Murder without motive: Eichmann in Jerusalem and In Cold Blood

ABSTRACT Each in its own manner, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965) – both first published in The New Yorker, both a cause célèbre, both retaining much of their original power a half century later – document crimes that appear to the author to strain the very concept of a motive. As if something as traditional as a motive might have impeded his work as the coordinator of the Final Solution, Eichmann is portrayed by Arendt as essentially motive-free. Where others saw a fanatic, she saw a non-entity dedicated only to bureaucratic routine. Capote depicts the ruthless massacre of a family in rural Kansas as a bizarre, under-motivated act that only psychoanalytic theorizing can make sense of. I contend that the authors should not have been so quick to dismiss conventional motives or to heap scorn on the courts in which a traditional concept of motivation still prevailed.