ABSTRACT

Hannah Arendt’s family history, which began in Kant’s city of Königsberg, was not as dramatic or as symptomatic as Scholem’s—although, since the names of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem have now been mentioned together, this brief parenthesis of social history should also be completed. The same tendency to ambiguity and irony plays a central role in Arendt’s discussion of what she claims to be the new form which evil assumes in the twentieth century, in the new explanations we find there of how evil comes to exist and of how it does its work. Arendt’s report of the trial of Eichmann, a report which appeared in 1963, originally as a series of articles in the New Yorker and then, soon afterward, as a volume, became a center of controversy as soon as it was published. Her account of the politics of evil reflected the conflict between the private and public domains which had affected her own life.