Cart
Where the horror was blackest and the confusion deepest, she resorted to “uninhibited irony,” which she once described to Joachim Fest as “my most precious inheritance from Germany—or more precisely, from Berlin.” Old friends abandoned her. When Gershom Scholem wrote to her, “I would just like to say that your portrait of Eichmann as a convert to Zionism is only conceivable from someone with your deep resentment of everything having to do with Zionism,” she answered, “I never made Eichmann out to be a ‘Zionist.’ If you missed the irony of the sentence—which was plainly in oratio obliqua, reporting Eichmann’s own words—I really can’t help it.”
Irony is her means of holding experience at arm’s length in order to think about it, a protection against panic and powerfully aggressive impulses that would only interfere with her judgment.
Moreover, behind the tone of the Eichmann book lies a quite real laughter that overcame Arendt as she read the transcripts of his interrogation. “I’ll tell you this: I read the transcript of his police investigation, thirty-six hundred pages, read it, and read it carefully, and I do not know how many times I laughed—laughed out loud! People took this reaction in a bad way. I cannot do anything about that. But I know one thing: Three minutes before certain death, I probably still would laugh.” As a test, she had taken at face value what she saw and what Eichmann said about himself: nothing but clichés whose “thoughtlessness” so shocked her that she burst out laughing, thereby outraging not just the Jewish world.