Almost sixty years after its publication, the first Persian translation of Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), by German philosopher Hannah Arendt, has been the literary phenomenon in Iran for several months. This account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Nazi responsible for the “final solution”, interweaving political and philosophical reflections, has been reissued twenty-two times in Iran since its release in October 2020 (by the Borj publishing house) : 23,000 copies in all. A huge success in a country of 83 million inhabitants, of course, but where novels and essays rarely exceed 300 copies. The Covid-19 even made matters worse: according to statistics reported by the Iranian press, bookstore activity fell by 90%, forcing some to go out of business.
Why this interest in a book on a Nazi criminal who, according to Arendt, is less an assassin than a clown? A translator, a fine connoisseur of the publishing world, based in Tehran and preferring to remain anonymous, answers that the Iranians have lived with the expression “banality of evil” for almost twenty years.
“Some intellectuals and politicians use it to draw a parallel between Nazi Germany and today’s Iran”, she explains, before adding: ” In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt paints the portrait of a criminal unable to formulate a single sensible sentence but who played a central role in the deaths of millions of people. This portrait, for the Iranian reader, is not very far from its own leaders, especially today with Ebrahim Raïssi. ”
This ultraconservative, elected President of the Islamic Republic on June 18, who has spent his entire career in the judiciary, was one of the architects of the execution of thousands of people in 1988. And his character is striking by his absence of personality and eloquence.
“An embodiment of what Arendt develops”
A sociologist and teacher in one of the universities of Tehran who, too, wishes to keep his name silent, extends the comparison: “The situation in Iran is an embodiment of what Arendt develops in his book: people who work obediently and responsibly for the regime, without thinking about the consequences of their actions, while, personally, they are kind, pleasant and humble. . This is exactly where evil and crime arise. “
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