Self is making deliberate effort to slow her reading of this book, as she knows it will be quite deleterious for her mental state to continue this “staying-up-until-4 AM” behavior of the past two days. In order to get her mind nice and rested for bedtime, self has now limited herself to reading only one chapter a day. And not after 10 p.m. That way, the last images in self’s brain as she lays her head down to sleep will not be of cattle trains or gas chambers. Let’s see if that works tonight!
However, it is at present only 9:12 p.m. So self can certainly still continue reading. And right now, in Chapter VIII, Arendt describes how it was that a perfectly ordinary man named Becher came to join the S.S.: “because he was actively engaged in horseback riding.”
(Dear blog reader, there are so many points in this book that cause self’s jaw to hang open, simply hang open — from absolute disbelief)
Thirty years ago, Arendt explains, horseback riding “was a sport engaged in only by Europe’s upper classes. In 1934,” Becher’s riding instructor “had persuaded him to enter the S.S. cavalry regiment, which at that moment was the very thing for a man to do if he wished to join the movement and at the same time maintain a proper regard for his social standing.” As an S. S. man, Becher became “the principal buyer of horses for the S. S. personnel department, a job that earned him nearly all the decorations that were then available.” In fact, Becher possessed an excellent nose for business, and was on the way to amassing for himself quite a tidy fortune by taking “possession of Jewish property.” The one thing that stood in his way, however, “was the narrow-mindedness of subordinate creatures like Eichmann” (Pause for breath: HA HA HA HA HA!) who, according to Arendt, “took their jobs seriously.” Eichmann could never make money because he could never extract more than a minimal amount from any Jew — “not, of course, because he wished to save more Jews,” Arendt writes, “but simply because he was not used to thinking big.”
Who knew, dear blog readesrs, who knew what a hilarity this book would turn out to be? Stay tuned.
