Theaters of Justice

Judging, Staging, and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht, and Delbo

Yasco Horsman

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804777377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What role do legal trials have in collective processes of coming to terms with a history of mass violence? How does the theatrical structure of a criminal trial facilitate and limit national processes of healing and learning from the past? This study begins with the widely publicized, historic trials of three Nazi war criminals, Eichmann, Barbie, and Priebke, whose explicit goal was not only to punish, but also to establish an officially sanctioned version of the past. The Truth and Reconciliation commissions in South America and South Africa added a therapeutic goal, acting on the belief that a trial can help bring about a moment of closure.

Horsman challenges this belief by reading works that reflect on the relations among pedagogy, therapy, and legal trials. Philosopher Hannah Arendt, poet Charlotte Delbo, and dramaturg Bertolt Brecht all produced responses to historic trials that reopened the cases those trials sought to close, bringing to center stage aspects that had escaped the confines of their legal frameworks.

Arendt’s Laughter

THEATRICALITY, PEDAGOGY, AND COMEDY IN EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM

The great political criminals must be exposed and exposed especially to laughter…. One may say that tragedy deals with the sufferings of mankind in a less serious way than comedy.

—Bertolt Brecht

Laughter always bursts, and loses itself in its peals. As soon as it bursts out, it is lost to all appropriation, to all presentation.

—Jean-Luc Nancy

In a letter to Mary McCarthy, written shortly after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt confesses to her lifelong friend:

You were the only reader to understand what I have otherwise never admitted— namely that I wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria. And that ever since I did it, I feel—after twenty years—light hearted about the whole matter. Don’t tell anybody; is it not proof positive that I have no “soul”?¹

Years later, during an interview in Germany, Arendt repeated this admission and so acknowledged publicly the lightness of her tone. She describes how she often laughed uncontrollably while studying the case, as when she read in her Jerusalem hotel room “the transcript of the police investigation, thirty-six hundred pages, read it, and read it very carefully, and I do not know how many times I laughed—laughed out loud!”² This eruption into laughter is of course described as a private response, taking place in the solitude of a hotel room; and the earlier revelation of her lightheartedness is confessed from within the intimacy of a correspondence with a dear friend. Nevertheless, the laughter Arendt describes did not remain external to her report on the Eichmann trial. In a sense, its echoes reverberate throughout the pages of Eichmann in Jerusalem.³ One can hear its resonances when she calls Eichmann a “clown” (54), characterizes certain aspects of the trial as “outright funny” (48, see also 50, 288), and refers to the proceedings as “sheer comedy” (3), a “horrible comedy” (198), and a “comedy” whose “macabre humor easily surpasses that of any Surrealist invention” (50). More generally, a tone of laughter permeates her book and can clearly be discerned in the irony with which she depicts not just the figure of Eichmann but also his Israeli prosecutors and even the dramatic gestures of some of the holocaust survivors who took the witness stand during the trial.

This slightly mocking tone scandalized her critics when her report was first published.⁴ Now that the dust over the debate over the content of Eichmann in Jerusalem seems to have settled, this tone appears to be the most enduring curiosity about the book. Arendt writes that the Eichmann trial presented itself to her as a comedy, rather than as, for example, a tragedy. To indicate how crucial the comic dimension is for her understanding of the trial as a whole, she selected as the book’s epigraph Brecht’s “O Germany— / Hearing the speeches that ring from your house, one laughs. / But whoever sees you, reaches for his knife.”

Reading Arendt’s report in the context of her contemporaries’ responses to the trial, Arendt’s emphasis on the trial’s comic aspect is conspicuous indeed. The journalists covering the case tended to write about it with a pious solemnity. More significantly, Eichmann in Jerusalem’s ironic tone distinguishes it from that of Arendt’s earlier exploration into the evils of fascism in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Whereas that book had been written in a tone of high moral seriousness and expressed a patent sense of indignation, and therefore seemed to bear itself heavily under the “burden of our times,” (its original title), Eichmann in Jerusalem displays by contrast that aura of lightheartedness that typically follows a moment of laughter.

Although Eichmann in Jerusalem wears this laughter on its sleeve— and received disapproving comments from her contemporaries because of it—her tone is rarely acknowledged and almost never analyzed by current Arendt scholarship.⁵ Most critics who nowadays champion Arendt’s report go through rather painstaking efforts to defend the book’s moral seriousness—the publisher’s copy on a recent paperback edition praises Arendt for her “compassion,” her “outrage,” and her “true sense of tragedy”— thereby going against everything the text so clearly flaunts about itself.⁶ Yet I would contend that if Arendt’s book still speaks to us now, more than forty years after its publication, it is exactly because of the roaring laughter that sounds in it, which we have not yet assimilated.

The aim of this chapter, then, is to analyze Arendt’s laughter, or rather, what I would like to call, in her terms, “the precision of her laughter.”⁷ What exactly does her laughter entail, and to what does it respond? I would be reluctant to reduce it to a “distancing” device as is suggested by, among others, Shoshana Felman, Deborah Nelson, and Alan Rosen.⁸ As Arendt herself indicates in the interview with Gauss quoted above, her laughter was not a means to control her emotions; her bursting into laughter caught her by surprise and overcame her. Coming to grips with such roaring laughter may be a daunting task because, as Nancy has reminded us, laughter poses a challenge to conceptual thinking. It is rarely fully present, he writes: It slips away and disappears almost as soon as it sounds, falling out of our hands at the very moment we seem to grasp it.⁹ The question that I would like to raise in this chapter is: What is the relation between Arendt’s laughter and the particular mode of understanding implied by the tone of her book? Or rather, to employ Arendt’s own terminology, what is the relation between her laughter and the particular lesson that she said the trial taught her?

Despite the criticism of the trial’s overtly didactic ambitions (which I will discuss in the next paragraph), Arendt claims at two separate moments in her report that the proceedings taught her a lesson (she explicitly uses this term), namely that Eichmann’s crimes were driven not by fanaticism, anti-Semitic hatred, or some “profound diabolical” nature but rather stemmed from his incapability to judge, speak, and think for himself. The particular nature of the Nazis’ crimes should therefore not be understood of manifestations of a Kantian Radical Evil, as she had suggested in The Origins of Totalitarianism, but rather as fairly banal cases of “thoughtlessness.”¹⁰ She summarizes this newly gained insight in the renowned and often misunderstood phrase “the banality of evil.” Eichmann in Jerusalem became, of course, famous—or notorious—for coining the term “the banality of evil,” and most Arendt scholars tend to treat this phrase as a summary of the book’s “claim,” interpreting it as a philosophical, psychological, or legal concept employed to analyze Eichmann’s behavior.

Overlooked in almost all of these discussions, however, is the phrase’s peculiar status in Arendt’s book. Grasping its nature may perhaps be as difficult as getting a grip on Arendt’s laughter itself. As she explains in the introduction to the first part of Life of the Mind (1971, 1978), the phrase, when used in her report on the Eichmann trial, implied neither a “thesis” nor a “doctrine” about the nature of evil, nor was it a psychological concept explaining Eichmann’s behavior. It was simply a shorthand expression referring to a particular type of scene that “struck her” as a spectator of the trial.¹¹ As she writes in the postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem: “When I speak of the banality of evil, I do so on a strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial” (287, my emphasis). She goes on to elaborate what she means not by defining this banality conceptually but by contrasting it to other theatrical scenes of evil:

Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III “to prove a villain.” Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all … He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. (287, emphasis in original)

The above formulations suggest to me that the phrase “the banality of evil,” when used in Eichmann in Jerusalem, does not in the first place refer to the (philosophical, political, or legal) content of the lesson that she learned in Jerusalem but rather to the theatrical structure of a surprising scene that struck her, as a spectator, with an impact that she describes as didactic. She continues:

That such [that is, Eichmann’s] remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon, nor a theory about it. (288, my emphasis)

Hence, in Eichmann in Jerusalem the phrase “the banality of evil” points to a lesson that is not (yet) articulated in conceptual terms and transposed into a set of assertions that would add up to an explanation or a theory. As a lesson it is (still) marked by the first-person experience of learning, of being struck by something unexpected and new whose impact has not (yet) been solidified into a thesis or a doctrine articulated in the third person. The phrase seems to point to what she had called earlier, in “understanding and Politics” (1954), a “preliminary understanding”: a grasping of the newness of a phenomenon, which precedes its analytical understanding. This preliminary moment of understanding typically results in a new coinage: “Whenever we are confronted with something frighteningly new, our first impulse is to recognize it in a blind and uncontrolled reaction, strong enough to coin a new word.”¹² New phrases, such as “the banality of evil,” do not, then, express a full conceptual understanding but merely acknowledge the recognition of something “frighteningly new.” They are spontaneous responses to an experience that attempt to express something on the threshold between understanding and not (yet) understanding.¹³

*

In this chapter I propose to understand Eichmann in Jerusalem as a report on an unexpected didactic event and as an attempt to render the experience of learning its lesson without translating it into an explanation or theory that would explain away its shocking impact. I seek to demonstrate that the experience of learning is intricately bound up with Arendt’s bursting into laughter and her understanding of the trial as comedy. Hence Eichmann in Jerusalem is (implicitly) an investigation into the relations among a unique trial, its peculiar theatrical nature, and the unexpected way in which the event became pedagogical. To indicate how Arendt’s understanding of both the didactic impact of the Eichmann trial and its theatrical nature differs from way the Israeli government understood it, I will first describe some of that government’s stated goals for the Eichmann trial, as well as Arendt’s criticism of these aims. Second, I will analyze Arendt’s own understanding of the theatrical nature of the trial. Eichmann in Jerusalem implicitly contains, I argue, a theory about the didactic nature of the legal theater. I will explicate this theory by comparing her book to Rolf Hochhuth’s play Der Stellvertreter (1963), a comparison Arendt herself invites in the postscript to her book. Third, I will discuss what was, according to Arendt, the trial’s “lesson”—or rather the lesson that she learned as a spectator of the trial, linking it precisely to her eruption into laughter. My chapter concludes with a reflection on the question: How, according to Arendt, did the Eichmann trial become a didactic event? There I will return to the very precise meaning possessed by the notion of “understanding” in Arendt’s work.

Beth Hamishpath! The Courtroom as a Theater

Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) opens by citing the call of the bailiff who announces the judges’ arrival into the courtroom:

“Beth Hamishpath”—the House of Justice. (3)

These words, uttered on April 11, 1961, opened the proceedings of the Jerusalem District Court against Adolf Eichmann, the former chief of the Gestapo’s Division of Jewish Affairs, under indictment for crimes against the Jewish people, for crimes against humanity, and for having been a member of criminal organizations. As Arendt indicates in the book’s introduction, from the very beginning there was confusion about the precise goals that the trial was supposed to achieve, some of which exceeded strictly legal goals. The Knesset had announced that the widespread dissemination of the proceedings through all available media was a highly desirable social objective.¹⁴ In addition, shortly before the opening of the legal proceedings, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion declared that for Israel the verdict of the trial mattered less than the spectacle staged for a global audience, a spectacle intended to teach Israel and the world a few lessons about the Holocaust. In pretrial statements Ben-Gurion spelled out how these various lessons would be directed toward different audiences. For the non-Jewish world, the trial was supposed to provide a lesson about the Holocaust and their implication in it; Jews in the Diaspora would be instructed that Israel was the only certain protection for Jews in an anti-Semitic and hostile world; and finally, for the younger generation of Jews inside Israel who had not lived through the war, the trial was going to be a history lesson about what had happened in the 1930s and 1940s (10).

If the exclamation “Beth Hamishpath” had, in Arendt’s words, the effect of a “rising curtain” (4), what followed was a highly complex, multilayered theatrical scene, meant to stage various lessons addressed to different audiences inside and outside the courtroom, in Israel as well as the rest of the world. This theater was to extend outside the spatial confines of the courtroom and was to be preserved for the future: The entirety of the proceedings was transcribed, archived, audiotaped, and filmed. Arendt describes the mise-en-scène of the trial in cinematic detail, as if to trace the building’s transformation under the impact of those inaugural words. She introduces the central figures of the legal drama that would unfold in the following months: the black-robed judges, flanked by court stenographers, who have taken their seats at the long table that soon will be covered with books and documents; directly below them, the translators and radio equipment; the accused, surrounded by a protective glass booth; and finally, occupying the lowest tier, the prosecutor and the counsel for the defense (3).

As is well known, Arendt was critical of the Israeli attempt to turn the Eichmann trial into “didactic theater.” A large part of the polemical thrust of her book is aimed at the efforts of Ben-Gurion—the “invisible stage manager” (5) directing the proceedings—and prosecutor Gideon Hausner to make this legal event a “show trial” (4). Patiently she spells out the differences between a “house of justice,” opened by the “Beth Hamishpath” of the bailiff, and the legal theater envisioned by the Israeli government. Although a courtroom resembles a theater in many ways because legal proceedings take place before an audience separated from the legal scene (coincidentally, the design of the auditorium of the Beth Ha’am was modeled on a theater “complete with orchestra and gallery, with proscenium and stage, and with side doors for the actors’ entrance” [4]), a trial, if it is a theatrical event, is one oriented toward a very particular goal: “The purpose of a trial is to render justice; even the noblest of ulterior purposes … can only detract from this” (253). Even if, she writes, the rendering of justice requires a theatrical scene, as “justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done” (277), its theatricality differs from that of the dramatic show trial envisioned by the prosecution. Justice needs seclusion; it prescribes “the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight” (6). The trial’s success, Arendt maintains, would be largely due to the presiding judges’ refusal to fall into the trap of playacting.¹⁵

Hence, from the very first pages of her book onward, Arendt is critical of both the trial’s didactic ambitions and its particular theatrical nature. This criticism was not limited t...