ICI Edition

Inspired by the Fiftieth Anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, based on a series of articles written for the New Yorker, was published in 1963. An account of the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, it was also a contribution to the early historiography and interpretation of the Holocaust. Above all, Arendt sought to respond to the problem of unprecedented crimes against humanity, and to offer a diagnosis of the dangers posed by the bureaucratic personality in modernity. A meeting point between philosophy and journalism, the text defined the voice, role and task of the public intellectual, and was a declaration of affiliations for a thinker in exile, addressing the legacies of the past from which her own theoretical preoccupations emerged.

The gathering explores the legacy of Arendt’s essay: its status as exemplar for philosophical intervention in the world, its style of dealing with the unthinkable, and its relationship to ongoing controversies in historiography and jurisprudence.

In English
With

Jay Bernstein
Seyla Benhabib
Barbara Hahn
Wolfgang Heuer
Christoph Menke
Andreas Nachama
Gaby Weber
Annette Weinke
et al

Organized by

The conference was a cooperation between ECLA of Bard, A Liberal Arts University in Berlin, the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College in New York.

The event, like all events at the ICI Berlin, is open to the public, free of charge. The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin. If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.