Volume 26, Number 18 · November 22, 1979
Mean Spirits
By Elie Kedourie
Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945
by Bernard Wasserstein
Oxford University Press, for the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 389 pp., $17.95
In a well-known work on the Eichmann trial Hannah Arendt perversely floated the notion of the banality of evil. What seems to lie behind this idea is that Eichmann was no more than a dim little man whose crimes were simply a byproduct of the daily official routine to which it was his duty as a bureaucrat to attend. But bureaucrats are also human beings, and part of what makes a human being is the capacity to make choices, and specifically moral ones. Contrary to Miss Arendt's glib phrase, choices of this kind can never be banal. If they were, we would not, every time we hear or read about the Nazi treatment of the Jews, feel intimately and profoundly devastated. The horror which Nazi actions will continue to inspire arises in part from our inability to fathom, and fully account for, their monstrousness. The malice which, without the shadow of a provocation, and for no seeming advantage, diligently and relentlessly destroyed the happiness, security, and lives of whole multitudes will always be matter for awed puzzlement. None of its manifestations can possibly ever be judged banal.
Review, 3493 words
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