"It was funny when, during the cross-examination on the Sassen documents, conducted in German by the..."

“It was funny when, during the cross-examination on the Sassen documents, conducted in German by the presiding judge, he used the phrase ‘kontrageben’ (to give tit for tat), to indicate that he had resisted Sassen’s efforts to liven up his stories; Judge Landau, obviously ignorant of the mysteries of card games, did not understand, and Eichmann could not think of any other way to put it. Dimly aware of a defect that must have plagued him even in school—it amounted to a mild case of aphasia—he apologized, saying, ‘Officialese is my only language.’ But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliche… To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was ‘empty talk’—except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented cliches (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliche) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”



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Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”

The passage, from Arendt’s report on Eichmann’s trial, is the “banality of evil” referred to in the title. There is a point where language becomes so meaningless that it becomes a buffer between people, forcing us to float away into worlds of our own definition. I have half-a-dozen similar situations that come to mind, but since none of them literally involve Nazis who sentenced millions of people to death, I won’t be so glib.

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