Synopses & Reviews
Where the horror was blackest and the confusion deepest, she resorted to “uninhibited irony,” which she once described to Joachim Fest as “my most precious inheritance from Germany—or more precisely, from Berlin.” Old friends abandoned her. When Gershom Scholem wrote to her, “I would just like to say that your portrait of Eichmann as a convert to Zionism is only conceivable from someone with your deep resentment of everything having to do with Zionism,” she answered, “I never made Eichmann out to be a ‘Zionist.’ If you missed the irony of the sentence—which was plainly in
oratio obliqua, reporting Eichmann’s own words—I really can’t help it.”
Irony is her means of holding experience at arm’s length in order to think about it, a protection against panic and powerfully aggressive impulses that would only interfere with her judgment.
Moreover, behind the tone of the Eichmann book lies a quite real laughter that overcame Arendt as she read the transcripts of his interrogation. “I’ll tell you this: I read the transcript of his police investigation, thirty-six hundred pages, read it, and read it carefully, and I do not know how many times I laughed—laughed out loud! People took this reaction in a bad way. I cannot do anything about that. But I know one thing: Three minutes before certain death, I probably still would laugh.” As a test, she had taken at face value what she saw and what Eichmann said about himself: nothing but clichés whose “thoughtlessness” so shocked her that she burst out laughing, thereby outraging not just the Jewish world.
About the Author
Marie Luise Knott is a journalist, translator, and author living in Berlin. In 1995 she founded the German edition of
Le Monde diplomatique and has been its editor-in-chief for the past eleven years. She has written numerous works on art and literature, as well as two important studies of Hannah Arendt.
David Dollenmayer is an emeritus professor of German at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His translations include works by Rolf Bauerdick, Bertolt Brecht, Elias and Veza Canetti, Peter Stephan Jungk, Michael Kleeberg, Perikles Monioudis, Anna Mitgutsch, Mietek Pemper, and Hansjörg Schertenleib. He is the recipient of the 2008 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize (for Moses Rosenkranz’s Childhood) and the 2010 Translation Prize of the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York (for Michael Köhlmeier’s Idyll with Drowning Dog).