Strangneth asserts early on that Eichmann Before Jerusalem “is a dialogue with Hannah Arendt,” and it is this promise of a dialogue that makes her book a marketable commodity.Īrendt was an intellectual star who became a lightning rod for controversy when Eichmann in Jerusalem was first serialized in The New Yorker in 1963. The primary reason for this attention is that the book positions itself, as its title suggests, as a response to Hannah Arendt’s 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Yet her book was translated from the German, published by the venerable Knopf publishing house in 2014, and widely reviewed here and abroad. In her 2011 book, Eichmann vor Jerusalem: Das unbehelligte Leben eines Massenmörders (Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer), Bettina Strangneth sets about proving something generally known: that Adolf Eichmann was a zealous Nazi – that he was one during World War II, when he was elevated to the status of Jewish expert and transport Czar, and that he remained one after the War ended, when he and many of his colleagues fled to South America but remained in contact with a broad network of unreconstructed Nazis still in Germany.Īlthough Strangneth elaborates at great length on these facts, nothing that she writes comes as news.
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