An eminent professor of European history regaled me recently with a tale of splendid irony: in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, he had witnessed a near shouting match in which young German academics lectured their American counterparts about the sanctity of international law and human rights as presumed barriers to U.S. aggression. The very concept of human rights had practically been invented in response to Germany's mid-century crimes; but five decades later, Germans now held forth as legitimate bearers of that noble idea, resonant with their country's reputation as a mostly progressive voice in world affairs.

In her terrific The Language of Human Rights in West Germany, Lora Wildenthal chronicles the emergence of human rights discourse in postwar Germany as part of a larger process of the democratic remaking of the country. That emergence was halting, slowed by the Nazi legacy and Cold War hostilities, which politicized the discourse in sharp, particularly German ways. This study is thus a trenchant reminder of the extent to which national experiences condition the meaning and reception even of ostensibly universal constructs.

Wildenthal's key innovation within human rights scholarship is to distinguish between the language of human rights and human rights themselves, and to concentrate on the former. This focus permits her to do two things: first, to show how deeply contested ideas of human rights were in postwar Germany and, second, to stress the challenge advocates faced in establishing their very credibility as advocates. Indeed, human-rights proponents faced terrible dilemmas just after the war. Should human rights talk be the provenance only of individuals with impeccable anti-Nazi credentials, or should such talk be shared more widely in order to expand its reach? Could one advocate on behalf of German prisoners of war (POWs) and expellees (ethnic Germans forced from Poland and the Sudetenland) without providing added grist to the arguments of the far right, which was obsessed with claims of German victimization? And could one decry assaults on the human rights of those in East Germany while avoiding the fierce, often self-serving anticommunism that dominated West German politics?

Germans found no easy answers to these questions, largely dooming the early years of human-rights advocacy to tragicomic failure. The revived German League for Human Rights was caught in internecine wars among its various chapters, dividing precisely over who could be a legitimate member and who was worthy of its advocacy. One of its Berlin leaders was exposed as a former SS member and also charged with misusing League and state funds. And while helping to run hostels for East German refugees, he worked, in fact, as an intelligence operative for the Allied powers. In defending Germans under occupation, the legal theorist Rudolf Laun developed forward-looking ideas about the rights of individuals and collectivities against nation-states. But he built his arguments on dubious and even toxic premises, such as the notion that the American occupation and Nazi regime were essentially indistinguishable as illegitimate, coercive forms of power.

One gets the sense, above all, that the human-rights community from the 1940s to the mid-1960s did not do much of anything, except try to articulate a language of human rights and establish authority to speak it. What it lacked, therefore, was the campaigning around specific abuses one associates with human-rights work today. This very struggle for discursive legitimacy, waged by the “loose affiliations of articulate public intellectuals” (64) that made up the early core of human-rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the Humanist Union, represents another major plank of the analysis (64). In Wildenthal's telling, a major end of human-rights work was to help to grow and democratize the West German public sphere. Hence, many of the human-rights advocates she profiles are nearly indistinguishable from the growing group of writers, satirists, gadfly intellectuals, and free-floating critics who sought, largely with their words, to combat the stifling conformity, deference to institutional power, and ambient authoritarianism of postwar West Germany. Only in the early to mid-1960s did human-rights work come into its own, organizing around specific causes such as penal and educational reform and countering censorship. And only in the 1980s and 1990s did human rights achieve pride of place within a thoroughly transformed German civil society, evident in the work of the German group Terre des Femmes: Human Rights for Women, which Wildenthal analyzes in the book's last chapter.

For all its many virtues, The Language of Human Rights pays a price for the predilections and choices of its author. Overwhelmingly trained on intellectual biography, it offers riveting portraits of charismatic figures and their often idiosyncratic ideas. But we learn little of the political and strategic effects of human-rights advocacy, let alone mobilization efforts. Related to this inattention to activism as such, Wildenthal has surprisingly little to say about the late 1960s and early 1970s, when political dissent was at a fever pitch. In particular, to what extent did human-rights claims figure into the era's radicalism–or, were they avoided for their purportedly Western, liberal taint. Similarly, we barely learn what groups such as Amnesty and the Humanist Union ultimately thought of radical claims that Red Army Faction prisoners were subject to torture and thus domestic victims of human-rights abuse. These limitations do little, however, to detract from the achievements of the book, which illuminates how, through the tenacity of human-rights crusaders, Germany became such fertile ground for human-rights advocacy.