Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (101 page)

On 11 May 1960, at six-thirty in the evening, Richard Klement got down as usual from the bus which brought him home from work at the Mercedes-Benz factory in the Suarez suburb of Buenos Aires. A moment later he was seized by three men and in less than a minute forced into a waiting car, which took him to a rented house in another suburb. Asked who he was, he replied instantly, ‘Ich bin Adolf Eichmann,’ adding, ‘I know I am in the hands of the Israelis.’ The Israeli Secret Service had had ‘Klement’ under surveillance for some time, the culmination of a determined effort on the part of the new nation that the crimes of World War II would not be forgotten or forgiven. After his capture, Eichmann was kept secretly in Buenos Aires for nine days until he could be secretly flown to Jerusalem on an El Al airliner. On 23 May, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced to cheers in the Jerusalem parliament that Eichmann had arrived on Israeli sod that morning. Eleven months later, Eichman was brought to trial in the District Court of Jerusalem, accused on fifteen counts that, ‘together with others,’ he had committed crimes against the Jewish people, and against humanity.
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Among the scores of people covering the trial was Hannah Arendt, who was there on behalf of the
New Yorker
magazine and whose articles, published later as a book, caused a storm of controversy.
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The offence arose from the subtitle of her account, ‘A Report on the Banality of Evil,’ a phrase that became famous. Her central argument was that although Eichmann had done monstrous things, or been present when monstrous things had been done to the Jews, he was not himself a monster in the accepted sense of the word. She maintained that no court in Israel – nor
any
court – had ever had to deal with someone like Eichmann. His was a crime that was on no statute book. In particular, Arendt was fascinated by Eichmann’s conscience. It wasn’t true to say that he didn’t have one: handed a copy of
Lolita
to read in his cell during the trial, he handed it back unfinished. ‘Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch,’ he told his guard; ‘Quite an unwholesome book.’
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But Arendt reported that throughout the trial, although Eichmann calmly admitted what he had done, and although he knew somewhere inside him that what had been done had been wrong, he did not
feel
guilty. He said he had moved in a world where no one questioned the final solution, where no one had ever condemned him. He had obeyed
orders; that was all there was to it. ‘The postwar notion of open disobedience was a fairy tale: “Under the circumstances such behaviour was impossible. Nobody acted that way.” It was “unthinkable.” ‘
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Some atrocities he helped to commit were done to advance his career.

Arendt caused offence on two grounds.
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She highlighted that many Jews had gone to their deaths without rebellion, not willingly exactly but in acquiescence; and many of her critics felt that in denying that Eichmann was a monster, she was diminishing and demeaning the significance of the Holocaust. This second criticism was far from the truth. If anything, Arendt’s picture of Eichmann, consoling himself with clichés, querying why the trial was being prolonged – because the Israelis already had enough evidence to hang him several times over – only made what Eichmann had done more horrendous. But she wrote as she found, reporting that he went to the gallows with great dignity, after drinking half a bottle of red wine (leaving the other half) and refusing the help of a Protestant minister. Even there, however, he was still mouthing platitudes. The ‘grotesque silliness’ of his last words, Arendt said, proved more than ever the ‘word-and-thought-defying
banality of evil.’
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Despite the immediate response to Arendt’s report, her book is now a classic.
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At this distance her analysis, correct in an important way, is easier to accept. One aspect of Arendt’s report went unremarked, however, though it was not insignificant. It was written in English, for the
New Yorker.
Like many intellectual emigrés, Arendt had not returned to Germany after the war, at least not to live. The mass emigration of intellectual talent in the 1930s, the bulk of which entered the United States, infused and transformed all aspects of American life in the postwar world, and had become very clear by the early 1960s, when
Eichmann in Jerusalem
appeared. It coloured everything from music to mathematics, and from chemistry to choreography, but it was all-important in three areas: psychoanalysis, physics, and art.

After some early hesitation, America proved a more hospitable host to psychoanalytic ideas than, say, Britain, France, or Italy. Psychoanalytic institutes were founded in the 1930s in New York, Boston, and Chicago. At that time American psychiatry was less organically oriented than its European counterparts, and Americans were traditionally more indulgent toward their children, as referred to earlier. This made them more open to ideas linking childhood experience and adult character.

Assistance to refugee analysts was organised very early in the United States, and although numbers were not large in real terms (about 190, according to one estimate), the people helped were extremely influential. Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse have already been mentioned, but other well known analyst-emigrés included Franz Alexander, Helene Deutsch, Karl Abraham, Ernst Simmel, Otto Fenichel, Theodor Reik, and Hanns Sachs, one of the ‘Seven Rings,’ early colleagues of Freud pledged to develop and defend psychoanalysis, and given a ring by him to symbolise that dedication.
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The reception of psychoanalysis was further aided by the psychiatric problems that came to light in America in World War II. According to official figures, in the
period 1942–5 some 1,850,000 men were rejected for military service for psychiatric reasons, 38 percent of all rejections. As of 31 December 1946, 54 percent of all patients in veterans’ hospitals were being treated for neuropsychiatrie disorders.

The other two most influential emigré psychoanalysts in America after World War II were Erik Erikson and Bruno Bettelheim. Erikson was Freud’s last pupil in Vienna. Despite his Danish name, he was a north German, who arrived in America in 1938 when he was barely twenty-one and worked in a mental hospital in Boston. Trained as a lay therapist (America was also less bothered by the absence of medical degrees for psychoanalysts than Europe was), Erikson gradually developed his theory, in
Childhood and Society
(1950), that adolescents go through an ‘identity crisis’ and that how they deal with this is what matters, determining their adult character, rather than any Freudian experience in childhood.
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Erikson’s idea proved extremely popular in the 1950s and 1960s, with the advent of the first really affluent adolescent ‘other-directed’ generation. So too did his idea that whereas hysteria may have been the central neurosis in Freud’s Vienna, in postwar America it was narcissism, by which he meant a profound concern with one’s own psychological development, especially in a world where religion was, for many people, effectively dead.
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Bruno Bettelheim was another lay analyst, who began life as an aesthetician and arrived in America from Vienna, via a concentration camp. The account he derived from those experiences,
Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,
was so vivid that General Eisenhower made it required reading for members of the military government in Europe.
¹¹
After the war, Bettelheim became well known for his technique for helping autistic children, described in his book
The Empty Fortress.
¹²
The two works were related because Bettelheim had seen people reduced to an ‘autistic’ state in the camps, and felt that children could therefore be helped by treatment that, in effect, sought to reverse the experience.
¹³
Bettelheim claimed up to 80 percent success with his method, though doubt was cast on his methods later in the century.
¹⁴

In America, psychoanalysis became a much more optimistic set of doctrines than it had been in Europe. It embodied the view that there were moves individuals could make to help themselves, to rectify what was wrong with their psychological station in life. This was very different from the European view, that sociological class had as much to do with one’s position in society, and that individuals were less able to change their situation without more widespread societal change.

Two matters divided physicists in the wake of World War II. There was first the development of the hydrogen bomb. The Manhattan Project had been a collaborative venture, with scientists from Britain, Denmark, Italy, and elsewhere joining the Americans. But it was undoubtedly
led
by Americans, and almost entirely paid for by them. Given that, and the fact that Germany was occupied and Britain, France, Austria, and Italy were wrecked by six years of war, fought on their soil, it was no surprise that the United States should assume the lead in this branch of research. Göttingen was denuded; Copenhagen had
been forced to give up its place as a centre for international scholars; and in Cambridge, England, the Cavendish population had been dispersed and was changing emphasis toward molecular biology, a very fruitful manoeuvre. In the years after the war, four nuclear scientists who migrated to America were awarded the Nobel Prize, adding immeasurably to the prestige of American science: Felix Bloch in 1952, Emilio Segrè in 1959, and Maria Mayer and Eugene Wigner in 1963. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 established its own prize, quickly renamed after its first winner, Enrico Fermi, and that too was won by five emigrés before 1963: Fermi, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Hans Bethe, and Edward Teller. Alongside three native American winners – Ernest Lawrence, Glenn Seaborg, and Robert Oppenheimer – these prizewinners emphasised the progress in physics in the United States.

Many of these men (and a few women) were prominent in the ‘movement of atomic scientists,’ whose aim was to shape public thinking about the atomic age, and which issued its own
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
for discussion of these issues. The
Bulletin
had a celebrated logo, a clock set at a few minutes to midnight, the hands being moved forward and back, according to how near the editors thought the world was to apocalypse. Scientists such as Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Bethe left the Manhattan Project after the war, preferring not to work on arms during peacetime. Edward Teller, however, had been interested in a hydrogen bomb ever since Fermi had posed a question over lunch in 1942: Once an atomic bomb was developed, could the explosion be used to initiate something similar to the thermonuclear reactions going on inside the sun? The news, in September 1949, that Russia had successfully exploded an atomic bomb caused a lot of soul-searching among certain physicists. The Atomic Energy Commission decided to ask its advisory committee, chaired by Oppenheimer, for an opinion. That committee unanimously decided that the United States should not take the initiative, but feelings ran high, summed up best by Fermi, whose view had changed over time. He thought that the new bomb should be outlawed before it was born – and yet he conceded, in the Cold War atmosphere then prevailing, that no such agreement would be possible; ‘Failing that, one should with considerable regret go ahead.
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The agonising continued, but in January 1950 Klaus Fuchs in England confessed that while working at Los Alamos he had passed information to Communist agents. Four days after the confession, President Truman took the decision away from the scientists and gave the go-ahead for an American H-bomb project.

The essence of the hydrogen bomb was that when an atomic bomb exploded in association with deuterium, or tritium, it would produce temperatures never seen on earth, which would fuse two deuterium nuclei together and simultaneously release binding energy in vast amounts. Early calculations had shown that such a device could produce an explosion equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT and cause damage across 3,000 square miles. (For comparison, the amount of explosives used in World War II was about 3 million tons.)
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The world’s first thermonuclear device – a hydrogen bomb – was tested on 1 November 1952, on the small Pacific island of Elugelab. Observers forty miles away saw millions of gallons of seawater turned to steam, appearing as a giant
bubble, and the fireball expanded to three miles across. When the explosion was over, the entire island of Elugelab had disappeared, vaporised. The bomb had delivered the equivalent of 10.4 million tons of TNT,
one thousand
times more violent than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Edward Teller sent a telegram to a colleague, using code: ‘It’s a boy.’ His metaphor was not lacking in unconscious irony. The Soviet Union exploded its own device nine months later.
¹⁷

But after World War II ended, most physicists were anxious to get back to ‘normal’ work. Quite what normal work was now was settled at two big physics conferences, one at Shelter Island, off the coast of Long Island, near New York, in June 1947, and the other at Rochester, upstate New York, in 1956.

The high point of the Shelter Island conference was a report by Willis Lamb that presented evidence of small variations in the energy of hydrogen atoms that should not exist if Paul Dirac’s equations linking relativity and quantum mechanics were absolutely correct. This ‘Lamb shift’ produced a revised mathematical account, quantum electro-dynamics (QED), which scientists congratulate themselves on as being the ‘most accurate theory in physics.
¹⁸
In the same year as the conference, mathematically and physically trained cosmologists and astronomers began studying cosmic rays arriving on Earth from the universe and discovered new subatomic particles that did not behave exactly as predicted – for example, they did not decay into other particles as fast as they should have done. This anomaly gave rise to the next phase of particle physics, which has dominated the last half of the century, an amalgam of physics, maths, chemistry, astronomy, and – strange as it may seem – history. Its two achievements are an understanding of how the universe formed, how and in which order the elements came into being; and a systematic classification of particles even more basic than electrons, protons, and neutrons.