Judging Evil in the Trial of Kastner

Law and History Review

Volumn 19, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 117-160

  Bilsky, Leora ^a  

^a TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY   (Israel)

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EID: 85011476686     PISSN: 07382480     EISSN: 19399022     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/744213     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. The two epigraphs at the beginning of this article are from Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 287, and Klaus Mann, Mephisto, trans. Robin Smyth (New York: Random House, 1977). For Arendt's physical description of Eichmann, see Eichmann in Jerusalem, 5. “Adolf Eichmann… medium-sized, slender, middleaged, with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes, who throughout the trial keeps craning his scraggy neck toward the bench… and who desperately and for the most part successfully maintains his self-control despite the nervous tic to which his mouth must have become subject long before this trial started.” See also letter from Arendt on April 13, 1961, in Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926-1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 434. (“Eichmann is no eagle; rather, a ghost who has a cold on top of that and minute by minute fades in substance, as it were, in his glass box.”)
2. For detailed descriptions of the Kastner affair, see Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 255-320; Yehiam Weitz, Ha-Ish she-Nirtsah Paamayim [The Man Who Was Murdered Twice] (Jerusalem: Keter, 1995); Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 145-71. For a discussion of the decisions in the trial and appellate courts, see Pnina Lahav, Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century (Berkely: University of Califonia Press, 1997), 123-25, 132-33, 142-44.
3. Weitz, Ha-Ish she-Nirtsah Paamayim, 60-61.
4. For a detailed examination of the negotiations, see Bauer, Jews for Sale? 145-71.
5. In Israel there is no jury system. Judges of a trial court sit either as sole judges in minor cases or in groups of three judges in the more important or complicated cases. (Article 37 of the Courts Law [consolidated version], 5744-1984.) Since Kastner's libel trial fell under the category of minor criminal offenses and did not seem to involve complicated issues of law in the outset, a sole judge was assigned to it. This initial perception of the case is confirmed by the fact that the state prosecution appointed the inexperienced attorney, Amnon Tel, to the case. See Weitz, Ha-Ish she-Nirtsah Paamayim, 107, 115, 122-23. Later on, after Tamir had managed to transform the trial proceedings into a most complicated case, addressing the whole issue of the behavior of Jewish leaders during the Holocaust, Judge Halevi did not ask for a panel of three judges to be appointed. (This was in contrast to the state prosecution that replaced Tel, an inexperienced criminal prosecutor, with the attorney general, Haim Cohen.) With the benefit of historical hindsight we see that a panel of the judge's peers could have supplied a deliberative framework for judging the Holocaust by allowing the judges to consult each other. Indeed, on Kastner's appeal five judges were appointed to sit on the case, instead of the three who normally preside at the appellate court. (Article 26[1] of the Courts Law specifies that the Supreme Court will sit in panels of three justices and authorizes the president of the court to extend the panel.)
6. Kastner was shot near his home in Tel Aviv on the night between March 3 and 4, 1957. The assassin belonged to an underground right-wing organization that was involved in the planning of terrorist attacks. The assassin (Zeev Ackshtein), the driver (Dan Shemer), and the head of the organization (Yosef Menks) were tried and convicted of murder. Weitz, Ha-Ish she-Nirtsah Paamayim, 332-36.
7. Lawrence Douglas, “Wartime Lies: Securing the Holocaust in Law and Literature,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 7 (Summer 1995): 367-96.
8. The defense attorney proved allegation four by providing the affidavit Kastner had written in support of Kurt Becher. The court decided that allegation three had not been proved in the trial.
9. Contrast Halevi's binary approach to that of the historian Yehuda Bauer who surveys the spectrum of options that were open to the Va'a'dat and discusses them within the historical context of the time, Bauer, Jews for Sale? 145-71.
10. Jews for Sale?., 154.
11. Jews for Sale?., 65. Bauer, Jews for Sale? 163-71.
12. Jews for Sale?., 111.
13. The judge divides his story into three subchapters: “Preparation to the Temptation,” “The Temptation,” and “The Dependence of K. on Eichmann.” Jews for Sale?., 49-51. The description of the temptation is a dramatic moment in the judgment: “The temptation was great. K. was offered the opportunity to save six hundred souls from the impending Holocaust and a chance to somewhat increase their numbers through payment or further negotiations. And not just any six hundred souls, but those very people who were most important and deserving of rescue in his eyes, for whatever reason-if he wished, his relatives; if he wished, members of his movement; and if he wished, the important Jews of Hungary.” Jews for Sale?., 51.
14. Lahav, Judgment in Jerusalem, 134.
15. Judgment in Jerusalem, 135-41.
16. Judgment in Jerusalem., 93.
17. Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 95.
18. Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death., 91.
19. Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death., 92, 102.
20. Cited in Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death., 102-3.
21. Cited in Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death., 103-4.
22. The straightforward application of contract law to the negotiations between Kastner and the Nazis also overlooks the fact that Kastner's contract was with the “law” itself. For this reason Kastner could not rely on the “law” to enforce his “contract.” Kastner was in the position of an illegal gambler (for whom the law does not offer enforcement). As we shall see below, Kastner preferred the metaphor of a “game of roulette” as describing the nature of the relationship with Eichmann much more accurately. See below, note 56.
23. See, for example, The straightforward application of contract law to the negotiations between Kastner and the Nazis also overlooks the fact that Kastner's contract was with the “law” itself., 92.
24. The straightforward application of contract law to the negotiations between Kastner and the Nazis also overlooks the fact that Kastner's contract was with the “law” itself., 105.
25. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 212-19. See also Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 25-51.
26. We can perceive here a connection between time and narrative. Contract law expels time and encourages us to view Kastner as an archetype. When we are introduced to the archetypal story of how he “sold his soul to the Devil,” we grasp at once the beginning and end of Kastner's story-there is no need for us to listen to the details as they unfold over time, and there is thus no need to listen to Kastner's narrative. For an elaboration of the connection between time and narrative, see David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
27. For a discussion of the elimination of the category of “chance” from the historical scholarship during the nineteenth century, see Reinhart Koselleck, “Chance as Motivational Trace in Historical Writing,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 116-29.
28. “Chance as Motivational Trace in Historical Writing,”., 43.
29. Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1943), 23-26: “The earliest German version of the Faust legend pits a Jew against the devil, to whose wiles, of course, the Jew succumbs… Here it is the Jew's refusal to accept the true doctrine that renders him defenseless against Satan” (23). Trachtenberg traces the source of the Faust legend to another well-known legend about Theophilus where the Jew is depicted as a magician operating through the agency of Satan and introduces Theophilus the Christian to the Devil. These legends spring from the medieval fascination with the Devil and his association with the Jews.
30. See E. M. Butler, The Fortunes of Faust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952).
31. The first literary version known is found in the Faust Chapbook published by Spiess in Frankfurt am Maine in 1587. Butler, The Fortunes of Faust, 3-13.
32. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, with an introduction by Sylvan Barnet (New York: New American Library, 1969); Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. John E. Woods (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1997).
33. See Butler, The Fortunes of Faust; see also J. W. Smeed, Faust in Literature (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987).
34. The Fortunes of Faust;., 28-30. According to Freudiger's report (cited in agreement by the judge), Kastner deliberately provided incomplete reports so that no one could have a general perspective like his and compete with him for the leadership role. The Fortunes of Faust;., 46.
35. The Fortunes of Faust;., 51.
36. Segev, The Seventh Million, 265.
37. This is again reminiscent of the Faustian tradition that depicts the contract with the Devil as a kind of “infection.” See J. P. Stem, History and Allegory in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (London: H. K. Lewis, 1975), 11.
38. “We could not look behind Eichmann's cards”; We chose “the German card”; “The loser in this game [of roulette] will also be called a traitor.” Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 49, 56.
39. “We could not look behind Eichmann's cards”;., 228-40. The association of Kastner, the Jewish leader, with greed also has an anti-Semitic tinge.
40. Compare this to Kastner's description of himself as Eichmann's puppet: “We knew that in front of us stands the general editor of the destruction of the Jews. But also the possibilities of rescue were in his hands. He-and he alone-decided on life and death.” Here it is Eichmann who plays God (Kastner's report, p. 38, cited in Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 52).
41. Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 206-38. The transformation of literary fantasy into harsh reality under Nazi totalitarianism is discussed by Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). A recent movie by Roberto Benigni, Life Is Beautiful, attempts the opposite by trying to counter the harsh reality in the Nazi camps with an imaginative fantasy shared by a father and his child. The film tells the story of an Italian Jew who keeps alive his little boy's innocence in a Nazi concentration camp by pretending that the routines of the camp are no more than an intricate game staged for his son's benefit. In my opinion, this attempt fails, but while failing it nevertheless exposes the fantastical element in Nazi imagination.
42. “We did not have any illusions about the Nazi proposals, but we did not sit as judges, our role was to save the lives of Jews, and we had a duty to pass the proposal to the Jewish highest authorities for them to decide. We evaluated the chances as balanced, but not impossible. But we hoped that the Jewish agencies together with the Allies would find a way to continue the negotiation that we began, and to buy a lot of time by doing so.” Kastner's testimony, pp. 42, 44, quoted in Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 66.
43. “We did not have any illusions about the Nazi proposals, but we did not sit as judges, our role was to save the lives of Jews, and we had a duty to pass the proposal to the Jewish highest authorities for them to decide. We evaluated the chances as balanced, but not impossible. But we hoped that the Jewish agencies together with the Allies would find a way to continue the negotiation that we began, and to buy a lot of time by doing so.”., 68-69.
44. Alfred Hoelzel, The Paradoxical Quest: A Study ofFaustian Vicissitudes (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 160.
45. This message, however, is delivered in an outline of Lessing's version of Faust that was not developed any further. See Butler, The Fortunes of Faust, 113-25.
46. Hoelzel, The Paradoxical Quest, 81.
47. The Paradoxical Quest., 86 (ray emphasis). An interesting comparison can be made to Arendt's rejection of Kant's notion of “radical evil” as inadequate to describe Eichmann's moral fault and its replacement with the notion of “the banality of evil.” See letter from Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, New York, December 2, 1960, in Correspondence, 409-10. For further discussion of this issue, see Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); Leora Bilsky, “When Actor and Spectator Meet in the Courtroom: Reflections on Hannah Arendt's Concept of Judgment,” History and Memory 8.2 (Fall/Winter 1996): 137-73 at 150.
48. A letter dated February 13, 1831, quoted by Hoelzel, The Paradoxical Quest, 106.
49. Hoelzel, The Paradoxical Quest, 168-69.
50. “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis,” meaning “do not trust all acts of apparent kindness,” comes from Virgil's Aeneid 2.49. Having besieged Troy for more than nine years because their admired Helen was a captive there, the Greeks pretended to abandon their quest and left the Trojans a “gift” of a wooden horse; once the horse was taken within the walls of Troy, Greek soldiers poured out of its hollow interior and destroyed the city. See Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Rolfe Humphries (New York: Macmillan, 1987). For a retelling of the story, see Rex Warner, Greeks and Trojans (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1951), 177-84.
51. Carol M. Rose, “Giving, Trading, Thieving, and Trusting: How and Why Gifts Become Exchanges, and (More Importantly) Vice Versa,” Florida Law Review 44 (1992): 295-326. This mistrust of gifts is also apparent in the anthropological literature that demonstrates how what appears to be a gift can be explained as a contractual exchange (obligatory and self-interested). See for example Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
52. Rose, “Giving, Trading, Thieving, and Trusting,” 298, 300. (Rose suggests taking the opposite direction and discovering the “gift” element in ordinary contractual transactions.) For a reflective essay about the need to retain the singularity of “gift” as a distinct category from “contracts,” see Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).
53. This “dark side” of gifts can be traced back to the etymology of the word dosis in Latin and Greek, which means both “gift” and “poison.” “The Latin and especially Greek use of dosis to mean poison shows that with the ancients as well there was an association of ideas and moral rules of the kind we are describing.” Derrida, Given Time, 36, referring back to his note to “Plato's Pharmacy” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 131-32, 150-51.
54. The moral blame of the Trojans is traced back to the warning given to them by the prophet Laocoon (“Are you crazy, wretched people? Do you think they have gone, the foe? Do you think that any gifts of the Greeks lack treachery?… Do not trust it, Trojans, do not believe this horse. Whatever it may be, I fear the Greeks, even when bringing presents” [lines 50-60]), a warning that they ignored. Likewise, Judge Halevi blamed Kastner for ignoring a warning given by Moshe Kraus, the head of the “Israeli office” in Budapest, that the negotiations were a “dangerous Nazi plot.” Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 32.
55. The moral blame of the Trojans is traced back to the warning given to them by the prophet Laocoon (“Are you crazy, wretched people?., 39.
56. The judge overlooked an important distinction between “gift” and “contract” that lies in their relation to time. Mauss (as interpreted by Derrida) reminds us that in a barter society, the idea of gifts introduces into the relations of people the interval of time. In other words, the difference between a barter-contract and a gift is that while the former demands immediate reciprocity, the latter “gives time” to the recipient before returning the (value of) the gift. The real element of gift in a gift turns out to be time. Derrida, Given Time, 41: “The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to the extent it gives time.” Eichmann's proposal to Brand and Kastner that they exchange “trucks for blood” returned them to a barter society (the subject of Mauss's study). Kastner and Brandt, who did not have the trucks at their disposal, could only hope from this bargain for the “gift of time” as a way of saving the Jews. Their whole bargaining was aimed at gaining time. Judge Halevi missed the point of the bargaining by reducing it into a quid-pro-quo transaction devoid of any “deferral” in time.
57. The judge writes: “All the above circumstances come to show that it was very clear to K. from the beginning of his negotiation with the Nazis until the destruction of the ghetto of Kluj, what was the price that was expected and taken by the S.S. for saving his relatives and friends in Kluj; this price included, with the full knowledge of Kastner, the cooperation of the leaders in Kluj.” Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 105.
58. The judge writes: “All the above circumstances come to show that it was very clear to K. from the beginning of his negotiation with the Nazis until the destruction of the ghetto of Kluj., 96: “The leaders of Kluj were not heroes, they did not withstand the strong temptation created by the rescue plan designed by K. and the Nazis. This plan acted on the camp of the privileged Jews like a collective bribe, that brought them, whether they noticed it or not, to collaboration with the Nazis.” In pages 101-15 of the judgment, the judge explains Kastner's full responsibility for securing the collaboration of the Jewish leaders.
59. The judge writes: “All the above circumstances come to show that it was very clear to K. from the beginning of his negotiation with the Nazis until the destruction of the ghetto of Kluj., 91-92.
60. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 76: “It is well known that the belief in a Jewish conspiracy that was kept together by a secret society had the greatest propaganda value for anti-Semitic publicity, and by far outran all traditional European superstitions about virtual murder and well poisoning.”
61. Bauer, Jews for Sale? 168: “The Jews, in Himmler's ideology, were the real enemies of Nazism. They ruled the Western Allies and they controlled Bolshevik Russia… A basic desire to murder all the Jews does not contravene a readiness to use them, or some of them, as hostages to be exchanged for things that Germany needed in its crisis; the negotiations could be held with either the foreign Jews themselves or with their non-Jewish puppets.”
62. For a critical discussion of the use of criminal conspiracy in Nuremberg, see Judith Shklar, Legalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 171-77.
63. Legalism, 177-78.
64. Since the trial was not a criminal trial against Kastner, but a libel trial against Gruenvald, criminal conspiracy was not a legal charge brought against Kastner. The legal discussion concentrated on the question of whether Kastner “assisted” the Nazis in bringing about the mass murder of the Jews of Hungary. Only in the narration of the facts, and in order to find a causal link between the actions of Kastner and the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, do we encounter conspiracy as an organizing theme of the judge's historical narrative. For the need to distinguish between the meaning of causality in law and in history (and a warning about the conflation of the two through conspiracy law), see Shklar, Legalism, 194-99. Like any good conspiracy story, the language of secrecy is dominant in Halevi's narrative. He refers to the “Reich's secret” and says that “the secret of the rescue was transformed into a secret about the extermination.” Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 57, 62-63.
65. Appeal, Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 2017, 2076.
66. Lahav, Judgment in Jerusalem, 135.
67. Appeal, Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 2099. Interestingly, similar questions about the possibility of equality and free will arise in the literary controversy about Faust's moral blame, given the trickery and lies of Mephistopheles and the enormous inequality between the parties. There are scholars who argue that Faust was simply blind to the invalidity of the contract. Halevi's blindness is similar in this respect to Faust's. (I thank Carol Rose for suggesting this analogy.) Indeed, Goethe, who was aware of this problem, tried to equalize the position of the parties by transforming the “contract” into a “wager.”
68. There is, however, an ambiguity in Agranat's approach of how much legal positivism (i.e., separating law from morality) is required in a judgment that raises such complicated moral dilemmas. On the one hand he insists on their separation (reasonable for the law is not necessarily morally approvable). Appeal, Attorney General v. Gruenveld, 2120: “There will be those who will argue that from a strictly moral point of view, and no matter what the practical considerations are, it was the duty of the head of the Committee to allow the leaders of Kluj to decide for themselves about the significance of the information about Auschwitz and to determine alone the fate of their community members. My answer to this will be that this matter belongs to the question of the reasonableness of the means that were chosen by Kastner to save the Jews of Hungary from destruction. It is a question of whether the line of financial negotiations with the Nazis raised the chance of achieving this mission.” But at other times Agranat seems to argue that also from a strictly moral perspective Kastner should not be condemned. See, for example, There are scholars who argue that Faust was simply blind to the invalidity of the contract., 2082: “My opinion is that even if Kastner did not achieve his aim, one cannot condemn him morally, under one condition-that he was allowed to think, given the circumstances at the time, that the way of commercial negotiations with the Germans offered the best chance-even the only chance-of saving the majority of the Ghetto Jews.
69. There is, however, an ambiguity in Agranat's approach of how much legal positivism (i.e., separating law from morality) is required in a judgment that raises such complicated moral dilemmas., 2058. Translated by Lahav, Judgment in Jerusalem, 132.
70. Michael A. Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 12.
71. Instead of Halevi's dramatic subtitles like “Preparation for the Temptation,” “The Temptation,” “K's Dependency on Eichmann,” “The Origins of Secrecy,” Agranat divided the decision chronologically: “From 19.3.44 to 7.7.44 (the holocaust in the provincial towns)”; “From 8.7.44 to 14.10.44 (time of recess)”; “From 15.10.44 to the end of December 1944 (the partial expulsion of the Jews of Budapest).” Appeal, Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 2022.
72. For the difference between narrative and chronology in terms of moral closure, see Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1-23. Bernstein rejects the need to produce historical narratives with closure in order to allow “the point of view of any single moment in the trajectory of an ongoing story [to have] significance that is never annulled or transcended by the shape and meaning of the narrative as a (supposed) whole.” See Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions, 28.
73. The Nazis on their part used the grand aims of the Zionists against them. For example, when Kastner and his friends approached Eichmann and suggested allowing a limited number of Jews to emigrate, Eichmann reacted by saying that this plan was not big enough to provide a total (in Nazi terms “final”) solution to the Jewish problem. Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 49-50 (quotation from Brand's report, 20-22).
74. The Nazis on their part used the grand aims of the Zionists against them., 178-189.
75. See, for example, Richard Weisberg, Poetics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Robin West, Narrative, Authority, and Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Richard Posner, Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); James Boyd White, Heracles’ Bow (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirts, eds., Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
76. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Poets as Judges: Judicial Rhetoric and the Literary Imagination,” University of Chicago Law Review 62 (1995): 1477-1519, 1479.
77. “Poets as Judges: Judicial Rhetoric and the Literary Imagination,”., 1480-81.
78. Robert Weisberg, “Proclaiming Trials as Narratives: Premises and Pretenses,” in Law's Stories, 61-83, 65.
79. As early as 1930 the legal realist Jerome Frank identified this function of law: “Man… driven by fear of the vagueness, the chanciness of life, has need of rest. Finding life distracting, unsettling, fatiguing, he tries to run away from unknown hazards… [and] to postulate a legal system… free of the indefinite, the arbitrary and the capricious.” Jerome Frank, Law and the Modern Mind (1930; Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1963), 196-97. For an interesting discussion of the relations between law and literature in this respect, see Gretchen A. Craft, “The Persistence of Dread in Law and Literature,” Yale Law Journal 102 (1992): 521-46.
80. The first poem (1 July 1955) “Around the Trial” consists of three parts that are devoted to different aspects of the trial (“Two Paths,” “The Nature of the Accusation,” “The Tone of Discussion”); second poem, “More about the ‘Two Paths'” (22 July 1955); third poem, “Judgment by Principle” (29 July 1955); fourth poem, “About the Moral to the Generation” (12 August 1955). The poems appear edited and revised in Alterman's Ketavim Be Arbaa Kerachim (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Meuhad, 1962) 3:421-40. For explanations of the poems and a detailed discussion of the Alterman controversy, see the interpretive essay by Dan Laor in Nathan Alterman, Al Shtei Ha-Derachim [Between Two Roads], ed. Dan Laor (Tel-Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Meuhad, 1989), 114-55, especially 122-23. For a comparison between the Arendt and Alterman controversies in the light of the role of the intellectual in the Holocaust trials, see Leora Bilsky, “In A Different Voice: Nathan Alterman and Hanna Arendt on the Kastner and Eichmann Trials,” Theoretical Inquiries in the Law 1(2) (July 2000): 509.
81. Alterman, Kastner's Notebooks (private notes, not published) (on file in Alterman's Archives, Tel Aviv University).
82. Roland Barthes, “Dominic, or the Triumph of Literature,” in Mythologies, trans., Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1972), 43-46. Gaston Dominici, the eighty-year-old owner of the Grand Terre farm in Provence, was convicted in 1952 of murdering Sir Jack Drummond, his wife, and daughter, whom he found camping near his land.
83. Barthes, “Dominic,” 46. In the original French text they are called: “la litterature de repletion” and “la litterature du dechirement.” Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957), 53.