In 1961, Harry Mulisch traveled to Israel to attend, as a correspondent for the Dutch magazine Elseviers Weekblad, an event of historical dimensions, the trial of the notorious Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. The author's articles were collected and published the following year in a book titled Case 40/61.

Although he modestly described it as a report, it is much more than that. It constitutes, in addition to a particularly personal testimony, a shocking essay on the mass extermination of European Jews by the Nazis, presented through an exhaustive examination of the dark background that shaped the "architect" of the Holocaust.

Eichmann, an otherwise ordinary technocrat, embodied, according to Mulisch, an unprecedented cultural form, the kind of "human machine" that, executing orders and disregarding their moral consequences, was capable of everything, not only reaching extremes but also surpassing them.

A rare document, a penetrating, timeless portrait of evil. "Harry Mulisch is the only author who wrote about this specific issue with its central theme being the accused, and whose judgment of Eichmann coincides in some key points with my own." Hannah Arendt.

"Arendt's analysis is based on her academic training. Mulisch's is based on his literary intuition." Deborah Dwork.

"In his book Case 40/61 about the Eichmann trial, Mulisch is captivated, absorbed by the enigma of evil, not merely the incidental reality of pain, nor even the occasional wickedness of people, but that inherent, vast baseness of the cosmic universe." The Times Literary Supplement.