Arendt is clear in her condemnation of Eichmann and her discontent with the
verdict. The ending of her trial report is unexpected. Arendt finds it necessary to create
her own more adequate judgment of Eichmann in the final pages of her epilogue. This
commentary was necessary, in her opinion, because the judges had misunderstood the
nature of Eichmann as a criminal as well as the nature of his crime. In the words of our
class, Arendt believed that the court had failed to make sense of Eichmann as an actor
and to make sense of his crime as actions. Where the jury had been looking for malicious
intent, Arendt saw the failure to understand crime in the context of totalitarianism.
“Foremost among the larger issues at stake in the Eichmann trial was the assumption
current in all modern legal systems that intent to do wrong is necessary for the
commission of a crime.” (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 277) The judges and the prosecutor
had been looking for a preconceived form of intent, the absence of which had
complicated their interpretation of Eichmann’s case, although it’s abundantly clear in the
trial report that Eichmann had been found guilty before the trial ever began. The closing
of Arendt’s proposed verdict shifts the focus from intent to the question of obedience. If
Eichmann had consciously obeyed, he was guilty. “For politics is not like the nursery; in
politics obedience and support are the same.” (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 279)
The potential of committing a crime without intent troubled students deeply. This
insight politicized their everyday taken-for-granted actions. The familiar and the
habitual, the routine and the procedural, all might be the beginnings of catastrophe. As
much as they were horrified by Eichmann, they were also sympathetic to the nature of
everyday life in which people focus on their own careers, their own families, and their
own interests. Arendt’s equation of obedience and support seemed unacceptable to some,
but to others, that equation expressed the dangers of careerism and conformism.
19
Convention