Language:
English
Year of publication:
2000
Titel der Quelle:
Journal of Religion
Angaben zur Quelle:
80,3 (2000) 375-404
Keywords:
Arendt, Hannah,
;
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich,
;
Holocaust (Jewish theology)
;
Good and evil Religious aspects
;
Judaism
;
Good and evil Philosophy
;
Christianity and other religions Judaism 1800-2000
;
History
Abstract:
Compares ideas about evil expressed by theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his "Creation and Fall" and by Hannah Arendt in her "Eichmann in Jerusalem". Pp. 386-396 discuss Arendt and the Eichmann trial. Arendt faulted the Jerusalem court for failing to understand the real criminality of Eichmann, which she related to the inability to understand or respond to the immensity of the evils of the Holocaust. She felt that it was a mistake to emphasize Eichmann's evil as something that only he, as a kind of demon, could have done. He was a bureaucrat whose crime was participating in a totalitarian regime where evil had become the norm. Arendt stressed that one should not despair, since evil does not have an independent existence; one should rather engage in participatory politics. States that the absolute responsibility of each person must be stressed, along with human freedom which, for Arendt, had a greater reality than evil.
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