, first of all, Tuija Parvikko, who generously put her time and effort into delivering the new prologue for the republication. We would also like to offer our thanks to the peer-reviewers of the new prologue, who offered constructive feedback, as well as Anna-Mari Vesterinen and Leena Kaakinen from the Helsinki University Press for their assistance, support and expert vi Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past advice during the preparation of the manuscript. Finally, we would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude for the financial support of the Finnish Association for Scholarly Publishing, whose funding was crucial in renewing the book series into open access format in the first place, and the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, which provided funding to publish this book.

Madrid and Turku, 28 November 2021

Pro et Contra series editors

Foreword vii

PROLOGUE: ON RECENT INTERPRETATIONS OF HANNAH ARENDT’S EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM

During the Second World War, the idea of “collective guilt” or the“collective responsibility” of all Germans for war crimes and genocides of enormous groups of peoples prevailed among the Allied leadership. Winston Churchill, for instance, spoke for a permanent weakening and even of the dissolution of Germany in order to prevent future catastrophes in Europe. For Hannah Arendt, the problem was more complicated. Immediately after the war, she argued that the problem in postwar Germany was how to bear the burden of confronting a people among whom the boundaries dividing criminals from normal persons, the guilty from the innocent, had been so completely effaced that nobody would be able to tell whether they were dealing with a secret hero or with a former mass murderer. Most Germans had become “irresponsible corresponsibles’, supporting the Nazi regime by following orders and acting as cogs in a machine of mass murder. In trying to understand what made people support the Nazis, Arendt focused her attention on the person who boasted of being the organising spirit of the murder. This man was Heinrich Himmler. Arendt argued that Himmler was neither a Bohemian like Goebbels, nor a sex criminal like Streicher, nor a perverted fanatic like Hitler, nor an adventurer like Göring. He was, instead, a good pater familias, with all the outer signs of respectability, incapable of betraying his wife and anxious to seek a secure and decent future for his children. (Arendt 1945)

For Arendt, the real horror lay in the fact that this kind of a good family man had become the greatest criminal of the century. More precisely, the trouble with the Nazi perpetrators and their fellow travellers and followers was that they were not composed of a group of perverted criminals with their heads full of evil motives. They were, instead, apparently normal family men who attempted to conform to

Prologue ix and obey the rules and practices of the society, to act decently, pursuing a successful career and good standard of living for their families.

These reflections during the immediate postwar period show that Arendt had formed her view of the character of the Nazi criminal well before Israeli intelligence captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. However, she had not by then seen a Nazi criminal alive. Therefore, she wanted to attend his trial in Jerusalem. This book deals with the immense debate provoked by the report that Arendt wrote of the trial. One of the conspicuous characteristics of the debate that continues to re-emerge every now and then is that, until recently, these early reflections of Arendt have been systematically dismissed. While the contributors do believe that Arendt had formed her view of Eichmann’s character well in advance of the trial, they claim that she did so only based on the newspaper coverage of his capture in 1960.

The immediate postwar period from the 1940s to the trial of Adolf Eichmann in the beginning of the 1960s in Jerusalem witnessed a relatively quick turn, both in defeated Germany and other European countries, from the mourning of victims of war and general devastation and suffering caused by the war to looking forward to economic recovery and restoration. Even if the postwar period is not simply characterised by silence and lack of debate over the questions of guilt and responsibility and the fate of the victims of the Nazi terror — as a number of historians have tried to prove — it is fair to argue that, in general, people were more interested in rebuilding Europe and their own lives than mourning the victims and arguing over guilt and responsibility for war crimes and genocides.'

1. In Germany, one of the few who attempted to analytically and critically discuss the guilt of Germans was the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who not only had an intensive correspondence with Arendt as to how to deal with the guilt and responsibility of Germans and the legacy of the entire Nazi period but also tried to awake public debate by publishing a volume entitled Die Schuldfrage. Für Völkermord gibt es keine Verjährung (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1946). Abbreviated English edition The Question of German Guilt (New York: Dial Press, 1947).

x Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past

Having concluded the Nuremberg and other major war crimes trials, the Western powers were also not interested in hunting Nazi criminals. Moreover, the postwar period was characterised by a lack of exact knowledge of the volume of Nazi crimes as the first studies on these were only just emerging. In this respect, the beginning of the 1960s marked a turning point. The first serious studies over the fate of the victims of the Nazi crimes appeared, such as Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jews (1963). Along with the capture of Adolf Eichmann, a new interest in the Nazi “hunt” and convicting Nazi criminals arose. Some historians, such as Annette Wieviorka (1998), have argued that the Eichmann trial marked the end of the period of silence and the beginning of the era of the witness. More precisely, the Eichmann trial was the first great public event in which the voices of witnesses and listening to the stories of victims of the Holocaust were given a significant role. Other historians have recently argued that the Eichmann trial alone did not usher in an era of the witness. For instance, Henry Rousso (2017) has pointed out that mass testimonies following episodes of extreme violence first appeared during and after the First World War, in particular in the writings of officers and soldiers. This was a new phenomenon resulting from the thresholds crossed by the conflict’s cruelty. A small number of Shoah testimonies emerged as soon as the Second World War ended. These brought up another set of questions, extensively debated for 30 years, about their reception and assimilation, a process that cannot be reduced to merely counting the writings published before the 1960s (Rousso 2017, 35-36).

Hannah Arendt covered the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker. Her report first appeared in five articles published in consecutive issues only two years later, in 1963. It immediately caused an immense debate among American Jewish intellectuals, which soon extended to other intellectual circles as well. The debate became international as the report appeared in book form, especially after the German

Prologue xi translation appeared in 1964. The debate has continued ever since, almost uninterrupted.

Relatively peaceful moments have been followed by furious and heated wars of words. The original American debate focused mostly on the themes of Jewish responsibility and cooperation with the Nazis in Jewish councils (Judenrdte), Eichmann’s evil motivations, the character of the accused and the meaning of the banality of evil. In comparison, the German and other European debates focused on (the lack of) resistance at large, voluntary collaboration with the Nazis and the position of former Nazis and fascists in postwar European societies, The American and European debates overlapped only partly, and this distinction between the US-centric and Eurocentric debates has been largely recognisable until today.

This book was originally published in 2008. First and foremost, it focused on the original American debate over Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and discussed the question of why American Jewish intellectuals took Arendt's arguably controversial arguments so personally, as if she had written a pamphlet on the moral mindset of American Jewish intellectuals, instead of a report of the trial of a major Nazi criminal and a political judgement of his crimes. Firstly, I tried to draw a careful picture of Arendt’s own mindset and the context of writing her book. I analysed her early studies of Zionism and critique of the Jewish state and discussed her conception of and relation with Zionism, arguing that her critical Zionist background constituted the most important part of her personal stance on the Eichmann trial. Secondly, I dealt with the general background of the trial, telling the story of the capture of Eichmann and discussing the public debate caused by it. Thirdly, I analysed the original controversy and its basic arguments, revealing how badly Arendt’s book was misread, showing how easily even critical intellectuals may succumb to the temptation of ad hominem argumentation. Fourthly, I showed how important a role irony as a trope played in Arendt’s argumentative style. Indeed, on the one hand, I argued that Eichmann in Jerusalem was badly xii Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past received in the United States because hardly anybody understood Arendt’s ironic style of argumentation. Instead, readers took her text literally, believing that her book was meant to be an impudent and arrogant attack against both the wartime and the postwar Jewish establishment and intellectuals. On the other hand, I claimed that the readership could not bear the sharpness of her argumentation in so far as it mercilessly revealed the political weakness, conformism, inclination to wishful thinking, and lack of political judgement of not only the Jewish leadership and American Jewish intellectuals but also the Western political elite at large. Finally, I discussed the latest developments of the Arendt controversy at the beginning of the 21st century. I argued that the Eichmann trial marked an important turning point in the conceptual revolution of witness and victim, and that Arendt’s report had a decisive impact on causing this turn. More importantly, I argued that, around the turn of the century, the readings and debates over Eichmann in Jerusalem were disengaged and displaced from the original context of the book and included in the debates surrounding the singularity of the Holocaust and European politics of the past in general.

Hannah Arendt’s book itself was by no means about the victims’ voices, On the contrary, Arendt harshly criticised the attorney general, Gideon Hausner, for focusing the attention of the court on the sufferings of the victims instead of the crimes of the accused. Furthermore, Arendt maintained that the statements of witnesses were not reliable evidence, either for the court or for the historians, as human memoty is treacherous, even more so when traumatic experiences are in question. Even if people do not purposefully lie to the court, they can remember badly or only a part of an experience, or even adopt other people's memories as their own. Three other themes prevailed in the first debate: the Jewish responsibility, the Jewish councils and

2. For example, Primo Levi has dealt with the fickleness of memory from the victim's point of view. See I sommersi e i salvati (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), and the English translation, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Summit Books, 1988).

Prologue xiii cooperation with the Nazis, the nature of Eichmann’s evil, and the meaning of Arendt’s thesis of the banality of his evil. I showed in my book that, underlying all these three themes of the American debate, there was a hidden layer that dealt with the identity of American Jews and their responsibility for what happened to their European brethren. In addition, intertwined with this hidden layer was the question of the fate of the Jewish state and its right to represent world Jewry. Behind the question of why “they” did not rebel, there was the question of why “we” did not do anything in order to help them. While American Jewish intellectuals were wondering why European Jews did not organise resistance and self-defence against Nazi discrimination and violence, they were ashamed of not having done anything to encourage and help their European brethren. Similarly, behind the question of why “they” cooperated with their perpetrators, there was the question of what“we” would have done in a similar situation. It was easy to criticise the behaviour of European Jews from the other side of the ocean. Hardly anybody understood Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil and what she really meant when she argued that the deeds of the criminal did not correspond to the doer. Even today, Arendt's critics have trouble understanding what her thesis really means. Most critics try to find an explanation of it in Eichmann’s perverted morality and his wicked character and end up claiming that there is something wrong with Arendt's own conception of the relationship between morality and politics (of mass murder). In my book, I argue, instead, that the core of the banality of evil was that wickedness was not inscribed in the intrinsic or true nature of human being but in her/his deeds and their consequences. What made these deeds astounding was not their exceptional or devilish nature but their seeming and apparent normality. More precisely, Eichmann did not do evil by personally torturing or murdering somebody but, instead, by first leading the organisation of Jews’ expulsion from the Reich and then of their deportation to camps, being one of the principal executioners of the project of annihilation.

xiv Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past

In 2008, I concluded the book by discussing then-recent studies of the Eichmann trial and Arendt’s report of it. I first dealt with David Cesarani's biography of Adolf Eichmann (2004), according to which the birth of the field of Holocaust studies owes more to the controversy surrounding Arendt’s pamphlet than to the trial itself or the role of the victims’ testimonies in it, and it was not the trial but the controversy that brought the Final Solution home to millions of people. Cesarani’s main argument is that it is Hannah Arendt's interpretation of Adolf Eichmann and his trial that has most decisively shaped our understanding of the Nazi criminal, making Eichmann an icon of the 2oth century, of the Nazi regime, and of the genocide of the Jews. In his view, Eichmann has become a metonym for the entire history of the Nazi persecution, the mass murder of the Jews, and its legacy.

I found Cesarani’s interpretation somewhat exaggerated but, admittedly, the beginning of the 21st century witnessed a revival of rereading of Eichmann in Jerusalem. In these new readings, there was clearly a very different emphasis as compared to the earlier debates surrounding the book. This time, the controversy was not about Arendt’s interpretation of Jewish politics, or Eichmann’s personality, but on the trial itself, Arendt’s interpretation and critique of it, and her impact on the dispute over the singularity of the Holocaust. One of the most passionate advocates of the great significance of the Eichmann trial was Shoshana Felman (2000), who argued that the most important result of the trial was that it inverted our understanding of monumentality and greatness. In the Eichmann trial, the real hero was not the accused; instead, the trial succeeded in showing the greatness of the victims. Felman argued that Arendt failed to see that the Eichmann trial historically created the victim. It was the first time in history that a new legal language and space had been created through the first-hand narratives of victims. Felman’s point, in accordance with most Holocaust historians, is that what we refer to as the Holocaust did not exist as a collective story prior to the Eich-

Prologue XV mann trial. Over the course of the trial, the victims recovered the language and acquired the semantic and historical authority of the story of their destruction. The result was an international discussion that defined the experience of the victims and referred to the crime against the Jewish people independently of the political and military history of the Second World War.

Whereas Felman focuses on the greatness of victims and the importance of their stories, Leora Bilsky (2004) approaches the Eichmann trial as one in a chain of political trials held in Israel. For her, the main characteristic of a political trial is that political authorities seek to advance a political agenda through criminal prosecution. As I discuss in this book, in the case of the Eichmann trial, the agenda and aim of the Israeli government were to determine the content of collective memory and the Israeli collective identity as to the Holocaust. Until the trial, the Israeli collective identity had been based on Zionist heroism in terms of which Jewish victimhood of the Holocaust was not appreciated. However, among younger Israeli generations, the memory and appreciation of militant Zionism and years of illegal terrorist fight were fading, and new elements of national identity were urgently needed.

Bilsky (2004) argues that the Eichmann trial played a central role in giving authority to the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and making them reliable witnesses in terms of the formation of a legal judgement and the writing of history. Indeed, the Eichmann trial contributed to source materials for historians: a new approach of writing history based on victims’ testimonies was born. However, it seems to me that Bilsky’s interpretation takes it for granted that in the political trial both parties are treated equally and can present their case equally forcefully. In practice, this is not always the case. It is enough to think of the Moscow trials of the 1930s to understand that the political trial very easily turns into a show trial in which the prosecutor really sets the stage. As to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, neither Felman nor Bilsky really deals with the fact that several witxvi Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past nesses on the defender’s side were not able to enter Israel because they were wanted. This did not, of course, affect the result of the trial, but it may weaken Bilsky’s argument of the greatness of political trial as transformative event.

The Eichmann trial — or, in broader terms, the Holocaust — did not remain the only context of the politics of victims and victimisation discourses. On the contrary, during the past 20 years, the victimisation discourse has spread globally and been adopted in different kinds of local and national contexts. Jie-Hyun Lim (2014) has argued that victimhood discourses have not remained exclusively related to the Holocaust; instead, victimhood has become a transnational theme that dominates the emergence of memories of mass dictatorship. Lim argues that the rise of a global public sphere has created a space for the contestation of conflicting national memories. For instance, the cosmopolitanisation of Holocaust memories has resulted in the re-territorialisation or re-nationalisation of memories as non-European victims of colonialism begin to equate themselves with Holocaust victims in the processes of decolonisation and nation-building. To many postcolonial regimes, Israel has become a reference point as “a little Great Power”. Most importantly, given that the global public sphere tends to be sympathetic to innocent victims, nations have been increasingly engaged in“a distasteful competition over who suffered the most’? A global confessional culture has emerged in which victimhood narratives can promote national identification that cannot be achieved in other ways. As a result, an international competition for victimhood gives birth to victimhood nationalism, which is based on the dichotomy of victimising nation/ victimised nation (Lim 2014, 35-36).

While the first two decades of the 21st century have witnessed a global process in which victimisation discourses have spread everywhere and the reference to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust is

3. Lim borrows this expression from Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic (2004).

Prologue xvii weakening and fading,* in Arendt studies, several new developments have taken place. Some of these are more or less direct continuations of the Eichmann — or Arendt — controversy, while some others draw from Arendt’s early writings and the Eichmann report in order to focus on new themes often connected with burning political problems of the contemporary world. The most interesting developments have, probably, taken place in legal studies, political theory and human rights discourse (Birmingham 2006; Hayden 2009; Sznaider 2011; Gündoğdu 2015; see also Parvikko 2014).° It seems to me that, since almost all of Arendt’s early writings, including her Jewish writings and reflections on responsibility and judgement,‘ have appeared, Arendt scholars have adopted more comprehensive strategies of reading and interpretation, paying growing attention to changes and differences between Arendt’s early and later writings. In the following, I will discuss a few of the most important new approaches to the Eichmann/Arendt controversy. In addition, I will introduce a few approaches that instead draw from the Eichmann report, aiming at developing Arendt's ideas further. In other words, I will have a look at contributions attempting to think with Arendt to go beyond her thinking.

While global debates over victimhood nationalism mostly deal with entire nations or national groups and their fate under totalitarian

4. In fact, the spread of victimisation discourses also covers such fields as individual psychology, confessional autobiography, the film industry, and fiction, to mention a few. Not surprisingly, in politics, new populist movements have successfully used victimisation strategies for their own purposes,

5. There are, of course, also those branches of Arendt studies that draw from her political and philosophical writings, such as The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1963), Between Past and Future (1961), Crisis of the Republic (1972), The Life of the Mind (1978) and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982), without paying particular attention to the Eichmann controversy.

6. Most importantly, see Arendt (2003 and 2007). A number of Arendt’s correspondences have also been published. As to the Eichmann controversy, probably the most important among these are Hannah Arendt and Kurt Blumenfeld (1995) and Hannah Arendt and Gerschom Scholem (2017).

xviii Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past rule or in the great conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries, leaving the reference to the Eichmann trial and Arendt’s interpretation of it to the position of a footnote, a branch of the contemporary Eichmann controversy continues in terms surprisingly similar to the first debate in the 1960s (see e.g, Golsan & Misemer 2017). It is characteristic of these contributions that in one way or another they revolve around Eichmann’ personality. One of the most praised contributions of this genre is Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (2014),’ which re-examines Eichmann’s life before the Jerusalem trial in the light of archive materials that only surfaced well after the 1960s. Stangneth’s interpretation leans heavily on the so-called Argentine Papers, including the “Sassen interviews”, which have now surfaced in several archives.’ None of these materials had been available, either for Arendt or for the court in Jerusalem. On several occasions, Stangneth recognises our debt to Arendt’s insights of Nazi totalitarianism and her report of the Jerusalem trial. However, in her reading strategy, there is a highly problematic bias concerning both the criminal and Arendt's interpretation of him. Stangneth depicts Eichmann as a fanatical National Socialist and anti-Semite who never ceased to fight his pro- Nazi war and to seek personal fame and recognition. In Stangneth's view, Eichmann’ zeal to annihilate Jews stemmed precisely from his ideological fanaticism and his profoundly anti-Semitic worldview. Further, in her interpretation, Eichmann was an extremely calculating person who never showed in public his inner feelings or motives, but instead always kept a close eye on the impact he was having, try-

7- The German original was published in 2011 with the title Eichmann vor Jerusalem. Das unbehelligte Leben eines Massenmérders (Hamburg: Arche Verlag).

8. The Argentine Papers consist of several hundred pages of Eichmann’s own notes in exile. The“Sassen interviews’ are transcripts of tapes that were recorded during often “wet” sessions of discussion made by a Dutch journalist and a member of the Waffen-SS, Willen Sassen, Eichmann, and a few of their friends in Buenos Aires in the 1950s. In the 1960s, only tiny parts of these interviews were published in Life magazine.

Prologue xix ing to make every situation work in his favour. This may be very true. However, it does not follow, as Stangneth argues, that in Jerusalem Arendt fell into Eichmann’s trap, believing that the calm and dry bureaucrat in the glass booth was the real and the only Eichmann that ever existed. Stangneth claims that Arendt was unable to resist Eichmann’ cunning strategy of defence of representing himself as an unlucky loser, without really being able to show how exactly her “novel” interpretation of Eichmann’s personality differs from Arendt's argumentation. On a careful reading of Arendt’s pamphlet, it is clear that she did not cherish any fantasies of the personality of the Nazi criminal, and she avoided the trap of describing him as somehow essentially inhuman, devilish, or monstrous by birth. Instead, she described him as an entirely normal, ordinary man with a strong propensity to self-important boasting, bragging, and bossing about. In addition, Arendt described Eichmann as a devoted careerist whose principal aim was to climb as high up in the Nazi hierarchy as possible. Even if Stangneth’s contribution does not markedly differ from Arendt’s interpretation of Eichmann, there is a fundamental difference in their approaches. While Stangneth focuses on the person of the criminal, arguing that his evil deeds originated from his evil personality, Arendt focused on his deeds, arguing that evil motives alone do not commit crimes. Stangneth risks being obsessed with the idea that an evildoer must be evil by their nature, and that the wickedness of the deeds of the criminal can be derived and measured by their inner nature or personal character. Arendt simply argued that what appeared before the court in Jerusalem was not Eichmann’s inner nature or hidden motives but, instead, his deeds. This is because, for Arendt, it is the deeds that matter, judicially, politically, and ethically. Even more importantly, the Western judicial system has been constructed in such a way that it can deliver justice only based on the deeds of the accused.

Stangneth’s (2014) account, which became widely reviewed and commented on, contributed significantly to redirecting the debate

XX Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past back to its original starting point, focusing on Eichmann’s “wicked” personality, the evil nature of his actions and his anti-Semitism. It is noteworthy that, again, the controversy was split in two. While American debaters once again enthusiastically focused on Eichmann’s person, German discussions of Stangneth’s book centred around the neo-Nazi circle of sympathisers who gathered in Argentina, their connections to post-war Germany, their hopes to influence political events there, and the claim that successive German governments resisted bringing Adolf Eichmann to trial. As Seyla Benhabib (2018, 64—65) has argued, these aspects of Stangneth’s book, which directly address the culture of silence and repression in postwar Germany's failing to work through the past (Vergangenheitsbewaltigung) have all been neglected by American commentators. Instead, the trial of Adolf Eichmann has been turned once more into a trial of Hannah Arendt.