Hannah Arendt's essay on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann held in Israel's capital in 1961,
Eichmann in Jerusalem
, is surely the reference of a long literary tradition of great chronicles on trials.
The German philosopher became a reference without having been the pioneer: 15 years earlier, the English novelist Rebecca West had covered the Nuremberg trials —sent as Arendt by the weekly
The New
Yorker— , and the French writer was also in that same trial Joseph Kessel, posted by
France-Soir
, who had already covered the trial of Marshal Pétain — head of the pro-Nazi government during World War II — in France, and who would later cover Eichmann's.
All these chronicles, written for the press, can be read today in book format.
Another Frenchman, Emmanuel Carrère, has just finished his coverage of the trial for the attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris —the last installment is published tomorrow in this newspaper—.
Carrère ruled out at the beginning that it was a “Nuremberg of terrorism”: “[there] high-ranking Nazi dignitaries were tried, here little indoctrinated thugs will be tried, (…) but it will also be a great event, something unprecedented that should find little little by little its rules and its dramaturgy ”, he wrote last September.
The book will be out next September.
More information
The trial for the Paris attacks, told by Emmanuel Carrère
The expression “senior Nazi dignitaries” is historically accurate, but it may suggest a very different image from the portraits chroniclers made of the Nuremberg defendants.
The contrast between a machinery articulated to assassinate millions of people and its leaders, those
killed
who already without the violent paraphernalia of power sat on the bench in 1946, is one of the keys shared by West's gaze in
A trail of gunpowder
(Kingdom of Redonda), and Kessel in
Jugements derniers
(Tallandier, without Spanish edition).
"None bears on their foreheads, or in their eyes, the least trace, the least reflection, the least justification of their past glory, or the terrifying power they once held," Kessel wrote.
For West, the contrast was almost categorical: "There was a mystery here: that Don Prud had committed such a huge and ruthless crime."
Hannah Arendt categorized this contrast: in her chronicle she coined a concept, the banality of evil, which unleashed a strong controversy.
Arendt saw in Eichmann a "normal" guy, so normal that he acted like millions of Germans and probably like millions of citizens of any other country would have acted under the same circumstances.
“Under the prevailing circumstances in the Third Reich, only 'exceptional' beings could react 'normally'.
This very simple truth presented the judges with a dilemma that they could not solve, nor avoid,” Arendt wrote.
Mismatches and dramaturgies
“Evil was not the result of an erroneous moral judgment”, says Reyes Mate, professor emeritus at the CSIC, to explain Arendt's concept, “evil was due to a structure of the human being, in which humanity and animality they are very close, we are all potentially criminals, it is enough to stop thinking and let yourself be carried away by what they tell you, to become one of those individuals who collaborated directly or indirectly with the Jewish genocide”, adds the author of
Memory of Auschwitz
.
Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann during the trial that sentenced him to death in Israel, on June 22, 1961. GPO (Getty Images)
Perhaps Arendt succeeded in describing the archetypal Nazi, but it is not certain that she succeeded in describing the real Adolf Eichmann, given the documents and biographies that have appeared since then.
On another scale, that is the dilemma, and the risk, of any chronicler: where does the singularity lie and where does the usual drama lie.
Both of the protagonists and of the historical moment.
"The chronicles reflect very well the moment in which society judges that past," says Mate.
“The limits of the law and the challenge of the problems are seen very well in the trials.
There is a certain mismatch between having to judge these crimes with given laws and the enormity of the event [the Holocaust] that was not foreseen and that forces new paths to be broken, ”he adds.
The dramaturgy of the process always appears.
From the English judges, for once without wigs, of the Nuremberg International Tribunal —there was an attempt to rid the magistrates of the national traits of their countries— to the “trial room” in Jerusalem that Arendt saw “arranged like a theater”, something he attributed to Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's plans for the trial to serve as a staging for the Hebrew state.
"Justice, though perhaps an abstraction to those who think like the prime minister, proved, in Eichmann's case, to be much harsher and more demanding than Ben-Gurion and the power concentrated in his hands," Arendt wrote.
Apart from these historical processes, other authors have dealt with that "historiographical experiment" (Ferrajoli) that is any trial.
There are those who have seen in it a war between two versions in which the most truthful does not triumph, but the most dramatically effective, like Janet Malcolm in her
Iphigenia of her in Forest Hills
(Debate), about a murder trial.
Javier Melero, lawyer for several independentistas and author of a chronicle on the trial of the Procés,
The order
(Ariel) agrees halfway: it is true that the parties are only trying to “provide legal content to their client's version”, he admits.
But that does not mean that the system cannot work: “I believe that there is an honest claim to find out what happened, punish the guilty parties and repair the victims”, he says.
“Truth and Justice are extremely arrogant concepts.
It's all about getting minimally acceptable results,” he adds.
Trials for major terrorist attacks now attract major coverage, although not exclusively.
Pablo Ordaz, a journalist for this newspaper, covered the 11M attacks in Madrid, and the
process
in the Supreme Court.
Also in Spain, José Luis Martín Prieto thus covered the 23-F trial for this newspaper in 1982, and his chronicles were later collected in the book
Técnica de un coup d'état
(Grijalbo).
Antonio Muñoz Molina did the same with the trial against part of the GAL in 1998, in
La Puerta de la Infamia.
Chronicles of the Marey case
(Huerta de San Antonio Foundation).
More recently, Arcadi Espada covered
el del
procés for
El Mundo
, published as
Sed de Lex
(Funambulista), and Guillem Martínez, for Ctxt, as
Caja de Brujas
(Contextos).
"As a trial progresses, you discover that what has created the most controversy, at the moment of truth, which is what a trial is, is not so important," says Ordaz, author of
The Three Feet of the Cat
( Aguilar; about 11M) and
The endless trial
(Circle of chalk; about the
procés
).
The rules and forms of the process, so tedious, allow justice to materialize its objectives, at many levels.
"A trial is a representation, a staging of the crime and of the victim, and it entails a pedagogical moment and a moment of justice for the fundamental victim," says Mate.
A group of defendants at the beginning of the 3/11 trial on February 15, 2007. AP
Unlike theater and fictional stories, judicial representation necessarily includes boredom.
"The symbol of Nuremberg was a yawn," wrote West, as if he were making a record of an unpleasant but inescapable fact.
God is a better narrator: “If the Allah of
the Thousand and One Nights
had governed this divine plan, an angel would have appeared and struck down all the accused and then would have proclaimed that the rest of those present in court could do as they were told. craved, and they would have fled (…) back to life.”
Throughout the entire trial, Carrère has faced the challenge that the bas-relief of those "little criminals", indoctrinated in the name of Allah, but prosecuted by human justice, posed for his story.
Luckily, they were not the only ones summoned.
“Hundreds of human beings who have in common to have lived that night of November 13, 2015, to have survived it or to have survived those they loved, will appear before us and take the floor.
We will hear the truth,” she wrote of the victims.
The mother of the Spaniard Juan Alberto González Garrido, murdered at the Bataclan, appeared on October 20.
"The sentence is not going to repair the damage," she declared.
After the trial, on a terrace in Madrid, Cristina Garrido, said this Thursday that she "felt free to speak and say what she felt" in the trial.
"Talking about Juan Alberto hurts me a lot, but talking about him is keeping his memory alive and not falling into oblivion."
50% off
Exclusive content for subscribers
read without limits
subscribe
I'm already a subscriber