ABSTRACT
Two works have marked what can be called conceptual breakthroughs in our apprehension of the Holocaust. The first was Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which appeared in the US in 1963 as a report on the Eichmann trial held in Israel in 1961. The second was the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, which first appeared in France in 1985. Arendt’s irony in coining her conceptual paradox is frequently misunderstood to mean, straightforwardly, a psychological description of the Nazi Perpetrator, and it is precisely this “psychology of evil” that becomes a subject of the controversy. Arendt perceives the trial as the space of a dramatic confrontation between the claims of justice and the competing claims of government and power. Arendt’s critique has had its own historical momentum; its dissenting legal force has paradoxically become today not only part of the event in history but part of its notorious legal historiography.
