Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Description

One of the greatest and most controversial feats of twentieth-century journalism Hannah Arendt's authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi SS leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in the New Yorker in 1963. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative - a meticulous and unflinching look at one of the most unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the twentieth century.

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, and received her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. In 1933, she was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo, after which she fled Germany for Paris, where she worked on behalf of Jewish refugee children. In 1937, she was stripped of her German citizenship, and in 1941 she left France for the United States. Her many books include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), in which she coined the famous phrase 'the banality of evil'. She died in 1975.

A touchstone in the 20th century's thinking about morality and politics * The New York Times * Quite astonishing . . . her indictment of Eichmann reached beyond the man to the historical world in which true thinking was vanishing -- Judith Butler Deals with the greatest problem of our time . . . the problem of the human being within a modern totalitarian system * The New Republic *