Publisher's Synopsis
Dan Stone, author of The Holocaust: An Unfinished History says:
Supposedly a ‘trial report’ of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the man who organised the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, Arendt’s book is the key to understanding why, more than sixty years since its first publication, its author remains so bitterly divisive. Her sarcastic tone and her scathing assessment of the role played by the Jewish Councils – set up by the Nazis in occupied Poland to administer the ghettos and, ultimately, to assist in the deportation process – shocked readers then, as they do now. Yet Eichmann in Jerusalem went on to spawn a whole sub-discipline of history: perpetrator studies; and it is one of a small number of books that has stamped our age thanks to Arendt’s coining of the much-contested term, ‘the banality of evil’, to describe Eichmann. Along with her The Origins of Totalitarianism, this one of the essential books of the twentieth century, and still crucial for understanding the twenty-first.
The classic work on 'the banality of evil', and a journalistic masterpiece
Hannah Arendt's stunning and unnverving report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in the New Yorker in 1963. This edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt's postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, this classic portrayal of the banality of evil is as shocking as it is informative - an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling issues of the twentieth century.
