Criminal Case 40/61, the Trial of Adolf Eichmann

Under a deceptively simple label, 'criminal case 40/61,' the trial of Adolf Eichmann began in 1961. Hannah Arendt covered the trial for theNew Yorkermagazine and recorded her observations inEichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil. Harry Mulisch was also assigned to cover the trial for a Dutch news weekly. Arendt would later say in her book's preface that Mulisch was one of the few people who shared her views on the character of Eichmann. At the time, Mulisch was a young and little-known writer. He has since emerged as an author with an international reputation, celebrated for such novels asThe AssaultandThe Discovery of Heaven. Mulisch modestly called his book on case 40/61 a report, and it is certainly that, as he gives firsthand accounts of the trial and its key players and scenes (the defendant's face strangely asymmetric and riddled by tics, his speech absurdly baroque). Eichmann's character comes out in his incessant bureaucratizing and calculating, as well as in his