In traditional diplomatic histories of modern Europe, the so-called “German problem” usually emerges as a question of containing, counteracting, and, finally, totally destroying the aggressive manifestations of a dangerous great power. Without ever alluding to this historiographical heritage, Annette Weinke shifts the focus from foreign policy and power-politics to transnational debates over German state violence during the “long twentieth century.” The latter phrase denotes a distinctive period (from the late nineteenth century to the present) characterized not only by socioeconomic modernization but—equally important for her study—by hegemonic liberalism and the gradual emergence of international legal thought and humanitarian law. Like previous studies on this subject, Weinke's accepts as a premise the conspicuous interrelationship between German state actions and the development of international humanitarian law. From a liberal Eurocentric perspective, Germany offered a model of extreme state violence that prompted such legal-humanitarian responses. In methodology, research, and argumentation, however, Weinke's innovative study differs significantly from other works in that it is transnational and traces developments over a long historical period. Moreover, the author challenges linear studies that often presume a liberal teleology because she insists on contextualizing actors and events within the complexity of historical realities.
Weinke's longitudinal story is one of a dynamic nonteleological dialectic of politics, juridical thought, and Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), all intertwined with a reciprocal interrelationship of historical events and struggles within the historical discipline. Throughout her work, Weinke emphasizes the centrality of nonstate actors, ranging from jurists and historians to private institutions and groups and individuals pursuing their own interests, that interacted with state institutions and politics. Initiatives by pre–World War I international rights jurists and the peace movement facilitated the Hague Convention on restricting the destructive nature of modern warfare. After 1918, German leftist councils incited public discourse by demanding accountability and prosecution for war crimes of the imperial regime. In the early 1940s, American neo-Wilsonians and refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe (most notably the Jewish Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, the Institute for Jewish Affairs, and the exiled Frankfurt School) were crucial in the pursuit of international prosecution of Nazi crimes, including establishing the juridical foundations for the Nuremberg trials, as well as involvement in the struggle over the historical legacy and memory of National Socialism.
Although they were, at various times and in greatly vacillating circumstances, engaged in the development of international criminal law and human rights—ultimately, transitional justice—nonstate actors often worked at cross-purposes. In prosecuting Nazi war crimes, liberal international jurists advocated supplanting the concept of sovereign state immunity by placing citizens under international criminal law, whereas the Frankfurt School's Franz Neumann, concerned about the dilemma of dual loyalty, vigorously defended state sovereignty. Nevertheless, despite initial fundamental reservations about allied postwar strategies, Neumann reconciled himself to Nuremberg, where his expertise proved important.
From their mid-nineteenth-century origins, transatlantic human rights discourses within the fledgling field of international law were Eurocentric, drawing distinctions between “civilized” and “barbaric” societies. They were also prone to advancement, rejection, or self-interested manipulation from a nationalist perspective. Indeed, appeals to international law, historical commissions and documentation, and even morality and victimization by state violence were mustered to promote state interests or impede the fulfillment of humanitarian ideals and prosecution of individual and state crimes. In early Weimar, Max Weber's Heidelberg Association rejected the imposition of international criminal law, thereby engendering a specifically German mentality and practice of opposition to judgment by outsiders and occupiers that endured well into the Federal Republic. Later, the Nuremberg defense counsel Hermann Jahreiβ utilized prosecutors’ invocation of totalitarianism and positivist law arguments to rebuke ex post facto culpability, a legal strategy later invoked successfully against widespread prosecutions and convictions of former Nazis. West German experts in international law likewise reframed the human rights discourse to propagate and legitimize the notion of German victimhood.
By the 1990s, the universalization of the Holocaust, together with the expansion and intensification of international networks, particularly nongovernmental organizations and Latin American truth commissions, created a cultural transformation that significantly altered discourses on international law and human rights. A progressive reorientation within the German historical profession from defensiveness to incisive critical assessment, such as the revelatory archival disclosures from the East, accelerated this process. In confronting the dilemma of reconciliation versus justice regarding crimes in the former German Democratic Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) now positioned itself as a proponent of international human rights ideals and transitional justice. No longer the feared unrepentant pariah, the FRG had, apparently, finally achieved the status of a respected member of the liberal community of international justice, with the formerly idealistic, internationalist United States now depicted as the outsider impeding the fulfillment of the international justice agenda.
However, Weinke cautions against recent scholarly trends depicting the Federal Republic as a model of overcoming a past of extraordinary state violence by applying the ideals and processes advanced in the field of transitional justice through what she calls the “progressive, teleological trinity of democracy, predictable rule of law, and an enlightened memory culture” (211). The German case, she argues, could only be elevated to this exemplary status as a paradigm guiding future developments in human rights and international criminal law if Germany's actual history was selectively generalized with requisite misleading “omissions and exaggerations” (210). Here, a few examples from later history should suffice. Eliciting a lasting sense of betrayal among GDR dissident civil rights activists, Egon Bahr of the usually progressive Social Democratic Party of Germany had, for party-political purposes, advocated strongly for amnesty, while Helmut Kohl's conservatives upheld justice for the victims of state crimes. Moreover, Germany's often extolled acceptance of the Genocide Convention and International Criminal Court materialized only after reassurances that German citizens would never be charged under either.
Annette Weinke's book is a commendable piece of historical research and writing, well deserving this English translation. It combines historical detail and consistent engagement with the enormous secondary literature into a smoothly flowing, comprehensible narrative. Nonspecialists will find it an authoritative, illuminating history. And although certain “transitology” scholars and wishful-thinking German advocates of humanitarian international law will undoubtedly question her analysis and disruptive conclusions, Weinke confronts them with an abundance of evidentiary documentation and persuasive argumentation.
