耶路撒冷的艾希曼 不是平庸而是惡

More than 50 years after its publication, Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” remains enduringly controversial, racking up a long list of critics who continue to pick apart her depiction of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as an exemplar of “the banality of evil,” a bloodless, nearly mindless bureaucrat who “never realized what he was doing.”

漢娜·阿倫特(Hannah Arendt)的《耶路撒冷的艾希曼》(Eichmann in Jerusalem)出版50多年來仍具有爭議，許多批評者猛烈抨擊她對納粹戰犯阿道夫·艾希曼(Adolf Eichmann)的描述，她說他是“平庸的惡”的典型代表，是一個沒有感情的、幾乎沒有思想的官員，“從未意識到自己做了些什麼”。

Bettina Stangneth, the author of “Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer,” published in an English translation this week by Alfred A. Knopf, didn’t aim to join those critics. An independent philosopher based in Hamburg, she was interested in the nature of lies, and set out around 2000 to write a study of Eichmann, the Third Reich’s head of Jewish affairs, who was tried in Israel in 1961, in light of material that has emerged in recent decades.

這個星期，阿爾弗雷德·A·克諾夫(Alfred A. Knopf)出版社出版了《耶路撒冷之前的艾希曼：大屠殺者未被仔細審視的人生》(Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer)的英譯本。該書作者貝蒂娜·斯坦尼思(Bettina Stangneth)無意加入那些批評家的行列。斯坦尼思是漢堡的一位獨立哲學家，她感興趣的是謊言的本質。2000年左右，根據近幾十年出現的資料，她開始撰寫關於1961年在以色列接受審判的艾希曼的著作，艾希曼是第三帝國猶太事務主管。

Then, while reading through the voluminous memoirs and other testimony Eichmann produced while in hiding in Argentina after the war, Ms. Stangneth came across a long note he wrote, dismissing the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, that flew in the face of Arendt’s notion of Eichmann’s “inability to think.”

艾希曼戰後在阿根廷藏身時寫了大量回憶錄和其他文件。斯坦尼思在通讀這些資料時發現了他寫的一大段筆記，這段筆記駁斥了伊曼努爾·康德(Immanuel Kant)的道德哲學，與阿倫特所謂的“沒有思考能力”的艾希曼形象截然相反。

“I sat at my desk for three days, thinking about it,” Ms. Stangneth said in a telephone interview from her home. “I was totally shocked. I could not believe this man was able to write something like this.”

“我在書桌前坐了三天，思考這個問題，”斯坦尼思在家中接受電話採訪時說，“我完全震驚了。我簡直不能相信這個人能寫出這樣的東西。”

Ms. Stangneth’s book cites that document and a mountain of others to offer what some scholars say is the most definitive case yet that Eichmann, who was hanged in 1962, wasn’t the order-following functionary he claimed to be at his trial, but a fanatically dedicated National Socialist.

斯坦尼思在書中引用了那個文件以及其他大量資料，證明了一些學者們心目中最爲關鍵的一點：1962年被絞刑處死的艾希曼絕不像他自己在審訊中所聲稱的那樣，只是一名服從命令的公務員，而是一個狂熱獻身納粹事業的納粹黨人。

If previous researchers have seriously dented Arendt’s case, Ms. Stangneth “shatters” it, said Deborah E. Lipstadt, a historian at Emory University and the author of a 2011 book about the Eichmann trial.

埃默裏大學的歷史學家黛博拉·E·利普斯塔特(Deborah E. Lipstadt)說，如果說之前的研究者們嚴重削弱了阿倫特的論據，那麼斯坦尼思“粉碎”了它。利普斯塔特2011年出版了一本關於艾希曼審判的書。

The facts about Eichmann in Argentina have been dribbling out, “but she really puts flesh on the bones,” Dr. Lipstadt said. “This was not a guy who just happened to do a dirty job, but someone who played a crucial role and did it with wholehearted commitment.”

利普斯塔特博士說，艾希曼在阿根廷的一些真相已經陸續傳開了，“但她寫得生動具體”，“這傢伙不是碰巧幹了一份骯髒的工作，而是在其中扮演重要角色，全身心投入”。

While Ms. Stangneth maintains that Arendt, who died in 1975, was fooled by Eichmann’s performance on the stand, she sees her less as a foil than as an indispensable intellectual companion.

斯坦尼思認爲阿倫特是被艾希曼在法庭上的表演愚弄了，但她不認爲阿倫特不重要，而認爲她是個不可或缺的智慧夥伴。阿倫特於1975年去世。

“It wasn’t my plan to write a historian’s book, just arguing against Arendt with historical facts,” Ms. Stangneth said. “To understand someone like Eichmann, you have to sit down and think with him. And that’s a philosopher’s job.”

“我沒打算從歷史學家的角度寫一本書，只是想用史實與阿倫特辯論，”斯坦尼思說，“想了解艾希曼這樣的人，你必須坐下來，從他的角度思考。那是哲學家的工作。”

“Eichmann Before Jerusalem,” based on research in more than 30 archives, certainly contains plenty of eye-opening facts, including the revelation that in 1956 Eichmann had drafted an open letter to the West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer — discovered by Ms. Stangneth in a trove of Eichmann’s papers held in German state archives — proposing that he return to his homeland to stand trial.

《耶路撒冷之前的艾希曼》是在研究了30多個檔案館的資料後撰寫的，其中當然有很多令人瞠目的事實，比如，1956年艾希曼曾起草過一份致西德總理康拉德·阿登納(Konrad Adenauer)的公開信，提議讓自己回國受審。那封信是斯坦尼思在德國國家檔案館保存的艾希曼文件裏找到的。

Ms. Stangneth also describes the sometimes surprisingly open postwar networks that protected Eichmann, as well as the reluctance of West German officials — who knew where Eichmann was as early as 1952, according to classified documents published in 2011 by the German tabloid Bild — to bring him and other former Nazis to justice.

斯坦尼思還提到，戰後情報關係網的公開程度有時令人驚訝，這保護了艾希曼；西德官員不太願意將艾希曼和其他前納粹分子繩之以法。根據德國小報《圖片報》(Bild)2011年公佈的機密文件，西德官員早在1952年就知道艾希曼的藏身之處。

Such revelations drew headlines when Ms. Stangneth’s book appeared in Germany in 2011, the 50th anniversary of the Eichmann trial, contributing to renewed debate about whether Germany’s postwar government had made a complete break with the past. (The full 3,400-page file on Eichmann held by the German intelligence service, the BND, has yet to be declassified.)

2011年是艾希曼審判50週年，斯坦尼思的書也於這一年在德國出版，她揭露出來的這些事很快成爲報紙頭條，再次引發關於戰後德國政府是否與過去一刀兩斷的爭論（德國情報機構聯邦情報局[BND]仍未公佈關於艾希曼的3400頁的完整文件）。

But the core of “Eichmann Before Jerusalem,” which was translated into English by Ruth Martin, is a detailed portrait of Eichmann and the circle of former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers surrounding him in Argentina, based largely on materials previously available to scholars but never, Ms. Stangneth said, fully or systematically mined.

但是《耶路撒冷之前的艾希曼》（英譯者露絲·馬丁[Ruth Martin]）的核心是詳細描述艾希曼在阿根廷時的情況，以及當時圍繞在他身邊的前納粹分子和納粹支持者。它的主要依據是學者們之前就能看到，但是（據斯坦尼思說）從未被完整或系統挖掘過的資料。

“We waste a lot of time waiting for spectacular new material,” she said. “We haven’t sat down and taken a very close look at the material we have.”

“我們浪費很多時間等待驚人的新資料，”她說，“而沒有坐下來仔細查看已有的資料。”

That material forms a veritable mountain. Eichmann’s testimony in Jerusalem runs to thousands of pages of transcripts, notes and handwritten texts, including a 1,200-page memoir he produced after the trial.

那些材料真的能夠堆積成山。艾希曼在耶路撒冷的證詞包括成千上萬頁筆錄、筆記和手寫文本，包括他在審判後寫的1200頁的回憶錄。

Ms. Stangneth, building on the work of others, has also pieced together the so-called Argentina Papers, a tangle of more than 1,300 pages of handwritten memoirs, notes and transcripts of secret interviews of Eichmann in 1957 by Willem Sassen, a Dutch journalist and former Nazi living in Buenos Aires.

斯坦尼思以他人的研究爲基礎，同時也把所謂的阿根廷文件拼湊到了一起，它包括1300多頁手寫回憶錄、筆記以及住在布宜諾斯艾利斯的荷蘭記者、前納粹分子威廉·扎森(Willem Sassen)1957年對艾希曼的祕密採訪的筆錄。

The Sassen transcripts, scattered across three German archives in incomplete and confusingly paginated copies, have long been known to scholars, and small portions were submitted as evidence in Eichmann’s trial, where he dismissed them as loose “pub talk.” (Two brief, edited excerpts also ran in Life magazine.)

扎森的筆錄分散存放在德國的三個檔案館，殘缺不全，頁碼混亂。學者們很早之前就知道這些筆錄，其中一小部分作爲證據被提交到艾希曼的審判中，他把那些筆錄斥爲不可靠的“酒吧胡言”（其中兩段經過編輯的剪短節選曾刊登在《生活》[Life]雜誌上）。

Ms. Stangneth uncovered hundreds of pages of previously unknown transcripts in mislabeled files. She also found evidence that the Sassen circle included more people than scholars had previously recognized, among them Ludolf von Alvensleben, former adjutant to Heinrich Himmler, whose participation in some of the interviews, she said, had gone undetected.

斯坦尼思在貼錯標籤的文檔中發現了幾百頁之前不爲人知的筆錄。她還發現有些學者也在扎森的圈子裏，而之前人們並不知道，比如海因裏希·希姆萊(Heinrich Himmler)的前助手魯道夫·馮·阿爾文斯萊本(Ludolf von Alvensleben)。斯坦尼思說，之前人們沒有察覺他也參與了其中一些採訪。

Together, in Ms. Stangneth’s depiction, these men formed a kind of perverse book club, meeting almost weekly at Sassen’s home to work through the emerging public narrative of the Holocaust, discussing every volume and article they could get their hands on, including ones by “enemy” authors. Their goal was to provide material for a book that would expose the Holocaust as a Jewish exaggeration — “the lie of the six million,” as one postwar Nazi publication in Argentina put it. But Eichmann had another, contradictory goal: to claim his place in history.

根據斯坦尼思的描述，這些人組成了一種墮落的讀書俱樂部，幾乎每週都在扎森的家中會面，閱讀公衆對猶太大屠殺的最新描述，討論他們能找到的每一本書和每一篇文章，包括“敵方”作者所寫的內容。他們的目標是收集資料，寫一本書，揭露大屠殺是猶太人的誇張，是“600萬人的謊言”（阿根廷一本戰後納粹出版物的說法）。但是艾希曼有另一個相反的目標：確立他在歷史上的地位。

The facts and figures confirming the scale of the slaughter piled up as Eichmann recounted the rigors of what he called (without irony, Ms. Stangneth notes) his “killer of a job.” Ms. Stangneth quotes a long Eichmann tirade on his “duty to our blood” — “If 10.3 million of these enemies had been killed,” he declared of the Jews, “then we would have fulfilled our duty” — that left his sympathetic listeners unnerved.

在艾希曼敘述自己所謂的“殺手工作”（斯坦尼思指出這絕不是諷刺）的嚴酷時，他也在提供無數能證實屠殺規模的確鑿事實。斯坦尼思引用了艾希曼描述自己“天生使命”的長文——“如果真有1030萬敵人（他指的是猶太人）被殺，那我們也算完成了使命”——這讓同情他的聽衆們感到不安。

“I cannot tell you anything else, for it is the truth!” Eichmann said. “Why should I deny it?”

“別的我無可奉告，因爲這就是事實！”艾希曼說，“我爲什麼要否認它呢？”

For the Sassen circle, Ms. Stangneth writes, this tirade marked the end of the fantasy that Eichmann would help them defend “pure National Socialism” against the slanderous charges of its enemies. For Eichmann, the Sassen conversations were good practice for Jerusalem, where his Israeli interrogator, Ms. Stangneth writes, noted his facility in answering historical questions, although in service of a very different image of himself.

斯坦尼思寫道，對扎森的圈子來說，這篇長文標誌着幻想的破滅，他們不再指望艾希曼會幫助他們爲“純粹的納粹主義”辯護，幫助他們否認敵人的誹謗中傷。對艾希曼來說，扎森的採訪只是應對耶路撒冷的極佳演練。斯坦尼思寫道，以色列審訊者發現艾希曼在回答史實問題時得心應手，不過這次是爲了給自己塑造一個完全不同的形象。

If Arendt, like many others, was taken in, some historians say, his performance still led her to valuable insights about the mentality of many of those who carried out the killing on the ground.

有些史學家說，如果阿倫特像其他很多人那樣被矇騙了，那麼他的表演仍讓她洞察到很多當時在現場執行屠殺的人們的心態，這很有價值。

“She had the right type but the wrong guy,” said the historian Christopher R. Browning, the author of “Ordinary Men,” an influential 1992 study of a German police battalion that killed tens of thousands of Jews in Poland. “There were all sorts of people like Eichmann was pretending to be, which is why his strategy worked.”

“她說的那類人的確存在，但他不是那類人，”史學家克里斯托弗·R·布朗寧(Christopher R. Browning)說。他1992年的著作《普通人》(Ordinary Men)很有影響力，該書調查了波蘭的一個德國警營，成千上萬猶太人在這裏被害。“艾希曼所假裝的那種人的確存在，各種各樣的人都是那樣的。所以他的策略才能奏效。”

Listening to Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt saw an “inability to think.” Listening to Eichmann before Jerusalem, Ms. Stangneth sees a master manipulator skilled at turning reason, that weapon of the enemy, against itself.

聽着艾希曼在耶路撒冷的陳述，阿倫特看到了一個“不能思考的”人。聽着艾希曼在赴耶路撒冷之前的講述，斯坦尼思看到了一個非常擅長操縱的大師，擅長讓理性來反對它自身，而理性原本是敵人的武器。

“As a philosopher, you want to protect thinking as something beautiful,” she said. “You don’t want to think that someone who is able to think does not also love it.”

“作爲一名哲學家，你想維護思考，認爲它是一種美麗的東西，”她說，“你不願認爲一個有能力思考的人不喜歡思考。”