THE ORIGINS OF ‘BANALITY’

To the Editors:

Seyla Benhabib’s assertion that Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil” was handed down to her by her husband, Heinrich Blücher, merits correction [“Thinking Without Banisters,” NYR, February 24, 2022]. The source for this misconception is a letter from Arendt’s teacher and friend the philosopher Karl Jaspers on December 13, 1963. In this letter, Jaspers informs Arendt that he has been told that the phrase, which has brought down so much critique, not to say hatred, on her, was “invented” by Blücher.

Arendt replies in a letter that was not included in the published exchange between Arendt and Jaspers, because it was only found later.1 In this reply, dated December 29, 1963, Arendt states that “the banality of evil” is her own concept, and not something someone else has formulated for her. However, the juxtaposition of “evil” and “banality” goes back to a much earlier exchange between Arendt and Jaspers, which both of them seem to have forgotten. In 1946, when they resumed their exchanges after the war, Jaspers underlines in a letter to Arendt that the Nazis are to be seen as banal criminals: “Mir scheint, man muss, weil es wirklich so war, die Dinge in ihrer ganzen Banalität nehmen, ihrer ganz nüchternen Nichtigkeit—Bakterien können völkervernichtende Seuchen machen und bleiben doch nur Bakterien.” In my translation: “It seems to me, because this is how it really was [during the war], that we should see the total banality of these things [the Nazi crimes], their sober nothingness—bacteria may cause pandemics exterminating peoples and yet remain just bacteria.”

So, when Arendt finds herself in the Jerusalem courtroom fifteen years later, she invents the concept of banality of evil when she observes Eichmann during the trial—without remembering the previous exchange with Jaspers. And just as Arendt has forgotten their discussion of evil and the Nazis, so has Jaspers.

Kenneth Hermele Gothenburg, Sweden