Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Illustrations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Gathering Ashes: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of Trauma
- Part I: Writing After Nuremberg
- 1 ‘An event that did not become an experience’: Rebecca West's Nuremberg
- 2 The Man in the Glass Booth: Hannah Arendt's Irony
- 3 Fiction in Jerusalem: Muriel Spark's Idiom of Judgement
- Part II: Territorial Rights
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - The Man in the Glass Booth: Hannah Arendt's Irony
from Part I: Writing After Nuremberg
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Illustrations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Gathering Ashes: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of Trauma
- Part I: Writing After Nuremberg
- 1 ‘An event that did not become an experience’: Rebecca West's Nuremberg
- 2 The Man in the Glass Booth: Hannah Arendt's Irony
- 3 Fiction in Jerusalem: Muriel Spark's Idiom of Judgement
- Part II: Territorial Rights
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I was really of the opinion that Eichmann was a buffoon. I'll tell you this: I read the transcript of his police investigation, thirty-six hundred pages, read it, and read it very carefully, and I do not know how many times I laughed – laughed out loud! People took this reaction in a bad way. I cannot do anything about that. But I know one thing. Three minutes before certain death, I probably still would laugh. And that, they say, is the tone of voice. That the tone of voice is predominantly ironic is completely true. The tone of voice in this case is really the person.
Hannah ArendtIn one of the opening sequences of Rony Brauman and Eyal Sivan's film, The Specialist (1999), cut from original documentary footage from his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann can be seen diligently cleaning his glasses. Finished, he brings them to his nose and then pauses; he has forgotten that he is already wearing a pair. If Eichmann cannot see out of his booth for multiple planes of glass, neither can the viewer get a clear look at him. Throughout the film, reflected back at us from the glass are the faces of the trial's audience in Jerusalem, many of them survivors, living ghosts in a glass pane. In another scene the documentary, Nazi Concentration Camps, first shown at Nuremberg, is played to a darkened courtroom. As Eichmann blinks into the mid-distance, looking but not seeing, the black-and-white images in the film are cast back on to the glass of his booth: a grey face among white corpses.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Judicial ImaginationWriting after Nuremberg, pp. 47 - 72Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011