Language:
German
Year of publication:
2005
Titel der Quelle:
Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung
Angaben zur Quelle:
14 (2005) 265-284
Keywords:
Arendt, Hannah,
;
Eichmann, Adolf,
;
Antisemitism Philosophy
;
Antisemitism History 1800-2000
Abstract:
Contends that to understand Arendt as though she viewed Eichmann only as a bureaucrat who followed orders and who was not antisemitic is an oversimplification. It ignores her view (as set out in "The Origins of Totalitarianism") of the progressive abstractness of antisemitism in history: from hostility arising from experience with real Jews during Emancipation, through its instrumentalization against the political system, its transformation to racism - the ideology of the master race vs. inferior races, the emptying of this ideology of all specific content, and finally to the ideology becoming reality in the Nazi death camps. Everything could be derived from antisemitic ideology; it relieved the masses of the need to think and judge. The process reached a peak in the person of Eichmann, whose only passion was to carry out "the will of the Führer" by administrative means, without regard to the meaning of the orders he gave or the identity of the victims.
URL:
Locate this publication in Israeli libraries
Permalink