Arendt, Eichmann ja menneisyyspolitiikka

Authors

• Tuija Parvikko

Abstract

This article deals with the debate caused by Hannah Arendt’s pamphlet Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Iargue that in recent years this debate has been removed from its original context of Jewish war-time politics into the context of politics of memory and history. The book has also become part of the debate concerning the singularity of the Holocaust. New critics of the book claim that Arendt implicitly defends historical revisionism and relativism by refusing the idea of the singularity of the Holocaust. They fail to see that Arendt pointed to the problematic aspects of ‘victimology’, which has since the 1980s become the prevailing perspec­tive in Holocaust studies. Isuggest with Arendt that we should start to read the Holocaust politi­cally and approach it in terms of the general political and military context of the era.