摘要：In 1961, Hannah Arendt was dis-patched to Jerusalem by the New Yorker to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Her impressions, first published as a series of articles and later collected in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, provoked immediate controversy. The dispute focused on Arendt’s claim that the prosecution’s efforts to portray the accused as a genocidal monster could not be reconciled with his bland, “everyman” persona. Writing that Eichmann was, in fact, an exceedingly average individual, Arendt believed that only his sheer “thoughtlessness” as an obedient bureaucrat in the Nazi machine made him a participant in genocide: “He was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.
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