The state of Israel became an urgent project for a large portion of the international community after the Holocaust, for precisely this reason. Once created, the Jewish state also facilitated the search for and arrest of war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann, since the genocide had been carried out against a people whose cause was now championed by a sovereign state, capable of apprehending and bringing to justice genocidal criminals. The contrast between this case and that of the Roma people is revealing: since there has never been a sovereign Romani state, the Roma were not able to bring their murderers to trial.
Israel’s role in bringing former Nazis to justice was important because West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1949–63) was not particularly interested in prosecuting war criminals, and Nazi refugees in countries such as Argentina and Paraguay had a cozy relationship with the governments that had received them. Besides, it was too often accepted that many of the Nazis who had executed the program of genocide were following the orders of the Reich, and the German Jews whom they murdered had lost their citizenship prior to being deported, so the German state was no longer legally bound to prosecute on their behalf.
Hannah Arendt recognized all of this, but she still questioned the legitimacy of holding Eichmann’s trial in Israel. For Arendt, Eichmann’s crime had still not been properly typified, and it was in fact a new type of crime altogether: genocide on a global scale was an attack not only on the Jewish people but also on humanity itself. This new type of crime against humanity, she argued, should be judged by an international tribunal and not in the courts of any one country, not even in Israel. This was Arendt’s argument.
It is worth pointing out that there are relevant parallels between Arendt’s idea of the crime against Jews as a crime against humanity and José Carlos Mariátegui’s ideas concerning the Jewish question. Despite the fact that Mariátegui was writing earlier, in the middle and late 1920s, and so well before the Holocaust, there is a real affinity between his ideas and Arendt’s analysis. Mariátegui saw the Jews as the world’s first genuinely universal, postnational subjects. The extermination of the Jews — which could not have been foreseen while Mariátegui was alive — was, by extension, an attack on universal subjects with values, and so on humanity itself.
Furthermore, this new genocidal pulsation had been pursued by a new species of nationalist imperialism that projected the legal authority of the nation-state outward onto conquered territories, and so set out to do away with a people on a universal scale, wherever they might be found. One might say that a universal social subject, the Jews, had been persecuted and murdered by a relatively new social formation, the imperial nation-state. The German nation-state had made use of the instruments at its disposal, starting with its own laws, to criminalize these people, deny them legal protection, and then to murder them wherever they might be found.
This new type of crime — genocide on a global scale — also produced a new type of criminal, of which Eichmann was a prime example. Arendt characterized this new criminal type as “banal” because these criminals operated within legally sanctioned bureaucracies, so they could readily argue that they had no malicious intent, but were “just following orders.” So, although Eichmann acknowledged having rounded up and deported hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths, he nonetheless considered himself to be innocent of any crime.138 There was no malicious intent in his actions, as he was only a law-abiding officer, following his legally sanctioned orders.
This new type of “banal” criminal was one of Arendt’s important discoveries, in particular because people who have done so much harm are always imagined as towering figures of power and even genius, not ordinary petty bureaucrats. Arendt echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s claim that Judeo-Christian culture always imagines evil to be a hyper-powerful force. According to Nietzsche, this is because Christianity and Judaism were in their origins slave religions, and for slaves, evil is rooted in the culture of the masters, whether they be Egyptian pharaohs or Roman patricians. The culture of the master is hyper-powerful for the slave, and when that power is in addition directed toward the oppression of the True Faith, it becomes truly “evil” in the modern sense.
It follows that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, evil has all the trappings of power and prestige, and given that Eichmann’s trial was slated to be a cathartic event, meant to give the people of Israel the satisfaction of retribution, Eichmann could not be figured as the small person that he actually was. For the process to have its desired effect, Eichmann had to be driven by powerful demons, and not by such banal pursuits as promotion or garnering credit from his political connections.
This is all true, but the problem with Arendt’s formulation of “the banality of evil” is that it has frequently been misread as a general characterization of all crime and all evil in the context of genocide. And of course, this is not at all the case. The by-now quite recognizable image of the typical war criminal as an officious little bureaucrat is just one sort of player in the historical drama of genocide. In the case of Bessarabia, for instance, the peasants who beat and robbed starving and frozen refugees, who raped and killed women, were not bureaucrats looking to climb the organizational ladder, as was the case with Eichmann.
They might have been spurred forward with material incentives — taking possessions from Jews, for instance — or by an ideology of ethno-religious cleansing, but their violence was not the direct result either of following orders or of an ambition to climb a bureaucratic ladder. Rather, their cruelty was often framed in relation to values that were culled from peasant communalism itself, and to practices connected to its protection.
As an example, we might turn once again to Malaparte, who interviewed a group of Romanian peasant soldiers standing before a destroyed Ukrainian village that was very much like their own. In an attempt to justify their actions, the soldiers told Malaparte, “We don’t destroy villages or harm the peasants. We only go after the Jews.”139 The separation of the Jewish Other from views of the purity of the peasant village was a way to try to contain their violence within a moral framework that made sense to them, but it also justified violent acts that exceeded bureaucratic aims. So, whereas the rational carrying out of the Final Solution treated Jews as garbage that needed to be “processed” in the most industrialized and antiseptic manner possible, the violence of pogroms always came charged with a level of outrage that outstrips bureaucratic process.
In other words, violence against the Jewish “internal enemy” was in fact carried out by a variety of social types, of which Eichmann represented only one: those who followed the orders of their superiors in a bureaucratically implemented project of genocide. It is perhaps in recognition of the overwhelming multiplication of atrocity that Malaparte decided that the subject of his remarkable book was not the war, but rather kaputt, that is, the breakdown of order: “a living and macabre monster” that destroyed Europe. So, in Malaparte’s gripping description of what he experienced in Bessarabia and Transnistria in 1941 and 1942, the “engine of history” is both bureaucratic rationality and also its limits and collapse. Bureaucratic rationality is only one aspect of the genocidal frenzy, and the bureaucrat is only one of its criminal types.
Rhinoceroses
In the 1930s and 1940s, Bucharest boasted a small but distinguished intellectual class made up of perhaps two hundred or so figures, who were fond of splitting their leisure between two cafés, Corso and Captsa.140 This was a world of densely interwoven social connections, but it was also a world of exalted ideologies. Mihail Sebastian, a Jewish playwright, memoirist, and novelist whose original name was Iosef Hechter, was a prominent figure there. He was also a privileged witness of this world’s tragic descent, which he recorded in an extraordinary diary that was hidden by his brother after his death in 1945 and published in 1996. The publication of Mihail Sebastian’s diary caused a great scandal in Romania, a country that has not been very eager to come to grips with its history of anti
-Semitism.141
In the 1930s and 1940s, Romanian intellectuals were in their majority anti-Semitic and fascists, and they didn’t flinch at the idea of ethnic cleansing (or “purification,” as Field Marshall Antonescu called it). And I’m not speaking here of anodyne characters or of mediocre minds like that of Adolf Eichmann. Eugène Ionesco describes the phenomenon in detail, since he was one of comparatively few famous Romanian intellectuals who did not sympathize with the fascist Iron Guard in the 1930s. Ionesco describes the contagious aspect of fascism in a well-known work in which the “normal” characters morph one by one into rhinoceroses.
In his memoir, Ionesco quotes from his Budapest diaries of the 1930s to pinpoint the moment when the idea for his Rhinoceros first came to him. The passage from that diary reads as follows:
I have before me a rhinocerontile slogan, a slogan for the “New Man” that any normal person cannot understand: “All for the State,” “All for the Nation,” “All for the Race”…But what is the State? What is the Nation? What is Society? They are dehumanizing abstractions, not existential realities but rather putrid, supremely alienating abstractions. Humanity does not exist: there are only people. Society does not exist: there are only friends. It’s not the same for a rhinoceros. To me, their state is a phantasm; for them, the person of flesh and blood is the phantasm.142
A number of key Romanian intellectuals embraced fascism and leaned heavily on anti-Semitism for its ideological justification. Like Ionesco’s rhinoceroses, they felt that flesh-and-blood humans were of little importance. And they spent the terrible summer of 1941 cheering along the process of ethnic cleansing that was then being launched, and inventing fables to justify it.
On June 24, 1941, for instance, three days after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Sebastian writes that there appeared all over Bucharest two poster designs painted by Anestin, a celebrated Bucharest graphic artist. One of them portrayed Stalin with bloody hands and read, “The Butcher of Red Square.” The other poster “shows a Jewish man in a red robe, long curly sideburns, a religious cap, and a beard, holding a hammer in one hand and a sickle in the other; hidden behind his robe are three Soviet soldiers.” Above the image, the poster read, “Who Are the Masters of Bolshevism?”143
The following week, Jews were banned from raising the Romanian flag in their homes. Frightened by the intensity of the anti-Semitic radio campaign, the posters on the streets, and the newspapers, Sebastian stopped going out of his apartment. He devoted his time to reading Thucydides and War and Peace, trying to think through the war from that vantage point, since he could find nothing but horror in the daily news. It was during that week that the Romanian army entered into Bessarabia and unleashed pogroms in every village.
During those same days, Ionesco received a visit from the writer Eugen Lovinescu, who told him, “The Russians must be defeated and the Germans victorious. If not, we will be governed by Jews and cobblers.”144 A rhinoceros. A few days later, the writer and erstwhile friend of Sebastian, Camil Petrescu, shared a series of predictions regarding what he saw as the inevitable results of the war, with some typically shameful phrases that Sebastian cites verbatim: “Germany will conquer all of Russia, and Hitler will be recognized by everyone as having freed the world from Bolshevism. In the end, some concessions will also be given to the Jews (‘things cannot continue like this’); they’ll get their own state in Russia, perhaps even in Birobidzhan.”145 Another rhinoceros. And so Bucharest’s intelligentsia was steadily engrossed by one, and another, and another.
In those days, Romanian intellectuals played at war, and they indulged all sorts of fantasies of grandeur. They also loudly blamed the Jews for just about everything, though in private they sometimes recognized that the situation in which the Jews now found themselves was a little excessive. Even so, they claimed that everything would calm down once they’d won the war. Apparently, they had so internalized the idea of the “Eternal Jew,” that they could not imagine that after the genocidal campaign, there wouldn’t be enough survivors for things to “calm down.” In the meantime, they took care not to raise their voices in defense of Jews. The aforementioned Petrescu fearfully warned his friend Sebastian not to ask him for any favors should he find himself in trouble. There were limits to interracial solidarity, even among friends.
Around the same time, another celebrated and far from anodyne Romanian “rhinoceros,” Mircea Eliade (1907–86), found himself in Portugal serving as a cultural attaché. The day after the Nazi and Romanian invasion of the Soviet Union, Eliade wrote in his diary: “I am overwhelmed by the fury of my love of country and by my incandescent nationalism. I can do no work since Romania entered the war. I cannot write. I have once again abandoned my novel.”146 Interestingly, in this same entry, Eliade laments the mediocrity of the Romanian government — one might say, its colonization by a legion of banal Eichmanns — but his criticism is put forward from a passionately fascist point of view: he speaks of the sacrifices made by the Iron Guard in the 1930s, and mourns his “martyred” coreligionists, because the government of Antonescu has now been populated by hacks:
All the massacres, all the prison camps, all the humiliations, all the rebellions, all the purifications, all the liberal programs — all of this to end up with Pamfil Seicaru, our eternal Pamfil, who has terrorized us and all our governments, but somehow always lands on his feet. Corneliu Codreanu, dead; Iorga, dead; also dead are Nae Ionesco, Armand, I. G. Duca, Moruzov — all of the Iron Guard bosses are dead, as well as those who executed them — while Pamfil remains alive, active, and patriotic.147
This pathetic lamentation was thus triggered by the fact that Romanian fascism had fallen into the hands of hackneyed bureaucrats, true, but even so, the responsibility for genocide does not fall only upon those bureaucrats. While people including my great-grandparents Hershel and Leah were dying of cold and starvation in the Bershad ghetto at the hands of the government that Eliade represented, this intellectual was caught up in the hubris of his own grandeur: “My detachment from the search for glory and wealth will allow me to write works of incontestable value. And I shall begin to write them one of these days.”148
The logic of Jewish genocide certainly created a new type of criminal, as Arendt argued: rather than towering princes of evil, they were bureaucratic types who were responsible for the execution of mass murder. But genocide is a process that needs to be cultivated over a period of time, it has many moments, and in them different actors play their part. My great-grandparents’ death came at the hands of soldiers who followed the orders of commanders who in turn were observing the laws and directives of their government, true. The infamous Einsatzgruppen of the SS also participated in the atrocities, insofar as they provided the Romanian army with a murderous example, gunning down Jews in mass executions.
But peasants and neighbors from Nova Sulitza and the other Bessarabian towns also participated in the slaughter and pillage, and their hatred had long been stoked by the very Iron Guard to which Eliade so proudly belonged. Those Iron Guard militants were not following orders, in fact the Iron Guard was for years a clandestine organization. Among those militants, narcissism and an exalted sense of honor were much more salient features than banality, nor were they spurred on by bureaucratic opportunism, but rather by their own delusions of grandeur, and the megalomaniacal fantasy of transforming the destiny of their nation.
It bothers me that Eliade, who would become a widely admired professor of religion and mythology at the University of Chicago, where I later also taught, never paid even the smallest price for his role in these events. When I started to look into what was happening in Bucharest when Jewish Nova Sulitza died, I was struck by Eliade’s role. Genocide is not only executed by the bureaucratic machine, it is also narrated into existence by intellectuals and propagandists, myth by myth. This is a form of evil that concerns me very particularly.
Iphigenia in Bucharest
Eliade wrote his first drama in the autumn of 1939, and it was performed in the National Theater of Bucharest at the beginning of 1941, just before the Romanian invasion of the Soviet Union. It was a version of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, so it dealt with sacrifice.
In the Iphigenia of Euripides, Agamemnon has offended the goddess Artemis, who vents her spleen by preventing the Achaean fleet from leaving port. The wind doesn’t blow, and the Greek ships can’t sail. The Achaeans consult the seer Calchas, who suggests that Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to placate Artemis. In the end, Iphigenia volunteers to be sacrificed, as she prefers to be remembered as a national heroine than to marry and live a long life at the expense of the Achaean people.
Eliade would make use of this legend to write a play dedicated to the sacrifice of Ion Motza and Vasile Marin, two Iron Guard militants who decided to go to Spain to fight on the side of fascism during that country’s three-year civil war. They both died on the same day in 1937, fighting to capture Madrid. Motza’s and Marin’s bodies were repatriated and paraded by train from town to town, on their way to a mass funeral in Bucharest. Crowds gathered at each stop, with the people crying in unison that they would gladly sacrifice themselves for the fatherland to avenge their fallen countrymen.149
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