I just finished reading the detective novel Pietr The Latvian by Georges Simenon, an author I recently learned Hannah Arendt read. Immediately, I noticed similarities between Simenon’s voice and Arendt’s voice in Eichmann In Jerusalem. I will not claim that Arendt was deliberately influenced by his novels, but its helpful for me to discover the gravity between the two. (Coincidence or Conspiracy?)
This passage from Pietr The Latvian jumped out at me:
”It was a ridiculous situation. The inspector knew there wasn’t once chance in ten that his surveillance would be of any use.
Yet he stuck it out- just because of a vague feeling that didn’t even deserve to be called an intuition. In fact it was a pet theory of his that he’d never worked out in full and remained vague in his mind, but which he dubbed for his own use the theory of the crack in the wall.
Inside every wrong-doer and crook there lives a human being. In addition, of course, there is an opponent in a came, and its the player that the police are inclined to see.
As a rule, that’s what they go after.
Some crime of offense is committed. The match started on the basis of more or less objective facts. it’s a problem with one or more unknowns that a rational mind tries to solve.
Maigret (the inspector) worked like any other policeman. Like everyone else, he used the amazing tools that men like Bertillon, Reiss and Locard have given the police- anthropometry, the principal of trace, and so forth - and that have turned detection into forensic science. But what he sought, what he waited and watched out for, was the crack in the wall. In other words, the instant when the human being comes of from behind the opponent. “
The first idea in this quote that appeals to me is “ vague feeling that didn’t even deserve to be called an intuition.” This is how I work, listening to that vague feeling and seeing how it develops. I have a vague feeling about Arendt and detective fiction.
The other idea, more related to Eichmann In Jerusalem , is how Inspector Maigret waits and watches the criminal until the the human being is revealed. This is how Arendt listens to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, waiting and watching the the criminal mastermind, the monster, until the human being appears.