Visualizing Atrocity

Book excerpt: Taking Hannah Arendt's account of the 1961 trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann as its point of departure, this book reassesses the myths that shape our understanding of the Nazi genocide as well as totalitarianism's broader features. These myths are tied to the atrocity imagery that emerged with the liberation of the concentration camps and played an evidentiary role in the post-war trials of perpetrators. At the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal, particular practices of looking were first established, and later institutionalized through Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem as part of the fabric of historical fact. These ways of seeing have come to constitute a visual rhetoric that drives contemporary mythmaking about how we know genocide and what is permitted to count as such. In contrast, Arendt's claims about the "banality of evil" work to disrupt this visual rhetoric.