Anything a Literary Source Can Tell: The Procedural Stance From Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem"

The present dissertation aims at addressing the procedural singleness of the 1961 Eichmann trial as presented by Hannah Arendt in her renowned “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”. As a basic premise, the thesis will hold that Arendt’s work gets closer to a representation, rather than a disquisition – a representation, one agrees, that does not renounce to its author’s argumentative habits. The inherent contradictions of the trial will be investigated, along with the way Arendt proceeded to match those very peculiarities with an equally ludicrous literary representation: the thesis will argue, indeed, that the author planned to frame the juristic into a literary event, with the result to insinuate into its legal and historical exceptionality, and thus deliver a uniquely lucid account of its procedural dimension. The thesis, in particular, will assess chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner’s strategy, based on which, in the spirit of a dialectic conflict, Arendt built her literary counter-representation: while it would be disproportionate to charge the prosecution with the entire burden of what went wrong in Jerusalem, it is impossible to exempt it from the unscrupulous spectacularization it subjected the Holocaust to. An insight into Arendtian moral philosophy will be needed to understand how inconsiderate Hausner’s understatement of procedural justice was, especially insofar as it dangerously matched with Adolf Eichmann’s claims of individual irresponsibility. Attempting to play by the same diverted rules that the prosecution had set as the golden standard for the show trial, Arendt engaged in creating proper literary archetypes, thus consecrating and fixing them in the theatrical roles they had picked for themselves. Framing “Eichmann in Jerusalem” within a series of literary precedents, within the suggestions and the genre it aspired to emulate, together with other works from Hannah Arendt, will prove to be a meaningful task given that the region of academic investigation precisely resides, in this case, in the blurred border between literary rendition and technical reportage; for this reason, the approach the thesis intends to adopt will be to carry out a philological examination of selected passages, without neglecting comparison with authors and scholars like Joseph Conrad, Primo Levi, Jonathan Littell, Karl Jaspers, Alberto Moravia, Günther Anders, Bertolt Brecht. As far as due process considerations are concerned, the dissertation will ground its procedural arguments on the criteria set up at the time of the Nuremberg trials. For those who arranged the trial had grotesquely attempted to shape it in the form of a literary event, and for the trial was most certainly not the epitome of a stable jurisprudential path, the thesis reiterates its commitment in seizing the one-time chance to explore the Eichmann trial, a procedural event, by means of its most prominent literary representation.