Courtroom as Stage (simile)
Arendt repeatedly describes the courtroom as a stage, and uses the language of theatricality to describe it. No matter how “consistently” the judges “shunned the limelight,” they couldn’t really do anything to prevent the trial from becoming a show trial. What was more, they were forced to play leading roles in that theatrical performance. Here they were, “seated at the top of the raised platform, facing the audience as if from the stage in a play.” The audience was meant “to represent the whole world.” Eichmann was supposed to represent the whole Nazi Party. They wanted him to realize what a horrible crime he had committed and to beg for forgiveness.
Ben-Gurion as "architect" and "stage manager" (metaphor)
Arendt uses a variety of metaphors to designate David Ben-Gurion's control over Israel and the trial. Ben-Gurion was one of the primary national founders of Israel, the man who led his country to independence and prosperity. Under his leadership, the young country managed to suppress numerous Arab attacks. Hannah Arendt describes him as “the architect of the state.” The Eichmann’s trial is another accomplishment of Ben-Gurion. The courtroom he chose for that trial is like a showroom in which he is going to teach enemies of the Jewish people a good lesson. He is “the invisible state manager of the proceedings.”
Banality (metaphor)
Arendt only uses the word "banality" in the title, but it functions more as a metaphor than an actual description of Eichmann. To be banal is to be common, indistinguished to a fault. A banal opinion about a film or a work of art is one that anyone could offer—indeed, it is an opinion that is offered because it is common. Arendt uses a word of aesthetic failure to describe a larger moral and political failure on Eichmann's part, and on the part of Europe itself.
The Categorical Imperative (metaphor)
Arendt spends some time unpacking Eichmann's reference to Immanuel Kant's moral dictum that we should always "act in such a way that our actions could be the basis of a universal law." For Eichmann—and for Germany as a whole—this moral belief stands as a metaphor for the absolute and total rule of Nazism, for acting in such a way that the "Führer, if he were aware of actions, would approve."
