Jerusalem (symbol)
Jerusalem is a symbol of eternity. This cradle of three monotheistic religions has been always fought over. Ben-Gurion’s decision to have the Eichmann’s trial there is symbolic, too. He wants “to attract attention to this trial, he wants to show the world that they are also responsible for all the misfortunes that the Jewish people had to endure during the war.” “Newspapermen and magazine writers” flock to Jerusalem “from the four corners of the earth.” They are supposed to be an audience at this play—they are supposed to watch a spectacle “as sensational as the Nurenberg Trials.”
Monstrousness (allegory)
Even though Adolf Eichmann is often characterized as a calm and composed person, he is allegorized as a “monster"—beyond the normal order of things, something strange and horrible lying inside a veneer of absolute normalcy. “It is difficult to believe that this pale and ghostlike figure in the glass booth is responsible for the death of six million people," Arendt notes. Adolf Eichmann is a man whose utter "banality," his lack of capacity to think for himself or question things, turns him into a heartless creature without mercy or conscience. Eichmann's evil acts, then, are an allegory for the capacity for monstrousness that lies within all human beings—if we don't think for ourselves.
Questions (motif)
Hanging over the trial is a series of questions: questions that are not explicitly asked by the prosecution, but that motivate the trial overall. As Arendt argues, the Israeli government hopes that Eichmann's trial will reveal the answers to questions "of seemingly greater import" than the explicit question of Eichmann's guilt—questions like “How could it happen?” and “Why did it happen?,” of “Why the Jews?” and “Why the Germans?,” of “What was the role of other nations?” and “What was the extent of coresponsibility on the side of the Allies?”
The Law (motif)
The book opens inside the courtroom, and much of the action takes place there. The question of the law— what is legal, what is illegal, and especially the destruction of the distinction between the two—recurs again and again. Arendt focuses on the proceedings of the courtroom and the trappings of the legal system to stress that the law is not only a tool for maintaining social order and ensuring that evil is punished, but in a larger sense a procedure for accessing the truth, for giving a full and complete account of things. When the distinction between legal and illegal is destroyed—which was the goal of Nazism as a system—we lose the ability to think about right and wrong, and to orient our actions.
Language (motif)
Arendt stresses the importance of language, often specifically describing how its abuse can lead to much larger negative consequences. She derides what she perceives to be the high-flown, empty moralizing of the Israeli prosecution. She mocks Eichmann's frequent misuse of cliched sayings, and Nazi Party blather. She also notes with horror the disturbing bureaucratic language that the Nazis used to discuss the murder of the Jewish people, a language that had to be mastered not just by "evil" men like Eichmann but by lowly secretaries and stenographers. In all of these instances, language is being used dishonestly or in a thoughtless way, and the consequences extend not just to conceptual confusion, but to real-world horrors.
