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LAW, CULTURE AND

THE HUMANITIES

If Only More Such Stories Could Have Been Told: Ways of Remembering Resistance

Bronwyn LeebawUniversity of California, Riverside, CA, USA

AbstractThis article considers how greater attention to the memory of resistance might alter the parameters of contemporary efforts to reckon with systematic abuse. I take the Eichmann Trial, which featured numerous testimonies on resistance, as a point of departure for considering the implications of distinctive ways of remembering resistance. The article begins by examining how narratives of heroic resistance were integrated into the trial, and considers the responses of two prominent commentators: Hannah Arendt and Haim Gouri. Arendt’s comments offer insight into how exemplary resistance informs the recovering of judgment and agency as responses to complicity, whereas Gouri’s account underscores the role of “unheroic”and anti-heroic testimony in addressing the limitations of exemplars.

Keywordsmemory, transitional justice, resistance, war crimes, Arendt, political violence

Stories of those who took action to resist abuses – those who took to the streets to protest, those who disobeyed orders to shoot, those who risked their lives to aid someone targeted for persecution – remain at the margins of human rights reports, truth commission hear-ings, and war crimes trials. Under the influence of the human rights movement, contem-porary efforts to reckon with atrocity and political violence center almost exclusively on the experiences of victims and perpetrators. When stories of resistance do surface in such accounts, commentators often remark on their unique power. Hannah Arendt famously wrote that testimony presented at the Eichmann Trial regarding Anton Schmidt’s efforts

Corresponding author:Bronwyn Leebaw, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA. Email: Bronwyn.leebaw@ucr.edu

599714 LCH0010.1177/1743872115599714Law, Culture and the HumanitiesLeebawresearch-article2015

Article

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1. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1963), p. 231.

to aid Jewish partisans was like a “bright light in the midst of impenetrable darkness.”1 Arendt insisted that things would be different in Israel, Germany, and the world, “if only more such stories could have been told.” Yet even when they are told, such stories linger at the periphery of official efforts to reckon with political violence and are rarely, if ever, discussed by commentators or scholars. Instead of treating this marginalization of resist-ance as an inevitable feature of international and transitional justice, this article takes it as a puzzle and a problem to be explored. What comes into view when examples of resistance are brought from the margins to the center of efforts to reckon with atrocity? How are assumptions about the possibility or impossibility of resistance already impli-cated in judgments regarding guilt and complicity in atrocity? And how might attention to exemplars such as Anton Schmidt challenge or transform contemporary approaches to transitional justice?

This article takes the Eichmann Trial as a point of departure in addressing such ques-tions. It examines how narratives of resistance were integrated into the trial and how prominent commentators responded to those narratives. It argues that narratives of resist-ance are threatening and disruptive for investigations of atrocity because of the way that they illuminate and demand the possibility of agency in contexts marked by widespread and varied forms of complicity. Yet for the same reason, such narratives are also vital to the process of reckoning with systematic injustice and abuse. To the extent that contem-porary frameworks for investigating and judging political violence set aside or bury the memory of resistance, they also abandon an important resource for efforts to judge and understand patterns of complicity, as well as efforts to recover political agency as a strat-egy for challenging complicity in systematic atrocity.

I focus on the Eichmann Trial for two reasons. First, in the period prior to the Eichmann Trial, Israeli society had placed the heroes of armed Jewish resistance at the center of official Holocaust narratives, while marginalizing the stories of victims and survivors that were not identified with armed resistance. One political goal of the Eichmann Trial was to shift away from what had become a divisive and painful approach to public mem-ory, which had been preoccupied with heroes of resistance, to one that would acknowl-edge the voices of victims. The Eichmann Trial is a useful starting point, then, for examining how certain ways of remembering resistance are seen as threatening in rela-tion to the framing of contemporary transitional justice projects. Second, although Eichmann’s prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, sought to assert a clear distinction between victims and perpetrators, he also called a number of witnesses to the stand to testify about their experiences as members of Danish, Dutch, and Jewish resistance organizations. Arendt’s insistence that things might have been different “if only more such stories could have been told” is striking in light of the fact that testimony concerning Anton Schmidt was only one of many that related stories of resistance. As an influential war crimes trial that incorporated lengthy narratives of resistance alongside victim testimony, then, the Eichmann Trial is a useful starting point for exploring the ramifications of such narra-tives for contemporary transitional and international justice practices.

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2. See, for example, Adam Branch, “Uganda’s Civil War and the Politics of ICC Intervention,” Ethics and International Affairs 21 (2007), 179–98; David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2005); Kieren McEvoy, “Victims and Transitional Justice: Voice, Agency, and Blame,” Socio-Legal Studies 22(4) (2013), 489–513; Gearoid Millar, “Ah Lef’ Ma Case Fo God: Faith and Agency in Sierra Leone’s Postwar Reconciliation,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 18(2) (2012), 131–43; Harvey Weinstein and Laurel Fletcher, “Violence and Social Repair: Rethinking the Contribution of Justice to Reconciliation,” Human Rights Quarterly 24(3) (2002), 573–639.

3. Alexander Keller Hirsch, “Fugitive Reconciliation: The Agonistics of Respect, Resentment, and Responsibility in Post-Conflict Society,” Contemporary Political Theory 10(2) (2011); Hirsch, ed., Theorizing Post-Conflict Reconciliation: Agonism, Restitution, and Repair (New York: Routledge, 2013); Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 53; Ruti G. Teitel, Globalizing Transitional Justice: Contemporary Essays (Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 20; Ernesto Verdeja, “Moral Bystanders and Mass Violence,’’ in New Directions in Genocide Research, ed. Adam Jones (New York: Routledge, 2011).

4. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989); Erin Baines, “Complex Political Perpetrators: Reflections on Dominic Ongwen,” Journal of Modern African Studies 47(2) (2009), 169–91. On the theme of political agency in transitional justice, see also Mark Drumbl, Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy (Oxford University Press, 2012); Helen Kinsella, The Image Before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Cornell University Press, 2011); Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin and Catherine Turner, “Gender, Truth and Transition,” UCLA Women’s Law Journal 16(2) (2007); Rosemary Nagy, “Transitional Justice as a Global Project: Critical Reflections,” Third World Quarterly 29(2) (2008), 275–89; Catherine O’Rourke, Gender Politics in Transitional Justice (New York: Routledge, 2013); Kimberly Theidon, “Gender in Transition: Common Sense, Women and War,” Journal of Human Rights 6 (2007), 453–78.

5. David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2005).

The analysis developed here is informed by the contributions of legal and political theorists that have critically examined the theme of political agency in relation to the work of human rights and humanitarian interventions. A prominent critique that emerges in this literature centers on the way that the victim–perpetrator binary of these frame-works denigrates or obfuscates political agency in response to systematic injustice.2 The obfuscation of political agency has profound implications for the way that contemporary human rights and transitional justice institutions frame claims about responsibility, diverting attention away from the roles of bystanders and beneficiaries in past wrongs and offering an anemic vision of democratic political change.3 The victim–perpetrator framework makes it difficult to understand and address the dilemmas of agency experi-enced by those that occupy what Primo Levi referred to as, “the gray zone” and those that Erin Baines identifies as “complex political perpetrators,” who are victims of the same crimes that they are guilty of committing.4 The human rights movement, writes David Kennedy, “portrays victims as passive and innocent, violators as abnormal, and human rights professionals as heroic.”5 This vocabulary, he adds, makes it difficult for those

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6. Svetlana Broz, Good People in an Evil Time: Portraits of Complicity and Resistance in the Balkans (Other Press, 2005); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2001); Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009); Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2008); Kader Asmal, Reconciliation Through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid’s Criminal Government (Palgrave, 1998); Mahmood Mamdani, “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa,” Diacritics 32(3–4), (2005), 33–58.

7. Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (Yale University Press, 1993), p. 188.

8. See Susan Neiman, “Victims and Heroes,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of Michigan, March 26, 2010.

9. In a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, Chris Lebron contends that Martin Luther King Day has become an occasion to celebrate, “not so much the man, but the hope that claiming him for all Americans exculpates us from the sins of … racial marginalization.” Chris Lebron, “What, to the Black American, is Martin Luther King Jr. Day?” The New York Times, The Opinion Pages, January 18, 2015, 7:15 PM.

who have suffered from injustice to recover a “complex sense for their human responsi-bility,” to acknowledge the particularity and the ambivalent aspects of their experience.

If the victim–perpetrator framework obfuscates the logics of complicity and the com-plexities of political agency, attention to narratives of resistance challenges this obfusca-tion by bringing agency back into view. Indeed, an impressive and diverse array of thinkers has insisted that the memory of resistance ought to be an important part of the process of reckoning with the past.6 Narratives of resistance challenge denial regarding the extent and nature of complicity, while simultaneously illuminating neglected exam-ples of protest and solidarity. For the same reason, however, such narratives can be pro-foundly unsettling for transitional justice. Focusing narrowly on the victim–perpetrator framework has been a way to avoid potentially volatile conflict, backlash and fear asso-ciated with efforts to investigate and judge patterns of complicity in systemic abuse.

Another reason that narratives of resistance are so unsettling, I suggest, is that the idea of resistance is commonly identified with narratives of heroic agency. The commemora-tion of heroic resistance against a common enemy is a common feature of state-legitima-tion.7 However, when figures such as John Brown or Nelson Mandela are recognized as heroes for rebelling against the authority of the state, this is also seen by many as a threat to the values of stability and order.8 For others, the concern is that in publicly commemo-rating heroic resistance, we adopt a triumphal and celebratory view of the past instead of confronting the irredeemable and devastating persistence of injustice.9 Finally, narratives of heroic resistance are implicated in the shame and shaming of those who did not resist or did not do so in ways that are considered heroic. Instead of marginalizing the theme of resistance because of its affiliation with heroism, then, we might consider alternative ways of remembering resistance, as well as alternative ways of thinking about heroism. This article explores this idea by taking the Eichmann Trial as a point of departure for locating and examining three different ways of remembering resistance to atrocity, with attention to the way that each approach is associated with a distinctive response to the

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10. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 17–21, 55, 56, 175–81.

11. Haim Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann, trans. Michael Swirsky (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), p. 43.

problem of complicity in systematic atrocity: heroic resistance, exemplary resistance, and unheroic or antiheroic accounts of resistance.

The first section begins by consider how the Eichmann Trial addressed the theme of heroic resistance and the way in which the memory of ghetto uprisings had become implicated in the shaming and judgment of the survivor population in public debates that took place in Israel prior to the trial. Like contemporary transitional justice investiga-tions, the Eichmann Trial asserted the victim–perpetrator binary as a strategy for divert-ing attention away from volatile questions regarding complicity. In contrast with contemporary transitional justice frameworks, however, Hausner addressed this problem by incorporating a range of resistance narratives into the Eichmann Trial and by expand-ing the category of heroic resistance to encompass the act of giving testimony and sur-vival itself. The second section analyzes Arendt’s response to testimony regarding Schmidt and the other resistance narratives presented at the trial, with attention to her writings on the theme of exemplarity and exemplary resistance. Arendt identified politi-cal action with the heroic and with the idea of establishing a kind of immortality through our words and deeds.10 Nevertheless, I suggest that Arendt’s analysis of exemplary resistance offers a distinctive alternative to conventional heroic narratives – one that challenges the contemporary emphasis on state legitimation, rule of law, and legalism by insisting upon the importance of cultivating practical judgment and political agency as responses and alternatives to pervasive complicity. The third section examines Haim Gouri’s account of the Eichmann Trial, published as Facing the Glass Booth. Gouri charts his own shift from a preoccupation with narratives of heroic resistance to the rec-ognition of what Lawrence Langer refers to as “unheroic memories,” which confront the shattered self and the collapse of agency, as well as anti-heroic forms of resistance that do not conform to the binaries associated with heroic agency. In so doing, Gouri also makes the case for the power of listening and the role of testimony in revealing the dis-tortions of exemplars. The article concludes by addressing how attention to these distinc-tive ways of remembering resistance might transform the theory and practice of transitional justice.

I. Heroic Resistance and Survival

The Eichmann Trial marked a turning point away from what had become a deeply divi-sive approach to remembering heroic resistance in Israel. In the period prior to the Eichmann Trial, heroic narratives of ghetto resistance dominated Israeli public memory. Gouri suggests that this focus on heroic resistance was a direct response to pervasive feelings of shame. “The Holocaust was a source of shame to us, like some awful blem-ish,” he writes, “But the heroism we embraced as a source of pride, giving us the right to hold our heads high.”11 Schoolbooks in use at the time celebrated ghetto fighters and

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12. Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, trans. Chaya Galai (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 94.

13. James E. Young, “When a Day Remembers: A Performative History of Yom Hashoah,” History and Memory 2 (1990).

14. Hanna Yablonka and Moshe Tlamim, “The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel: The Nuremberg, Kapos, Kastner, and Eichmann Trials,” Israel Studies 8(3) (2003), p. 11.

15. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang), p. 109.

16. Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 181. 17. Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 262; Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust, p. 73. 18. Leora Bilsky, “Judging Evil in the Trial of Kastner,” Law and History Review 19(1) (1999),

117–60.

partisans, while devoting little space to the mass killings of the Holocaust.12 Holocaust Heroism and Remembrance Day was not originally meant to commemorate “mere destruction,” writes James Young, but to advance the vision of “a new, fighting Jew and their rejection of the old passive Jew as victim.”13

Accounts of the period in Israel between 1948 and 1961 portray a situation in which the Holocaust survivors were seen as a source of embarrassment or viewed with suspi-cion. References to the shame felt by victims and the shaming of victims are pervasive in such accounts. In a work entitled, How Did You Survive? Mark Dworzecki, a survivor of the Vilna ghetto, describes his feelings of shame as self-imposed and externally imposed. “I hear their voices speaking,” he writes, “we have perished … and you are alive.” He also describes the feeling that he has been “branded” with shame, like a “mark that will never be expunged.”14 Read in the context of other accounts of the period, such com-ments can be disentangled to reveal several layers of naming and shaming. The Holocaust itself was seen as a “Jewish defeat,” writes Tom Segev, “its victims were censured for having let the Nazis murder them without fighting for their lives.”15 This sentiment was mapped onto pre-existing shame projected by Zionist Jews onto Jewish life in the Diaspora, portrayed as a life of assimilation, compromise, weakness, and naivety, as well as shame at having lived relatively good lives in Palestine while the Holocaust was tak-ing place and their own helplessness to stop the killings.16 This sense of shame was projected back onto the victims, who were portrayed as having been either shamefully passive in the face of the mass killing and grotesque humiliations, “like sheep to the slaughter,” or presumably compromised, as exemplified by the question, “how did you survive?” or “what did you do to survive?”

Passed in 1950, Israel’s Nazi and Nazi Collaboration Law was used in the 1950s to try Jews alleged to have served as Kapos in concentration camps in a series of trials that were not widely covered in the press.17 The subject of Jewish collaboration became a major national controversy in the context of the “Kastner Affair” – the 1954 trial of Michail Gruenwald for libel against Rudolph Kastner. As a leader of the Jewish Council in Hungary, Kastner had engaged in talks with the Nazis for a period of weeks, pursuing a deal to save the lives of one million Jews in exchange for ten thousand trucks. Instead, approximately 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz and Kastner succeeded in saving only 1,685 Jews. The group that he was able to save included a significant number of his own friends and relatives.18 Kastner went on to become a prominent leader in the Mapai party.

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19. Bilsky, “Judging Evil,” 119; Yechiam Weitz, “The Holocaust on Trial: The Impact of the Kasztner and Eichmann Trials on Israeli Society,” Israel Studies 1(2) (1996).

20. Weitz, “The Holocaust on Trial,” 6. 21. Bilsky, 124. 22. Judgment of Benjamin Halevi, Attorney General v. Makiel Grunwald, District Court,

Jerusalem, June 22, 1955. 23. Weitz, “The Holocaust on Trial,” 6. 24. Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the

Holocaust (Yale University Press), p. 155. 25. Bilsky, “Between Justice and Politics: The Competition of Storytellers in the Eichmann Trial,’’

in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Aschheim (University of California Press, 2001), p.234; Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 341.

Gruenwald, a religious rightwing activist hostile to the Mapai party, circulated a set of viru-lent charges against Kastner, accusing him, among other things, of selecting friends and family for rescue, withholding information from Hungarian Jews and deceiving them into ignoring alternative escape routes in an effort to save a chosen handful.19 What began as a libel trial against Gruenwald, then, turned into a political trial of Kastner.

Gruenwald’s defense lawyer, Shmuel Tamir, maintained that European Jewry con-fronted two choices during the Holocaust – cooperation or active resistance. Tamir also linked the willingness to negotiate with the Nazis to the more general role of pragmatic negotiations in politics. In public debates, writes Weitz, Kastner was portrayed as “the symbol of the Diaspora shtadlan (influenced by Gentile powers), diametrically opposed to … heroes – those who fought with the Nazis.”20 The judge presiding over the case, Benjamin Halevi, sided with the defense, concluding that Kastner had succumbed to the “temptation” to rescue his friends and “sold his soul to the devil.”21 Bilsky observes that the political trial of Kastner offered a response to the question that was at the center of the shaming of survivors at the time, “what could account for the ‘unheroic’ deaths of millions of Jews during the Holocaust?” The accusations against Kastner offered a way to redeem those who had “gone quietly” by explaining that they had been deceived by their own leaders. “The trust of the Jews in the misleading information … led the victims to remain quiescent in their ghettos,” argued Halevi, “it seduced them into not resisting or hamper-ing the deportation orders.”22 By invoking the language of contract law, adds Bilsky, Halevi framed Kastner as a rational, calculating, individual and implied a distinct moment in time in which a choice was made to become complicit in Nazi murder. Ultimately, the verdict in the Kastner case was overturned, but not before Kastner was murdered. The assassination prompted expressions of shock in the media and the beginnings of a public reconsideration of the way in which the behavior of survivor communities and Jewish collaboration had become the focal point of harsh and divisive judgments.23

One goal that Hausner associated with the Eichmann Trial, then, would be to move away from divisive internal judgments by using the trial to focus attention on the distinc-tion between Jewish victims and Nazi perpetrators. Douglas characterizes his strategy as an effort at “erasing the Gray Zone,” which had been the source of such intense conflict in the decade leading up to the trial.24 In his memoirs, Hausner writes that he explicitly asked those participating in the Eichmann Trial to “abstain from internal reckoning,” stating that, “this was the trial of the murderer and not his victims.”25 Hausner took steps

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26. On this set of linkages, see for example, Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 177; Douglas, The Memory of Judgment, p. 158.

27. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 283. 28. Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, p. 329. 29. Bilsky, “Between Justice and Politics,” 250. 30. Quoted in Douglas, The Memory of Judgment, p. 128. 31. Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 163; Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History

of the Jews in Europe During the Second World War (Holt, 1987).

to create what Bilsky calls an “acoustic separation” between the Kastner Affair and the Eichmann Trial, despite the fact that many of the judges, attorneys, and witnesses partici-pated in both trials. This emphasis on the victim–perpetrator distinction and the impor-tance assigned to allowing space for victim testimony remain prominent features of contemporary transitional justice. However, in contrast with contemporary truth com-missions and war crimes trials, the Eichmann Trial did not set aside questions about victim agency and it did not dispense with narratives of resistance. Instead, Hausner’s strategy set aside divisive and painful attention to the theme of victim collaboration with questioning that aimed at locating heroic agency in the shared project of survival. The Eichmann Trial helped to establish a new public understanding of the identity of the Holocaust survivor, linking that identity to a conception of heroic resistance that was simultaneously an emblem of, and explanation for, Zionism.26

In questioning the witnesses, Hausner repeatedly asked them to explain why they had not resisted. Arendt was irritated by this line of questioning, which she took to be “silly and cruel.”27 It is clear from Hausner’s memoirs, however, that his intention was to give them the opportunity to convey before an uncomprehending audience how their agency could have been so eroded. Reflecting on the responses he received to this question, Hausner concludes that the failure of victim resistance was due, not to any fault of their own, but to the “satanic character of the program.”28 At the same time, Hausner sought to locate moments of heroic agency in the fact of survival and in the act of giving testi-mony. Allowing victims to tell their stories in their own words became a basis for relocat-ing the victim and survivor community in the position of the accusing party.29

As Douglas observes, Hausner sought to frame victim testimony in accordance with a “heroic memory” narrative. “Heroic memory,” as coined by Lawrence Langer, aims to “salvage from the wreckage of mass murder, a … tribute to the victory of the human spirit.”30 Langer locates this impulse in Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust, which concludes by arguing that “even passivity was a form of resistance,” that “to die with dignity was a form of resistance,” and that “to give witness by one’s own testimony” was also “in the end, to contribute to a moral victory.”31 Douglas sees evidence of the same “heroic mem-ory” narrative in Hausner’s attempts to lead victims to conclude their testimonies on a “note of renewal and triumph” as well as his efforts to impose a unified or coherent logic onto the disjointed life stories that he encountered over the course of the trial.

In his reflections on the trial, Hausner writes that the witnesses served to represent, and even, in a way, to summon, the dead. The survivors, he recalls, were “almost closer to the dead than the living,” adding that through their testimony, “the nameless and

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32. Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, p. 328. 33. Douglas, The Memory of Judgment, p. 106. 34. Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, p. 333. 35. Testimony of Zivia Lubetkin Zuckerman, The Eichmann Trial, Session 25, May 3, 1961. 36. Testimony of Rachel Auerbach, The Eichmann Trial, Session 26, May 3, 1961.

faceless dead [came] to life for a moment before our eyes to have their agonies recorded before returning to their mass graves and their role as statistics.”32 Hausner would rou-tinely bring testimony to a close by asking the witness how many people had lived in his or her town and how many had returned. The effect of such repeated exchanges, one after another, is to force the audience to confront at once extraordinary suffering and loss as given meaning in the context of a single person’s experience and the astonishing scale of the annihilation. Thus, Hausner positioned the testimony of survivors as a basis for a kind of justice – a response to efforts by the Nazis to wipe out the memory of Jewish life in Europe.33 Witness testimony also became the basis for a heroic vision of reconciliation – between Israel and the lost world of the Diaspora, between the expanding community of survivors and the previously established Jewish community in Palestine, between the past and present, and even between the living and the dead.

Narratives of organized Jewish resistance were also incorporated into the trial record. “Here was a chance to bring out countless acts of heroism with which people were gener-ally less acquainted,” wrote Hausner of this decision.34 The judges did not support this rationale and moved repeatedly to limit this kind of testimony on the grounds that it digressed from the object of the trial. They ultimately allowed lengthy testimony from several members of organized resistance groups, though they would urge Hausner to guide the witnesses better. For the purposes of this analysis, two things are particularly notable about Hausner’s approach to guiding these witnesses. First, he questioned resist-ance leaders in such a way as to draw attention to their role in spiritual and cultural preservation, identifying this as a major form of resistance. Second, he allowed members of the organized resistance space to defend those who had not joined their efforts.

Hausner would generally begin by encouraging the witness to describe the cultural life of their towns and communities prior to the war. He would then request that each witness explain what steps had been taken to resist Nazi efforts to shut down the cultural life of Jewish communities. Thus, the heroes of the resistance who appeared at the trial began their narratives with lesser-known tales of their efforts to organize concerts, plays, and dances for the youth of the ghettoes. Zivia Lubetkin Zuckerman, a hero of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, stated that her first act of “revolt” was an effort to “preserve the human, social, and cultural character of the youth.”35 When Rachel Auerbach took the stand, Hausner led with the question, “What did you do so that the Jews would not degenerate spiritually?” Auerbach went on at some length, describing a flourishing artistic and cul-tural life in the Warsaw Ghetto, including concerts, readings of literature, and speeches. “Would it be possible to define the situation thus – that on the brink of destruction, there was some joy of Jewish creativity in Poland?” “It was amazing,” Auerbach replied, “even a new form of music was created.”36 And, observing that Jews were permitted to play Chopin and Mendelsohn, but not Beethoven, Auerbach reported that Beethoven sympho-nies had been performed as an act of revolt.

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37. Testimony of Rivka Kuper, The Eichmann Trial, Session 26, May 3, 1961. 38. Testimony of Abba Kovner, The Eichmann Trial, Session 27, May 4, 1961. 39. Testimony of Abba Kovner, The Eichmann Trial, Session 27, May 4, 1961. 40. Testimony of Zivia Lubetkin Zuckerman, The Eichmann Trial, May 3, 1961. 41. Gideon Hausner, “The Attorney General’s Opening Speech,” The Trial of Adolf Eichmann,

Session no. 6, April 17, 1961.

Hausner invited Auerbach and other witnesses to tell the stories of the risks they had taken, not only to maintain intellectual and cultural life, but also to preserve the relics and documents of that life. Rivka Kuper related the risks taken by Gusta Davidson Draenger to write her memoir, later published as Justyna’s Diary, on scraps of toilet paper that had been smuggled in by fellow inmates, who later smuggled the writings out of prison following Draenger’s death.37 Draenger’s heroism was identified, not only with her leadership in a fighting organization, but also in her act of witnessing and her contri-bution to the preservation of memory – the same work now being pursued in context of the trial and its incorporation of witnesses testimony. Identifying the work of witnessing and the preservation of cultural memory as forms of heroic agency was another way to bridge the gulf between “heroes and sheep.”

The leaders of the armed resistance were also offered the opportunity to address the question as to why so many others had not resisted. Abba Kovner, leader of the Vilna resistance and famous for having penned a fiery call for Jewish youth to rise up in arms against the Nazis, scolded the audience for having judged those who did not resist. 38 It should not be surprising that resistance was so minimal under conditions of terror and starvation, Kovner told the court. What was surprising was that a fighting force had emerged at all.39 Zivia Lubetkin Zuckerman emphasized that people were afraid to resist, not because of the risks to their own lives, but to the risks their actions presented for oth-ers. “If anyone lifted a finger,” she stated, “hundreds of Jews paid with their lives.”40 Living under conditions of random terror and starvation destroyed the sense that there was any kind of logic to action and reduced the capacity to think clearly. “Were we greater heroes? I would not say so,” she concluded. Thus, testimony from the heroes of the armed resistance called for an end to the judgment of survivors and refuted the bina-ries that had been invoked in inquiries of Jewish collaboration.

Hausner also included testimony on the resistance of Germans, Danish, and Dutch citizens. In his opening statements, he observed that tens of thousands of Germans had risked their lives to oppose the regime and to rebel against it, cataloguing the variety of forms that German resistance had taken. Testimony regarding German resistance was relevant, he argued, not only when it concerned insights regarding Eichmann’s charac-ter, but also to prove that it was possible to refuse participation in the genocide. Those who did not want to participate in mass murder, according to testimony from Judge Musmanno, were simply reassigned.41 Including stories of German and European resist-ance, then, was a way to take on Eichmann’s claim that he had no choice but to “follow orders.” More broadly, it was a way to shift collective attention away from the unset-tling topic of Jewish collaboration and focus instead on exposing and condemning European complicity.

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42. Gusta Davidson Draenger, Justyna’s Narrative, ed. Eli Pfefferkorn and David H. Hirsch, trans. Roslyn Hirsch and David H. Hirsch (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, Amherst Press, 1996), p. 33.

43. Draenger, Justyna’s Narrative, p. 37. 44. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Final Report, Vol. I (Cape Town: Juta,

1998), pp. 53, 124.

The memoirs that Gusta Davidson Draenger compiled on bits of toilet paper during her imprisonment begin with a haunting introduction. “From this prison cell that we will never leave alive, we young fighters who are about to die salute you,” wrote Draenger. “We offer our lives willingly for the cause,” she added, “asking only that our deeds be inscribed in the book of memories.”42 Draenger describes her comrades as a group of very young people with diverse ideological backgrounds, but a shared sense of them-selves as heroes. Aware that they would not survive, they hoped that their acts of resist-ance might be remembered as an expression of their idealism and as an inspiration to others. As Draenger put it, they “wanted to light a spark in every young person” in order to “motivate them to effective action.”43 The hope of being remembered as heroes gives meaning to resistance in contexts where any kind of action appears futile. It offers solace in the image of future community that might one day recognize the value of lives deni-grated in the present and reciprocate today’s sacrifices with remembrance. To remember heroes, then, is a way of honoring this hope and encouraging those called upon to take action in the present that they might one day be remembered as well.

Yet the close identification of resistance with heroism is also one reason that the memory of resistance is so challenging and unsettling for efforts to reckon with political violence. Such stories are typically bound up in a binary logic of agency that posits a set of stark choices between effective action and passive surrender, between idealism and “deals with the devil,” between noble individuals and the forces of evil. These logics also cast political negotiations and compromise as dangerous forms of corruption and betrayal, a slippery slope to annihilation. The image of the hero as one who is capable of breaking free from structural conditions is invoked in ways that makes it difficult to understand the conditions that undermine agency. Recounting such stories can be a strat-egy of denial that functions to silence victims and shame them for their own suffering.

Hausner’s response to this problem was not to exclude testimony regarding resist-ance, but to incorporate it into the proceedings alongside victim narratives, replacing what had been a divisive framing of heroic memory with one meant to unify. His approach may be usefully compared with that of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Both institutions emphasized the victim–perpetrator distinction as a strategy for setting aside divisive questions regarding collaboration and complicity and as a strategy for conceptualizing reconciliation as a process of state legitimation. Yet South Africa’s TRC set aside narratives of heroic agency and struggle and compelled members of liberation groups to testify either as victims or perpetrators, while straining to locate commonality in the shared experience of victimhood and in the idea of a “nation of victims.”44 In contrast, Hausner’s questioning located a basis for domestic reconcilia-tion in an expanded idea of heroic agency that would encompass the experiences of

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45. Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust, pp. 99–110. 46. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 121.

survival, resistance, and preservation, while retaining the heroic logics of good versus evil – logics that Hausner and Ben Gurion mapped onto the state’s conflicts with neigh-boring Arab countries.45 As witnesses to the Eichmann Trial, Arendt and Gouri both rejected Hausner’s emphasis on heroic survival and against Hausner’s effort to erase the gray zone, both insisted on the importance of resistance narratives as a strategy for exposing and addressing the problem of complicity. Their accounts of the trial offer dis-tinctive and somewhat conflicting alternative avenues for remembering resistance.

II. A Bright Light: Exemplary Resistance

Among all of the resistance narratives presented at the Eichmann Trial, it was only the story of Anton Schmidt that appeared to Arendt as a “bright light” in the darkness. Arendt’s reactions to testimony on the theme of resistance were somewhat varied. She remarked on the significance of testimony regarding Danish resistance, arguing that it was a story that should be taught in political science classes, but wrote dismissively of Heinrich Gruber, who was the only German gentile to relate his own efforts to resist Nazi policies. She was moved by Zivia Lubetkin Zuckerman’s account of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, describing it as the “purest and cleanest” account of Jewish resistance.46 However, she was apparently unmoved by the testimony of Abba Kovner, given that she more or less ignored Kovner’s own harrowing story of resistance and reacted instead to Kovner’s very brief discussion of Anton Schmidt. Arendt characterized the very exist-ence of armed ghetto uprisings as a kind of “miracle,” but expressed frustration about the inclusion of testimony regarding these uprisings, arguing that they had little to do with the legal goals of the trial.

Of course, Arendt’s commentary on the resistance narratives presented at the Eichmann Trial was bound up in her analysis of complicity and she was accused of inconsistency, unfairness, and callousness in her treatment of both themes. Here, I want to consider Arendt’s responses to accounts of resistance at the Eichmann Trial in connec-tion with her writings on exemplarity, and to compare Arendt’s treatment of exemplary resistance to Hausner’s focus on heroic survival. Arendt analyzes exemplarity and exem-plary resistance as responses to the problem of widespread complicity in systematic atrocity, to the ways that complicity reveals the limitations or inadequacy of prevailing standards of judgment, and to the ways that confronting the problem of complicity requires the exercise of practical and political judgment, as well as political agency.

The importance of exemplars should be familiar to anyone who has studied war crimes trials, truth commissions, or human rights reporting in general. What such diverse institutions and organizations have in common is the challenge of finding a way to judge abuses that are politically authorized and systemic – abuses that are carried out on a large scale. Where thousands of people may be deemed guilty of an offense, then it is impos-sible, politically and logistically, to put them all on trial. And even where a large number of defendants are tried, it is common to see prosecutors or advocates select exemplary

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47. See Diane Orentlicher, “Settling Accounts: The Duty to Prosecute Human Rights Violations of a Prior Regime,”Yale Law Review 100 (1991); Payam Akhavan, “Justice in the Hague, Peace in the former Yugoslavia? A Commentary on the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal,” Human Rights Quarterly 20 (1998).

48. On this theme, see Mihaela Mihai, “When the State Says ‘Sorry’: State Apologies as Exemplary Political Judgments,” Journal of Political Philosophy 21(2) (2011).

49. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 40–43.

50. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, p. 77. 51. Alessandro Ferrara, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Power of Judgment

(New York: Columbia Press, 2008), Preface. 52. Arendt, “Introduction: Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt

(New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 38.

defendants to symbolize a more general judgment of the party or that authorized abuse.47 Truth commissions routinely showcase the experiences of exemplary victims in order to aid an audience in making sense of voluminous testimonies. Official state apologies aim to exemplify a shift in the way that past wrongs are to be judged.48

Arendt saw exemplars as vital to the process of judging organized atrocity – not only as a response to the scale of such abuses, but to their nature as politically author-ized wrongs characterized by widespread complicity. To judge such wrongs is to iden-tify a breakdown, collapse, or failure inherent in the norms or laws that have guided people in the past, which means that such norms can no longer guide the process of judgment. In this context, determinative judgment, which involves the application of existing standards, is inadequate, and reflective judgment is required. Arendt under-stood reflective, or political judgment to entail an effort to seek agreement on criteria for judgment, in a context marked by conflict or uncertainty over the question as to which standards ought to apply.49 In the absence of agreed upon principles, Arendt wrote, the creative use of exemplars offers a way to illuminate the meaning of a gen-eral principle that could not otherwise be defined.50 Exemplars also have a communi-cative power, which, as Alessandro Ferrara puts it, “liberate an energy that sparks our imagination.”51 Arendt’s writings on exemplarity and judgment help to make explicit an aspect of transitional justice that is often unacknowledged – the creative use of examples to articulate a shift from one order or authority to another, from one way of evaluating violence to another.

Arendt’s writings on exemplars and exemplary resistance also challenge the framing of contemporary transitional justice debates in at least three important ways. First, Arendt contends that exemplars of resistance inform the assertion of political agency in defining the relationship between past and present and challenge the idea that we must passively inherit traditions and norms. Arendt famously used the term “pearl diving” to character-ize Walter Benjamin’s particular approach to deploying fragments of writing and quota-tions in his work. “[T]here is no more effective way to break the spell of tradition,” she wrote, “than to cut out the ‘rich and strange’ corals and pearls from what had been handed down in one solid piece.”52 Arendt’s use of exemplars has been likened to this kind of

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53. Kirstie McClure, “The Odor of Judgment: Exemplarity, Propriety, and Politics in the Company of Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 60.

54. Hanna Fennichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 243.

55. Bilsky, “Between Justice and Politics,” p. 240. 56. Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn

and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007). 57. Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research 38 (1971), 436.

“pearl diving.”53 As Hanna Pitkin puts it, Arendt calls for an approach that simultane-ously inherits and rejects tradition.54 It is an approach to the past that selectively pre-serves and destroys. Reflecting on French writer René Char’s expression of nostalgia for the terrible years of occupation and his enigmatic claim that the French resistance was an “inheritance that was left without a testament,” Arendt rejects the idea that we can simply turn to tradition as a kind of “testament” that determines which values, standards, or practices are to be inherited. This kind of passive relationship with the past leaves us unprepared for the task of responding critically to the ways in which tradition can be invoked to rationalize abuse and conflict. Alternatively, Arendt contends, we might look to moments of resistance to illuminate neglected possibilities for community, political engagement, and agency. Her approach to tradition stands in striking contrast to Hausner’s effort to ground the Eichmann Trial in a seamless, redemptive narrative of Jewish history based on traditional Jewish historiography.55 Where Hausner sought continuity in tradi-tion, Arendt exposed rupture and discontinuity. She located a “hidden tradition” of resist-ance in the figure of the “Jew as pariah,” as represented by the writings of Heinrich Heine and Bernard Lazare, which she took to exemplify an alternative to the assimila-tionist figure of the “parvenu.” Recovering the “Jew as pariah” as an exemplar of resist-ance was also a strategy for selectively drawing guidance from tradition while simultaneously challenging its authority.56

Arendt’s writings on obedience and disobedience also contain a powerful rejoinder to what has become a central premise of human rights activism and a good deal of human rights scholarship – the idea that war crimes trials and human rights activism succeed by cultivating an internalized obedience to human rights law and norms. The trouble with habitual obedience, she observed, is that “[w]hat people really get used to … is not the content of the rules, but the experience of ‘never making up their minds.”’ Arendt viewed habitual dependence upon any “prescribed rules of conduct” as dangerous because it leaves people vulnerable to those who manipulate such rules for nefarious ends. “If somebody should show up, who, for whatever reasons and purposes, wishes to abolish the old ‘values’ or virtues,” she wrote, “he will find it easy enough provided he offers a new code.”57 In developing this theme, she cites Socrates as an exemplar of the kind of thinking that she takes to be necessary to the task of maintaining a critical posture in rela-tion to one’s authorities. For Arendt, Socrates modeled an approach to critical thinking that does not depend on mastering a body of law or sophisticated philosophical texts, but

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58. See Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton University Press, 1999).

59. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 57. 60. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 295. 61. Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” in Essays in Understanding 1930–

1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 1994), p. 126.

62. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 233. 63. Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 88. 64. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 232–3; Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York:

Harcourt, 1973), p. 434.

only requires a simple skill that anyone is capable of mastering – the skill of engaging in a conversation with one’s own conscience.58

The story of Anton Schmidt similarly exemplified the potential for disobedience in a context of disappointing passivity. Read in the context of her broader analysis of the Eichmann Trial, Schmidt’s story serves as a powerful rejoinder to Eichmann’s own claim that he was just a “small cog” in the machinery of atrocity. Arendt emphatically rejected this as a legal defense. “If it is a crime,” she wrote, “all ‘cogs’ are turned back into perpetra-tors.”59 Nevertheless, she recognized the “cog theory” as a salient feature of the psychology of complicity and the refusal to make judgments about complicity.60 The “cog theory” appeals to the idea that we cannot really be held responsible for knowing or understanding the abusive logics of systems that we inhabit and support, given that our vision of the whole is obscured by imperatives that keep us focused on the minutiae of our day to day work. The “cog theory” also invokes the network of defenses associated with what it is reasona-ble or possible to do, in the event that such abuses are in fact evident to those who aid in facilitating them – claims such as, “if I didn’t do it someone else would” or “I was only following orders.” These elements of the cog theory are bound up in assertions regarding the futility of agency and the impossibility of judgment. As Arendt observed in an essay written shortly after the Eichmann Trial, “[w]here all are guilty, no one can be judged.”61 Arendt cites Schmidt as the exemplar of a principle that refutes such logics. “Under condi-tions of terror most people will comply,” she wrote, “but some people will not.”62 The example of one who did not comply better positions us to judge those that did.

Yet Schmidt was not simply acting on his own in refusing to comply with an abusive order, and Schmidt, unlike Socrates, did not simply withdraw from politics. Rather, his act of disobedience took the form of aiding an organized resistance group and in that sense exemplified the possibility of collective agency in response to repression. Schmidt’s resistance also arguably exemplified the distinction that Arendt drew between acts of solidarity, which enable action on behalf of those suffering, and pity, which perversely seeks power through the glorification of suffering.63 Finally, the recounting of Schmidt’s story in the context of the Eichmann Trial, exemplified something important for Arendt. In reflecting on why the testimony was so significant for her, Arendt returned to a theme that she had briefly addressed in Origins of Totalitarianism – the idea that authoritarian regimes seek to establish “holes of oblivion” into which “all deeds, good and evil, would disappear.”64 Pitkin observes that Arendt understood the significance of Schmidt’s story

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65. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, p. 215. 66. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 232–3. 67. Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 341. 68. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 131. 69. Testimony of Heinrich Gruber, Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Session 42, May 16, 1961. 70. Testimony of Heinrich Gruber, Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Session 42, May 16, 1961. 71. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 359.

in relation to the diary of Peter Bamm, a German physician who wrote that had anyone “seriously protested,” he or she would have been arrested and disappeared, therefore rendering the actions “morally meaningless” and “practically useless.”65 Schmidt’s story was significant, wrote Arendt, because it demonstrated that holes of oblivion do not exist. “One man will always be left alive to tell the story … Hence, nothing can be prac-tically useless, at least, not in the long run.”66

Why, then, does Arendt seem to suggest that the story of Anton Schmidt was the only example of German resistance that was told over the course of the trial? Heinrich Gruber, a German gentile who had survived internment in Dachau for his efforts to rescue Jews, reportedly captivated the audience with his testimony. As a protestant Bishop, Gruber had been involved in the rescue of thousands of Jews. His rescue efforts had involved him in face-to-face meetings with Eichmann. Hausner contrasted Gruber’s choices with those of Eichmann, representing Gruber as the “good German,” who demonstrated the possibility of civil courage in the face of evil.67 Arendt dismissed Gruber’s testimony as “highly embarrassing,” asserting that he, like Eichmann, “spoke in clichés” that had nothing to do with “the reality of the situation.”68 She was not only unimpressed with Gruber’s testimony, but also with the idea of Gruber as an exemplar of German resist-ance. Gruber’s testimony referred to the idea that “demonic powers” had “enslaved” the people, thereby invoking the struggle of goodness against evil. Arendt rejected appeals to “goodness” as a response to atrocity. The idea of striving for goodness, in her view, would do little to enable people to resist systematic atrocity in the absence of the capacity for critical judgment and agency.

Gruber had characterized Eichmann as a “man who sat there like a block of ice or a block of marble,” uniquely impervious to communication, and an example of the “merce-nary trooper” who “as he dons his uniform, doffs his conscience.”69 When asked whether he had tried to influence Eichmann, Gruber reiterated this message, adding that he had attempted to speak directly to Eichmann about the immorality of persecution, but that Eichmann remained impervious to any kind of reflection. “If he did not draw any conclu-sions from my example,” concluded Gruber, “then I really don’t think words could have gotten through to him.”70 Quoting Eichmann’s assertion that nobody had reproached him in the “performance of his duties … not even Probst Gruber,” Arendt criticized Gruber for his failure to be more vocal and direct in his opposition to Eichmann, arguing that Gruber’s dealings with Eichmann had functioned to legitimate Nazi policy.71

Arendt’s response to this aspect of Gruber’s testimony reflects the distinction she drew between exemplary resistance as offering insight into strategies for agency that should be available to the ordinary person, and the conventional identification of heroic

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72. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 131. 73. Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone (New York and London: Melville House, 2009), p. 357. 74. Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone, p. 32. 75. Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for An Ethic of Care (New York:

Routledge, 1993), p. 3.

resistance with idealized character traits, such as extraordinary goodness. Yet in deni-grating Gruber’s rescue efforts and his dealings with Eichmann, Arendt invokes certain binaries associated with heroic agency: idealism versus compromise, action versus inac-tion, and public versus private forms of protest. Her analysis of Gruber’s testimony also runs into contradictions that reveal the limitations of these binaries. After all, Arendt shared Gruber’s view that communication was impossible with Eichmann, calling into question her assertion that Gruber could have made a difference to Eichmann by vocal-izing his opposition more emphatically.72

An interesting response to the contrast that Arendt draws between the exemplary resist-ance of Anton Schmidt and what she takes to be the less than exemplary goodness of Gruber, may be found in Hans Fallada’s novel, Every Man Dies Alone. Every Man Dies Alone offers a fictionalized account of an actual working class couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, who dropped approximately 200 subversive postcards on the streets of Berlin between 1940 and 1942. The Hampels began their actions after their son was killed in the invasion of France. Their postcards contained brief messages that disparaged the regime, urging Germans to stop “following the Fuhrer like sheep,” to think for themselves, and to slow down and sabotage their work, among other actions against the regime.

The actions of the Hampels were, in many ways, consistent with Arendt’s analysis of exemplary resistance. Fallada’s portrayal of the couple, who become Otto and Anna Quangel in the text of the novel, is also consistent with Arendt’s analysis. They are pre-sented as an exceedingly ordinary working class couple, lacking any noticeable qualities of goodness or empathy. Their resistance campaign was public, principled, and defiant, aimed at urging others to recover their capacity for critical judgment, disobedience, and agency Yet Fallada depicts the impact of their actions as perverse and destructive. The postcards have precisely the opposite of their intended effect, because they endanger and terrify everyone who finds them, even those already committed to resisting the regime. Thus, when Otto finally has the opportunity to witness a stranger’s reaction to finding one of the postcards, he immediately recognizes that their impact is “nothing but fear.”73 Every Man Dies Alone also recovers and seeks to redeem an alternative form of resist-ance in the actions taken by several women whose lives intersect with those of the main characters. These characters practice quieter, less public forms of resistance, alongside an effort to nurture and protect and cultivate goodness in those around them. “[W]e are like good seeds in a field of weeds,” explains a young factory worker named Trudel, “[a]nd the good seeds can spread their influence.”74 These characters are portrayed as exem-plifying a kind of “ethic of care,” as conceptualized by Joan Tronto, and their quieter, less visible actions ultimately have a far more transformative impact than the Quangels’ postcard campaign.75

Fallada thus subverts the heroic binary whereby principled defiance and refusal are seen as exemplary, while private, hidden forms of resistance are treated as suspect or

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76. Geoff Wilkes, “Afterword’’ for Every Many Dies Alone by Hans Fallada (New York and London: Melville House, 2009), p. 517.

77. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 122. 78. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 124. 79. See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (Yale University

Press, 1982), pp. 338–55. 80. See Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust, p. 140.

cowardly. This could be read as self-serving. As a German living under Nazi rule, Fallada was, as Geoff Wilkes puts it in his afterword to Every Man Dies Alone, “neither an eager collaborator nor a resistance fighter.”76 Fallada’s reversal of values offers a convenient way to spin his own complicity and that of those around him, a way to repackage passiv-ity as a quieter, yet more powerful form of resistance. Arendt might also challenge the elevation of goodness in Fallada’s account of resistance and the idea that preserving or nurturing goodness could be an effective strategy of resistance. Arendt recognized that one of the insidious features of the “cog theory” was the way that it allowed people to believe in their own inherent goodness even as they participated in unimaginable brutali-ties, and to assert their own good intentions as a strategy of denial. Nevertheless, Every Man Dies Alone offers a powerful demonstration of how the binaries associated with heroic and exemplary resistance can obfuscate the range of avenues for agency in the face of atrocity.

If Arendt recognized the testimony concerning Schmidt as a welcome and useful digression, she dismissed the testimony regarding Jewish resistance as a problematic and unhelpful digression. Why would this be? She offers two reasons for this. First, Arendt thought the narratives were being deployed to support nationalist propaganda. “The political intention … was not hard to guess,” she wrote, “Mr. Hausner wanted to demon-strate that whatever resistance there was had come from Zionists.”77 She observed that the resistance testimonies actually demonstrated that this was not the case and that resist-ance had come from young people of all political orientations, but Arendt saw this lesson as an unintended outcome of Hausner’s strategy. Second, in one of the most controversial passages of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt stated that the narratives of victim resistance had also functioned as a kind of “smokescreen” for the more pervasive phenomenon of Jewish complicity.78 She added that such narratives would have been a more useful digression, if only the questioning had aimed at shedding light on the complicity of Jewish leaders.

Such comments famously elicited a furious response from Jewish intellectuals in Israel and in the United States.79 Read in the context of contemporary frameworks for Holocaust remembrance, Arendt’s comments are certainly insensitive. Yet her commen-tary on the Jewish Councils was arguably somewhat mild in comparison with Judge Halevi’s verdict that Kastner had “made a deal with the devil.” Like Halevi, Arendt reacted harshly to the idea that privileged Jews had been singled out for rescue.80 In accepting this logic, she suggests, Jewish leaders had played taking the role of the par-venu to an unprecedented extreme, negotiating for positions of privilege within a regime that was in the process of annihilating them. In contrast with Halevi, however, Arendt did

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81. Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust, p. 141, quoting a letter to Scholem. 82. Young-Bruehl, For the Love of the World, p. 345. 83. Seyla Benhabib, “Perspective and Narrative in Hannah Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem,’”

History and Memory 8(2) (1996), 39. 84. Eric Stover, The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in The Hague (University

of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 111, 124–5. 85. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 344. 86. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, p. 215.

not suggest that Jewish leaders had been in a position to choose between complicity and heroic resistance. When Hausner asked witnesses why they had not resisted, Arendt took the question to be “silly and cruel” because she saw organized resistance as generally unrealistic for Jews living under Nazi rule. The choice that Jewish leaders faced, as Arendt saw it, was not between organized rebellion and compliance, but between refusal and compliance. “In order to do nothing,” she wrote, “one did not need to be a saint.”81 Arendt recognized that Jewish leaders were not in a position to mount an effective rebel-lion, but she wanted to insist that they retained some degree of agency in the form of the capacity to maintain the position of the pariah, to withhold support for the system and refuse to grant any form of recognition to its hierarchies and categories. From this per-spective, the ghetto uprisings might have been awe-inspiring, but were also obfuscating when invoked as exemplars of Jewish agency.

Even sympathetic readers observed that Arendt’s indictment of Jewish leaders seems to be strangely out of proportion to their potential culpability, while questioning the accuracy of her claims regarding Jewish complicity and resistance.82 Why, as Seyla Benhabib puts it, “was it so difficult to understand that Jewish communities and their leaders could not grasp the magnitude, as well as the unprecedentedness of the crime which was being perpetrated against them?”83 Of course, it is not really unusual for members of persecuted groups to express greater anger and disappointment in response to the failings of friends, neighbors, and those within their own communities than they express in response to leaders that orchestrated their persecution.84 When Arendt wrote, in a letter to Scholem, that “wrong done by my own people naturally grieves me more than wrong done by other people,” she was expressing a fairly common sentiment.85

To some extent, however, these concerns reflect the limits and tensions inherent in the very idea of exemplary resistance. The selection of exemplars is inherently at odds with the goal of understanding the conditions, dilemmas, and inevitable compromises that ordinary people confront and why they acted as they did. As Pitkin observes, Arendt insists upon the possibility of agency, but when she moves to explain the circumstances that facilitate it, “explanation threatens to undermine the idea of agency,” leading her to make contradictory claims.86 Like heroes, exemplars must have acted in ways that are visibly extraordinary and set them apart from those that failed to act as they did, which means that exemplars cannot represent or explain the behavior of the average or ordinary person. Unlike heroes, however, exemplars are selected to reveal possibilities for agency that might have been available to ordinary people and so distort experience if they do not accurately represent the availability of such possibilities. These tensions are exacerbated by the way that her analysis of exemplary resistance retains binaries associated with

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87. Alan Mintz, “Foreword,” Facing the Glass Booth, p. xii. 88. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 31. My emphasis. 89. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 43.

heroic agency. By framing resistance as a clear choice between refusal and compliance made at a distinct moment in time, Arendt’s analysis unnecessarily obfuscates the condi-tions under which agency might be eroded, the agonizing moral dilemmas associated with such conditions, and the significance of hidden, private forms of resistance.

III. Unheroism and Anti-heroism

An Israeli poet and journalist, Haim Gouri produced daily reports on the Eichmann Trial for Lamerhav, the newspaper of a left-labor party. An edited collection of his reports was subsequently published as Facing the Glass Booth. In contrast with Arendt’s focus on the legal, political and historical questions at the center of the trial, Gouri’s account is written as a raw, personal, and fragmented response to what he witnessed on a day-to-day basis. It charts a radical shift in his perceptions of victimhood and resistance over the course of the proceedings. Gouri takes himself as the central exemplar of his analysis, as well as the primary object of his own judgment. Vacillating between the first person singular and the first person plural, he suggests that his own attitudes at the outset of the trial exem-plify that of his generation. Born in Tel Aviv in 1923, Gouri had served as a soldier in the 1948 War of Independence and was influenced by the Zionist Socialist Youth Movement and, what is described in the preface to Facing the Glass Booth as, a disdain for Diasporic life “verging on a loathing for the image of the enfeebled, passive, God-ridden, Yiddish speaking Jew of Eastern Europe.”87

At the outset of the account, Gouri writes of the revulsion he experiences upon hear-ing the testimonies of survivors. “I did not want to listen to this broken individual go on and on about his ills and indignities, the way the mob jeered at him and his fellow Jews,” writes Gouri after describing the testimony of Morris Fleischman, “I would have pre-ferred to go today to see the military parade at the stadium, to see Jews at their strongest and most beautiful.”88 Gouri expresses frustration at having to endure several victim testimonies before the heroes of the resistance appear to tell their stories. “From time to time we felt like asking Hausner, ‘when are we going to get to the revolt?’”89 He writes of the eagerness with which the Israeli audience awaited the appearance of the heroes. “Was it the disgrace of belonging to a people that had been defeated so effortlessly that made us want to see them so badly?” he asks.

In this passage, Gouri articulates the kind of hostility to survivors that Hausner hoped to address with the trial. He acknowledges his own profound desire to silence the victim. In recognizing this yearning, Gouri also conveys his initial response to the trial as a growing awareness of his own strategies of denial. To some extent, then, Gouri’s response conforms to Hausner’s expressed goal of using the trial as an opportunity to set aside divisive judgments regarding victim behavior and collaboration. Over the course of the trial, Gouri is indeed persuaded to set aside his desire to judge survivors for “going qui-etly.” He stops recoiling from stories of weakness and humiliation and begins to listen.

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90. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 276. 91. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 275. My emphasis. 92. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 170. 93. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 175. 94. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 171.

Gouri’s response to Fleischman’s testimony also hints at some of the ways that his own account will challenge Hausner’s focus on heroic survival, as well as Hausner’s effort to frame victim testimony as a justification for the state-building project. At the outset of his account, Gouri recognizes his own yearning for symbols of militarism and heroism as another species of denial, a way of shutting out the reality of the survivor experience. Over the course of the trial, Gouri comes to recognize his yearning to silence and judge the survivor population as a denial of his own shame and the shame of Zionists at their own helplessness in the face of the killings. “[W]e judged them instead of our-selves,” he observes, “We had refused to judge ourselves, but we cannot refuse in their presence.”90 Gouri restates this point in different ways whenever his account addresses testimony concerning Jewish collaboration or failure to resist. Where Arendt found it tedious to watch Hausner ask each witness why they had not resisted, Gouri reports that their responses to this question had a powerful impact on the audience. “These questions fly back in our faces, wounding, shattering,” he writes. Listening to testimony presented in response to these questions, Gouri suggests, had the effect of awakening the Israeli audience to its own suppressed feelings of shame. “Something is honing in on us inexo-rably … the refrain, ‘And you? What the hell did you do?’”91

Gouri describes himself as being profoundly altered by what, using Langer’s termi-nology, may be classified as the narratives of “unheroism” that were conveyed in the witness testimonies. Unheroic memory is “imbued with a spirit of irony,” writes Langer, “its defense against a reconciliation that it cannot embrace.”92 Based on his own study of recorded testimonies from Holocaust survivors, Langer argued that their experiences did not correspond to the available vocabulary associated with moral agency, particularly those invoked in narratives of heroic survival. To really listen to such narratives, argued Langer, requires us to set aside the desire to impose familiar categories onto a set of experiences that had shattered those categories and to apply moral logic to a set of condi-tions that defied all logic. Langer saw the impulse to identify survival as an affirmation of life, a kind of triumph, as a way of succumbing to the urge “to find joy at the end of the story,” a way of softening and avoiding what witness testimonies actually convey about the experience, which, as Langer summarizes it, might be better understood as simply “staying alive.”93 “Words like survival and liberation, with their root meanings of life and freedom,” wrote Langer, “entice us into a kind of verbal enchantment that too easily dispels the miasma of the death camp ordeal.”94 The idea of survival as a form of heroic agency, Langer argued, was a way of avoiding the message conveyed in testimony after testimony, that those imprisoned in the camps experienced their lives as devoid of any form of moral choice and that many experienced the moment of liberation from the camps as a new form of imprisonment. Langer distinguishes between the role of story and plot in survivor testimony. He develops this idea in connection with a quote from a

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95. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, pp. 173–4. 96. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 31. 97. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 275. 98. Sonali Chakravorti, Sing the Rage: Listening to Anger after Mass Violence (University of

Chicago Press, 2014), p. 121.

survivor who told the interviewer that he found it “difficult to strike a balance between consciously remembering these things and being possessed by them.”95 The idea of tes-timony as the presentation of a story, writes Langer, suggests a past that is consciously remembered and reported by a unified self. The role of a story is to bring relief, Langer writes. In contrast, narrative as plot, “stops the clock” and “seizes” the witness, bringing pain instead of solace, revealing a fragmented self with only a limited capacity to deter-mine the shape of the narrative. Where heroic memory searches for a story that “honors the link between agency and fate,” writes Langer, unheroic memory records the absence of such a link, and the corrosive feelings of lingering guilt over the collapse or failure of agency.

Gouri describes his response to witness testimony in a manner that resonates with the distinction that Langer draws between “story” and “plot,” yet as experienced from the standpoint of the spectator. Spectators to the Eichmann Trial, writes Gouri, were forced to confront the limits of their ability to select the kinds of stories they wished to hear about the Holocaust. The testimony of Morris Fleischman “grabbed hold of us by the scruff of our necks,” he writes, “as if to say ‘sit still and hear me out.’”96 The witness testimony, he writes, had finally enabled the Israeli audience to understand, “not from the abstraction that ‘it was hard to resist,’ but from the detailed stories that, at the end of the day, left us, too, close to the state of utter paralysis in which the victims found them-selves the whole time.”97

Gouri’s attention to unheroism stands in striking contrast with Hausner’s focus on heroic memory and survival as well as Arendt’s analysis of exemplary resistance and offers an alternative response to divisive judgments regarding victim collaboration. Hausner’s strategy aimed to set aside the theme of victim collaboration, to render it invis-ible by focusing on heroic victimhood and by erasing the gray zone. Arendt insisted on bringing the problem of European complicity and the theme of Jewish collaboration back into view. Her writings use examples of resistance as a strategy for strengthening her indictment of those who failed to resist, and for modeling political agency as an alterna-tive to compliance. By acknowledging the importance of unheroic testimony, Gouri offers an alternative to both responses. Like Arendt, Gouri insists upon the importance of bringing the problem of victim collaboration into view by challenging the trial’s empha-sis on heroic victimhood. However, Gouri’s reflections on unheroic testimonies also expose the limitations inherent in exemplary resistance as a response to collaboration and suggest an approach to addressing those limitations through the practice of what might best be characterized as a kind of radical listening.

Gouri’s response to unheroic testimony is consistent with Chakravorti’s call for an “ethic of listening” that encompasses the range of emotions, including anger, that arise in victim testimony.98 From this perspective, the failure to engage in empathetic listening leads to a hollow kind of judgment – one that distorts or fails to understand the

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99. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 108.100. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 108.101. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 93.102. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 35.103. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 130.

experiences under investigation. Yet the kind of listening that Gouri models goes further than this, empathizing with the shattering emotions on display in the testimony to the extent that he professes to experience the very paralysis that had once been the target of his resentment and disgust. Gouri names and reins in his own yearning to impose mean-ing on the testimonies: “What have we managed to convey so far? Nothing.” He also resists conventional approaches to reporting and journalism that would position his own voice as an authority on the trial or allow his own responses to overshadow the voices of witnesses. In doing so, he encourages the reader to listen as well, by conveying the testi-mony in a way that resists easy resolution or reduction – as fragments of stories, voices, gestures, and half-remembered moments.

Gouri uses this strategy in addressing the problem of victim collaboration. He analyzes the judgment of Jewish leaders who negotiated with the Nazis as a manifestation of the general desire, on the part of Zionists, to avoid examining their own responsibility and feelings of guilt. “[U]nable to bear the yoke of guilt,” he writes, “we are trying to foist it on our leaders.”99 Thus, instead of avoiding the gray zone of collaboration, he calls for its expansion to encompass a wider range of forms taken by collaboration, proposing a kind of solidarity in guilt in lieu of a sanctifying identification with heroes or innocent victims. The question, “why didn’t you resist,” he writes, “implicates us all in the first person plu-ral.”100 However, Gouri does convey the voice of a child named Marta, who, according to the testimony of her mother, posed this very question to her family and urged them to run away as they all stood waiting to be executed. Gouri also conveys the agonized accusa-tions leveled at Jewish leaders from the survivor population: “You fed us tranquilizers! You collaborated with the Nazis and saved your own families! My family perished!”101

Like Hausner, he recognizes the airing of victim testimony as a form of resistance against annihilation – and a “revolt against Germans who turned names into numbers.”102 However, Gouri rejects the idea that he, or anyone else, could speak for the dead. And where Hausner imagines that the testimonies of survivors have, in some way, summoned the dead and allowed them to be represented at and in some sense redeemed by the trial, Gouri responds to Dinur’s testimony with a devastating paragraph composed of a single brief sentence: “European Jewry no longer exists.”103 Gouri not only challenges Hausner’s assertion that a central lesson of the trial is the need for a strong Jewish state, but the very desire to impose meaning on the testimony. “[C]ould it be,” he asks, “that there is no les-son?” Gouri thus positions the act of witnessing unheroic testimony as a strategy of unhe-roic resistance against annihilation, as well as the erasure of survivor experience.

Gouri’s account of unheroic testimony thus challenges Arendt’s analysis of exem-plary resistance in a couple of ways. Where Arendt values exemplars for their role in mediating emotions, for establishing critical distance from the details of experience, Gouri suggests that it is only through the effort to gain some kind of proximity to the emotional details of experience that people can come to grasp the scale and significance

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104. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 267.105. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 267.106. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 270.107. Chakravorti, Sing the Rage, pp. 101–105; Leora Bilsky, “When Actor Meets Spectator

in the Courtroom: Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Judgment,” in Judgment, Imagination, and Politics, ed. Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), pp. 257–86.

108. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 66.

of the atrocities. Gouri condemns the tendency to turn the mass killings “into some sort of abstraction or symbol, in order to avoid the shock and speechlessness of a face-to-face encounter with the victims.”104 From this perspective, the distancing role of exemplars can foster a form of denial – a way of shutting out the full range of emotions needed to confront the meaning and significance of atrocity. He suggests that the witness testimony is valuable precisely because it shatters this distancing and mediating role of exemplars, forcing people to confront the intimate details of experience. Hearing the testimony, he observes, meant that Israelis could no longer “set up some imaginary anonymous case and put words in its mouth.”105 The witnesses, then, were not peripheral to the facts of the case, he argues, “they were the facts” They did not impart new knowledge, but a dif-ferent way of knowing, he writes, “through which the catastrophe emerged in all its concreteness through a fog of generalities.”106

The different ways that Arendt and Gouri responded to narratives of resistance reflect their diverging views on the relationship between the role of exemplars and testimony in processes of reckoning with atrocity. As Chakravorti and Bilsky both observe, Arendt’s writings on exemplarity are animated by visual metaphors for truth, which identify the capacity for critical thought with the faculty of sight and the idea that a certain distance is required to attain a critical perspective.107 By making us vulnerable to over-identification with a speaker, Arendt suggests, empathetic listening can undermine the capacity for judgment. In contrast, Gouri suggests that the role of testimony is to contest and even shatter exemplars, revealing the ways that exemplars distort and silence the voices of wit-nesses. He selects fragments of testimony as a strategy for exploring the meaning of testi-mony without abandoning the posture of listening by reducing them to symbolic abstractions that impose a false coherence on shattered agency and fragmented memory.

Gouri’s account of the Eichmann Trial also challenges the binaries that animate Arendt’s analysis of exemplary resistance, not only through his attention to unheroism, but also through his attention to anti-heroism. If unheroic memory reveals the collapse of agency that is denied by the narratives of heroic and exemplary resistance, anti-heroic memory offers a different kind of challenge to such narratives, by exploring the resistance among actors that do not demonstrate conventionally heroic traits or those that are otherwise compromised, by exposing the perverse outcomes of ostensibly heroic acts, and by identifying hidden forms of agency and resistance that are not nor-mally identified with heroism. Where Arendt dismissed Gruber as an embarrassing fool with little to add, Gouri characterized Gruber’s testimony as “the unique story of a noble and courageous soul,” and wrote that Gruber’s “very existence and the very choice that he had made were a living accusation against the defendant.”108 Yet Gouri’s

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109. Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth, p. 68.110. Gouri with Monia Avrahami, “Faces of the Uprising.” Available: http://www.gfh.org.il/Eng

/?CategoryID=61&ArticleID=73111. Gouri, The Chocolate Deal, trans. Seymour Simckes (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University

Press, 1965).112. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press, 1990), p. xii.

description of Gruber explicitly challenges the conventional identification of heroic resistance with military values, such as strength, force, and masculinity. Gouri describes Gruber as “heartbreakingly lonely” and “physically broken.” Where Arendt criticizes Gruber for having negotiated with Eichmann and failing to speak out more forcefully and publically, Gouri expresses little interest in such themes, focusing instead on a moment in his testimony when Gruber appeared to come close to emotional collapse, “his voice breaking, his glasses shining,” as he told the court what it was like for him to sort the clothing and shoes of Jewish children that had been gassed at Dachau.109 Gouri’s account locates heroism in Gruber’s emotional expression and compassion, while rejecting the framing of resistance in relation to binary choices between principle and compromise, public protest and private rescue.

Gouri develops the theme of anti-heroism elsewhere in his account of the trial, for example in relating a fragment of testimony about a son that offered to die in his father’s place moments before they were both executed. In such accounts, the deci-sion to “go quietly” in the place of another, no matter how futile, is recovered as an act of resistance against the pressure to collaborate. Gouri’s poem, “Faces of the Uprising,” recognizes quiet gestures, private teachings and calls of warning as forms of resistance alongside acts of violent rebellion. “To smuggle a loaf of bread was to resist,” he writes, ‘‘To extend a helping hand to those in need was to resist.”110 His novel, The Chocolate Deal, develops the theme of anti-heroism in a different way, by exploring the sense of emptiness experienced by survivors in the immediate post-war era and by casting conventional, public acts of heroism as opportunistic, rather than self-sacrificing.111

Like Fallada’s attention to private, less visible forms of resistance, Gouri’s effort to recover fragmented accounts of unheroism and anti-heroism suggests an important alternative avenue for remembering resistance. His attention to this theme bears a resemblance to James C. Scott’s effort to recover “hidden transcripts” of resistance. “Every subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a ‘hidden transcript,’’’ writes Scott, “that represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant.”112 Rumors, gossip, songs, gestures, jokes, and seemingly inexplicable work slowdowns, contends Scott, may be reread as “hidden transcripts” of insubordination. Arendt’s analysis of exemplary resistance, informed by the sharp distinction that she drew between private life and self-disclosing public action, does not encompass these varied forms of political agency. Yet as Scott observes, when we confine our conception of “the political” to what is openly declared we too easily fall into the false assumption that subordinate groups lack a political life – while missing “the immense political terrain that lies between quiescence and revolt.”

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113. Testimony of Sandra Adonis, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Youth Hearings, May 22, 1997. Available: http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/special/children/adonis.htm.

114. See also Kimberly Theidon, “Gender and Transition.”

IV. Conclusion

Politically authorized atrocities always involve widespread and varied forms of complic-ity and those who are the targets of organized persecution and systematic abuse nearly always face some kind of pressure to collaborate with the very system that is oppressing them. For this reason, stories of those who refuse complicity and resist pressure to col-laborate are never really absent from our processes of reckoning with political violence, even when they are neglected or avoided. Investigations that center on identifying vic-tims or convicting perpetrators will generally uncover narratives of resistance and even deploy such narratives as evidence in support of their judgments. Other stories of resist-ance are remembered outside of the official parameters of transitional justice and human rights reports, while nevertheless continuing to influence perceptions of the process and its relevance in the lives of individuals and communities. The real or perceived absence of resistance also influences the work of these institutions. It is easier to judge soldiers for obeying orders to commit atrocity in contexts where we can find examples of those who chose to disobey such orders. It might seem more plausible for a family to contem-plate returning to a community from which they were expelled if they are aware that members of that community had rebelled against their persecution, even if they did so in ways that were furtive, abortive, or ultimately unsuccessful. And where such stories are not told, the question inevitably lingers: why didn’t more people resist?

One reason that narratives of resistance are so challenging for human rights and transi-tional justice institutions is that the theme of resistance tends to be closely identified with heroic agency. Heroic agency, in turn, is identified with binary logics that pit idealism against compromise, action against inaction, principled sacrifice or martyrdom against selfish opportunism or craven compromise, public displays and confrontations against covert or quiet forms of struggle. Contemporary transitional justice and human rights institutions aspire to supplant the heroic logics of resistance, revolution, and counterrevo-lution with the sober, depoliticizing logics of criminal justice and therapeutic healing.

One problem with this strategy is that memories of heroism are not so easily set aside. Those who identify with heroic resistance may simply reject the framing of the process and see it as alien to their self-understanding. “There is nobody that looks back and say, well, these are the people that has fought the struggle,” lamented Sandra Adonis after testifying at the South African TRC’s Youth Hearings, “the struggle [that] brought us to the point where we are now.”113 The victim–perpetrator framework responds to the sham-ing and silencing of victims by identifying victimhood with “innocence” and the absence of agency, yet this too easily becomes another form of shaming and another variety of silencing.114 And in their effort to set aside the memory of heroic resistance, transitional justice institutions have neglected other ways of remembering resistance, thereby aban-doning insight into possibilities, complexities, and limitations of agency in confronting organized atrocity, as well as the conditions under which ordinary people become passive and complicit in extraordinary wrongs. Instead of consigning narratives of resistance to

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the margins of efforts to reckon with systematic injustice, then, we might recognize the importance of alternative ways of remembering resistance, as well as alternative ways of thinking about heroism.

In his role as prosecutor in the Eichmann Trial, Hausner hoped to challenge what had emerged as a divisive approach to the memory of heroic resistance and complicity in Israel, not only by offering space for narratives of victim suffering, but also by incorpo-rating a wide range of resistance narratives into the trial proceedings. Instead of respond-ing to victim shaming by positioning victims as passive or helpless, Hausner located heroic forms of agency in what he represented as their will to survive, their courage to bear witness, and their contributions to the preservation of Jewish tradition and cultural life. Instead of excluding narratives of resistance from the trial, he challenged the narrow identification of heroic resistance with the memory of ghetto uprisings, inviting those who had already been recognized as heroic, along with many others, to articulate an expanded view of what constituted heroism. While recognizing a wide spectrum of ave-nues for heroic resistance, Hausner also set aside the gray zone of collaboration. In the context of the Eichmann trial, this was also a way to identify the trial and the state as heroic interventions that would speak on behalf of the victim and facilitate the preserva-tion of memory as a heroic act of resistance against the forces of annihilation, as well as enemies of the state.

As observers of the Eichmann Trial, Arendt and Gouri both wrote accounts that chal-lenged Hausner’s effort to position the proceedings and the state as the voice of the heroic victim, though they did so for different reasons and in different ways. Both think-ers also insisted on bringing the theme of complicity back into view and offered alterna-tive ways to interpret the significance of the resistance narratives presented at the trial with attention to their role as a response to the problem of complicity. And in doing so, the two accounts of the trial articulate distinctive strategies for remembering resistance. Although the strategies that they propose are in some degree of tension with one another, I want to suggest that each offers an important challenge to contemporary debates on transitional justice.

Arendt’s analysis of exemplary resistance addresses limitations of the legalistic emphasis on addressing atrocity by cultivating obedience to law or traditional norms. She invokes exemplary resistance as a basis for confronting the problem of complicity in atrocity by cultivating the capacity for judgment and political agency. In contrast with narratives of heroic resistance, Arendt’s analysis of exemplary resistance aims to illumi-nate possibilities for agency that do not require any superhuman capacities, but only the faculties possessed by ordinary people. Such exemplars are not invoked to inspire awe, but rather to enable an audience to recognize new possibilities for what they themselves might be capable of doing. At the same time, Arendt saw exemplars as a basis for assert-ing political agency in the process of selecting guidance from the past and delineating a shift in the very terms of judgment. Yet Arendt’s analysis of exemplarity retains some of the binaries associated with conventional ideas about heroic agency and the role that she assigns to exemplars is in tension with the goal of understanding the complexities of agency, as well as the conditions under which it may be eroded.

Focusing on the conflicting ways that Hausner and Arendt addressed these themes might suggest a kind of trade-off. Hausner allows for a broad spectrum of resistance

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narratives, yet does so as a strategy for avoiding the spectrum of collaboration. Arendt insists on confronting the theme of collaboration and complicity, yet does so by reassert-ing stark binaries for evaluating exemplary forms of resistance. Gouri’s account of unheroism and anti-heroism offers a response to this impasse that exposes a different set of problems in Hausner’s approach, while also addressing the limitations of Arendt’s emphasis on exemplarity. Unheroism, in the writings of Gouri and Langer, conveys the collapse or erosion of agency, the experience of paralysis in the face of violence and in its aftermath. Through stories of unheroism, we confront the shattered self, the irrepara-bly fragmented community, lives divided between frozen moments in the past and the relentless passage of time. For Gouri, these stories were vital, not only as a way to under-stand survivor experience, but also as a basis for challenging the tendency to reduce and judge experiences through the abstraction of exemplars. Unheroic narratives not only challenge the idealization of survival and innocent victimhood, then, but also the ideal of asserting agency in establishing the terms of a relationship with the past. They require a kind of listening that entails the suspension of critical judgment and recognition of the limits of our ability to speak on behalf of others, to draw coherent lessons from their stories, and to attain mastery, resolution, or “closure.” Gouri’s strategy for encouraging this kind of listening was to counter what he took to be reductive and distancing exem-plars with decontextualized and sometimes clashing fragments of narrative that would bring the listener a bit closer to the emotional experience of survivors and offer a glimpse of meaning yet also resist integration into a reductive judgment or lesson.

If unheroic narratives require a different kind of listening, anti-heroic narratives come into view through efforts to recover the stories of those who do not necessarily expect or want to be remembered. Stories of anti-heroism address the limits of exemplars by exposing the small and large ways that ordinary, flawed, unsympathetic, or unlikely actors struggle to take agency in the face of organized brutality. Such stories reveal the perversities of agency under conditions of systemic injustice, the ways that idealism and self-sacrifice backfire or the ways that otherwise compromised actors locate unexpect-edly powerful avenues of resistance. These complex forms of agency tell us a great deal about the logics of systemic violence in the strategies that people adopt in struggling against it.

The very different accounts of the Eichmann Trial that were produced by Hannah Arendt and Haim Gouri thus offer distinctive strategies for confronting the legacies of atrocity and complicity through the memory of resistance. Arendt’s concern with exem-plary resistance and Gouri’s emphasis on the unheroism and anti-heroism conveyed in survivor testimony clash with one another in ways that mirror more general tensions inherent in efforts to reckon with politically authorized violence – between the goals of understanding and judgment, between the goal of assigning responsibility for the bur-dens of an inherited past and the aspiration to delineate a break with that past, between the importance of confronting the messy details and disorienting emotions of the particu-lar and the importance of locating a basis for judgment. The two approaches are also complementary to the extent that these tensions are intrinsic to the process of confronting the problem of complicity in systematic atrocity. Together, they expose what is lost with the marginalization of resistance by contemporary human rights and transitional justice investigations. Perhaps more importantly, these accounts offer distinctive strategies for

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remembering resistance that have the potential to challenge the parameters of contempo-rary transitional justice from within, by informing the recovery of individual and collec-tive political agency as responses to systematic atrocity.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the American Council of Learned Societies for the fellowship that supported the research and writing of this article. Earlier versions of this piece were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, and at the conference, ‘‘Transitional Justice and Hybrid Regimes in Turkey and the Middle East,’’ sponsored by Cornell Law School. I would like to thank Ruti Teitel, Chantal Thomas, Leila Sadat, Benjamin McKean, and all those who offered feedback along the way.

Funding

This research was funded in the form of a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.