This chapter introduces the main themes of the book: Hannah Arendt’s investigations of moral judgment and legal accountability. In 1933, she watched moral judgment collapse on a massive scale in Germany. Multitudes were swept away by conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific ideologies; Nazi morality swiftly upended traditional standards of moral decency. What could account for it? And how do some people keep their judgment intact in a corrupted culture? Understanding the nature of moral judgment became a central question of Arendt’s moral philosophy. Beyond this, she asks how the law should judge perpetrators who commit crimes against humanity, not out of greed or malice but because their leaders tell them it is the right thing to do, and their larger society seems to agree. The book analyzes these and other questions of moral and legal theory. This introduction provides a roadmap to the chapters that follow.

What prompted Arendt’s investigations of moral and legal judgment was the trial of Adolf Eichmann for crimes of the Holocaust. Her controversial view is that Eichmann represented the “banality of evil,” by which she means “the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness.” This chapter explains what Arendt means by “banality of evil” and why it led to confusions. It reviews the evidence by which she supported her thesis of Eichmann’s banality. The chapter points out several large and challenging philosophical questions the thesis raises. The chapter’s final section connects her concept of the banality of evil to her reflections on kitsch in aesthetics, as well as to Kant’s “maxims of common human understanding.” Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment turns out to be central to Arendt’s approach to moral judgment.

We almost cannot think today about mass atrocities without Holocaust references. Holocaust analogies frame and enflame our ethical debates. Holocaust words dominate our humanitarian lexicon. Yet the deep linkage between the Holocaust and global justice is accompanied by a marked crisis of confidence in international law. Many question whether global legal institutions can ever prevent and properly punish atrocity crimes. The more we invoke the Holocaust, it seems, the less certain we become about the legal world built in its name. This chapter traces this development, from the first discussions of what would come to be called “genocide” in the 1930s, through private litigation geared toward restorative justice. Each legal mode of dealing with the Holocaust has served as a model for how to approach other atrocities, and each has been unavoidably politicized, despite law’s promise to depoliticize the response to political crimes.

Many Jews coming from various parts of Eastern Europe found refuge in Germany, of all places, in huge “displaced-persons camps.” They made up as many Jews as had lived in the country before the war, only they were younger and unexpectedly active. While few German Jews returned to the “land of the murderers,” the new migrants took their place. This chapter tells the tale of their settlement in Germany, parallel to the building up the Federal Republic, especially under the the US military occupation. They could only observe with unease the signs of antisemitism in the new German state, and support the early acts of restitution as well as the financial agreement with Israel signed in 1952. They were also the first to demand some sort of confrontation with the Nazi past. Fritz Bauer, a Jewish jurist who fled to Denmark and later to Sweden during the war and finally returned to Germany afterwards, took it upon himself, as the Prosecutor of the State of Hessen, to organize and then serve as prosecutor in the so-called Auschwitz trials. The chapter ends with his life-story.

The Eichmann trial is oftentimes cited as a turning point in the emergence of Holocaust consciousness in France. That’s not wrong, but it misses other ways in which the early 1960s were important in shaping a new narrative about the genocide, one more centered on Jewish experience and pain. Schwarz-Bart’s literary breakthrough opened the path for others, for writers and documentarists like Piotr Rawicz, Anna Langfus, and Frédéric Rossif. All three were Jews who had, like Langfus and Rossif, lost family members to the Holocaust or who had spent time in a concentration camp as had Rawicz. The first two wrote novels which drew on their life experiences: Le Sang du ciel in Rawicz’ case (1961), which won the Prix Veillon, and Les Bagages du sable (1962) in Langfus’, which won the Prix Goncourt. Rossif made a documentary about Warsaw Ghetto survivors, Le Temps du ghetto (1961), which was shown first in Paris theaters and then on French TV in 1964. The stories they had to tell were not ones of martyrdom or heroism but ones of fear, irretrievable loss, and abandonment. This Deportation admitted neither of heroics nor of redemption. It was a story without a happy ending.