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.”
汉娜·阿伦特(Hannah Arendt)的《耶路撒冷的艾希曼》(Eichmann in Jerusalem)出版50多年来仍具有争议，许多批评者猛烈抨击她对纳粹战犯阿道夫·艾希曼(Adolf Eichmann)的描述，她说他是“平庸的恶”的典型代表，是一个没有感情的、几乎没有思想的官员，“从未意识到自己做了些什么”。

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.
这个星期，阿尔弗雷德·A·克诺夫(Alfred A. Knopf)出版社出版了《耶路撒冷之前的艾希曼：大屠杀者未被仔细审视的人生》(Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer)的英译本。该书作者贝蒂娜·斯坦尼思(Bettina Stangneth)无意加入那些批评家的行列。斯坦尼思是汉堡的一位独立哲学家，她感兴趣的是谎言的本质。2000年左右，根据近几十年出现的资料，她开始撰写关于1961年在以色列接受审判的艾希曼的著作，艾希曼是第三帝国犹太事务主管。
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.”
艾希曼战后在阿根廷藏身时写了大量回忆录和其他文件。斯坦尼思在通读这些资料时发现了他写的一大段笔记，这段笔记驳斥了伊曼努尔·康德(Immanuel Kant)的道德哲学，与阿伦特所谓的“没有思考能力”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.”
“我在书桌前坐了三天，思考这个问题，”斯坦尼思在家中接受电话采访时说，“我完全震惊了。我简直不能相信这个人能写出这样的东西。”
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.
斯坦尼思在书中引用了那个文件以及其他大量资料，证明了一些学者们心目中最为关键的一点：1962年被绞刑处死的艾希曼绝不像他自己在审讯中所声称的那样，只是一名服从命令的公务员，而是一个狂热献身纳粹事业的纳粹党人。
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.
埃默里大学的历史学家黛博拉·E·利普斯塔特(Deborah E. Lipstadt)说，如果说之前的研究者们严重削弱了阿伦特的论据，那么斯坦尼思“粉碎”了它。利普斯塔特2011年出版了一本关于艾希曼审判的书。
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.”
利普斯塔特博士说，艾希曼在阿根廷的一些真相已经陆续传开了，“但她写得生动具体”，“这家伙不是碰巧干了一份肮脏的工作，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.
斯坦尼思认为阿伦特是被艾希曼在法庭上的表演愚弄了，但她不认为阿伦特不重要，而认为她是个不可或缺的智慧伙伴。阿伦特于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.”
“我没打算从历史学家的角度写一本书，只是想用史实与阿伦特辩论，”斯坦尼思说，“想了解艾希曼这样的人，你必须坐下来，从他的角度思考。那是哲学家的工作。”
“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多个档案馆的资料后撰写的，其中当然有很多令人瞠目的事实，比如，1956年艾希曼曾起草过一份致西德总理康拉德·阿登纳(Konrad Adenauer)的公开信，提议让自己回国受审。那封信是斯坦尼思在德国国家档案馆保存的艾希曼文件里找到的。
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.
斯坦尼思还提到，战后情报关系网的公开程度有时令人惊讶，这保护了艾希曼；西德官员不太愿意将艾希曼和其他前纳粹分子绳之以法。根据德国小报《图片报》(Bild)2011年公布的机密文件，西德官员早在1952年就知道艾希曼的藏身之处。
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年是艾希曼审判50周年，斯坦尼思的书也于这一年在德国出版，她揭露出来的这些事很快成为报纸头条，再次引发关于战后德国政府是否与过去一刀两断的争论（德国情报机构联邦情报局[BND]仍未公布关于艾希曼的3400页的完整文件）。
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》（英译者露丝·马丁[Ruth Martin]）的核心是详细描述艾希曼在阿根廷时的情况，以及当时围绕在他身边的前纳粹分子和纳粹支持者。它的主要依据是学者们之前就能看到，但是（据斯坦尼思说）从未被完整或系统挖掘过的资料。
“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.”
“我们浪费很多时间等待惊人的新资料，”她说，“而没有坐下来仔细查看已有的资料。”
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.
那些材料真的能够堆积成山。艾希曼在耶路撒冷的证词包括成千上万页笔录、笔记和手写文本，包括他在审判后写的1200页的回忆录。
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为基础，同时也把所谓的阿根廷文件拼凑到了一起，它包括1300多页手写回忆录、笔记以及住在布宜诺斯艾利斯的荷兰记者、前纳粹分子威廉·扎森(Willem Sassen)1957年对艾希曼的秘密采访的笔录。
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.)
扎森的笔录分散存放在德国的三个档案馆，残缺不全，页码混乱。学者们很早之前就知道这些笔录，其中一小部分作为证据被提交到艾希曼的审判中，他把那些笔录斥为不可靠的“酒吧胡言”（其中两段经过编辑的剪短节选曾刊登在《生活》[Life]杂志上）。
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.
斯坦尼思在贴错标签的文档中发现了几百页之前不为人知的笔录。她还发现有些学者也在扎森的圈子里，而之前人们并不知道，比如海因里希·希姆莱(Heinrich Himmler)的前助手鲁道夫·冯·阿尔文斯莱本(Ludolf von Alvensleben)。斯坦尼思说，之前人们没有察觉他也参与了其中一些采访。
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.
根据斯坦尼思的描述，这些人组成了一种堕落的读书俱乐部，几乎每周都在扎森的家中会面，阅读公众对犹太大屠杀的最新描述，讨论他们能找到的每一本书和每一篇文章，包括“敌方”作者所写的内容。他们的目标是收集资料，写一本书，揭露大屠杀是犹太人的夸张，是“600万人的谎言”（阿根廷一本战后纳粹出版物的说法）。但是艾希曼有另一个相反的目标：确立他在历史上的地位。
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.
在艾希曼叙述自己所谓的“杀手工作”（斯坦尼思指出这绝不是讽刺）的严酷时，他也在提供无数能证实屠杀规模的确凿事实。斯坦尼思引用了艾希曼描述自己“天生使命”的长文——“如果真有1030万敌人（他指的是犹太人）被杀，那我们也算完成了使命”——这让同情他的听众们感到不安。
“I cannot tell you anything else, for it is the truth!” Eichmann said. “Why should I deny it?”
“别的我无可奉告，因为这就是事实！”艾希曼说，“我为什么要否认它呢？”
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.
斯坦尼思写道，对扎森的圈子来说，这篇长文标志着幻想的破灭，他们不再指望艾希曼会帮助他们为“纯粹的纳粹主义”辩护，帮助他们否认敌人的诽谤中伤。对艾希曼来说，扎森的采访只是应对耶路撒冷的极佳演练。斯坦尼思写道，以色列审讯者发现艾希曼在回答史实问题时得心应手，不过这次是为了给自己塑造一个完全不同的形象。
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.
有些史学家说，如果阿伦特像其他很多人那样被蒙骗了，那么他的表演仍让她洞察到很多当时在现场执行屠杀的人们的心态，这很有价值。
“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.”
“她说的那类人的确存在，但他不是那类人，”史学家克里斯托弗·R·布朗宁(Christopher R. Browning)说。他1992年的著作《普通人》(Ordinary Men)很有影响力，该书调查了波兰的一个德国警营，成千上万犹太人在这里被害。“艾希曼所假装的那种人的确存在，各种各样的人都是那样的。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.
听着艾希曼在耶路撒冷的陈述，阿伦特看到了一个“不能思考的”人。听着艾希曼在赴耶路撒冷之前的讲述，斯坦尼思看到了一个非常擅长操纵的大师，擅长让理性来反对它自身，而理性原本是敌人的武器。
“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.”
“作为一名哲学家，你想维护思考，认为它是一种美丽的东西，”她说，“你不愿认为一个有能力思考的人不喜欢思考。”