`The Gentlemen Enjoyed Their Evil'

On July 20, 1963, in a letter to Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, who had recently published Eichmann in Jerusalem, wrote:

“You are completely right that I have changed my mind and now no longer speak of radical evil….The fact is that today I think that evil in every instance is only extreme, never radical: it has no depth, and therefore has nothing demonic about it. Evil can lay waste the entire world, like a fungus growing rampant on the surface. Only the good is always deep and radical.”

How I wish to believe what Arendt writes. Scholem could not, and history is on his side. He was a man of incalculable learning and wisdom, and disagreed forcefully with her conclusions regarding Eichmann and the Holocaust. In particular, he objected to her notion of “the banality of evil.” In letter to Arendt, dated Aug. 12, 1963, Scholem wrote:

“Though you think you have proven it, I have not seen the proof. Maybe this kind of evil exists; but if so, philosophically it would have to be considered differently. I don’t picture Eichmann, as he marched around in his SS uniform and relished how everyone shivered in fear before him, as the banal gentleman you now want to persuade us he was, ironically or not. I refuse to go along. I’ve read enough descriptions and interviews of Nazi functionaries and their conduct in front of Jews – while the going was good – to mistrust this innocuous ex post facto construction. The gentlemen enjoyed their evil, so long as there was something to enjoy. One behaves differently after the party’s over, of course.”

Scholem’s anger is raging but admirably focused. For him, Arendt was not a disembodied intellectual voice. She and Scholem had been friendly correspondents for more than 20 years. It was Arendt, a refugee in the south of France in 1940, who first told Scholem about the suicide of his old friend Walter Benjamin. Arendt’s bald dislike of Israel and her characterization of European Jews as sheep lead passively to slaughter by the Nazis was not just morally repugnant to Scholem but a betrayal made more sickening because she was a friend, a colleague. Did Scholem know Arendt, in the 1920s, had been the lover of Martin Heidegger, a Nazi party member from 1933 until the end of World War II?

Arendt died in 1975. Five years later, when he was 83 years old, in a letter to the American sociologist Daniel Bell, Scholem’s anger had not cooled:

“…for quite some time I wanted to write you at length about your piece on Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann trial, which brought back to me one of the most bitter controversies of my life and caused me to break all and every connection with Hannah, up to the day of her death. I found it impossible to express, even to a friend like you, the bitterness of my feelings and thoughts in this matter. It has finished for me not only the question about the character of Hannah, but opened up a devastating new view of her own books.”