Suchergebnisse

When the late Kenneth Cmiel undertook the first systematic analysis of the emerging historiography of human rights in 2004, he surveyed a field that was 'refreshingly inchoate'. In the ensuing seven years, the scholarship on the history of human rights has burgeoned considerably. Yet one might still reasonably characterise the field overall as inchoate. Like any new subfield of historical inquiry, there is a clear lack of consensus among leading historians of human rights about even the most elementary contours of the subject. What are human rights? When and where did they emerge? How and why did they spread (if, indeed, they spread at all)? Who were the crucial agents in this history? Few historians working in the field seem to agree in their answers to any of these questions.

The Nuremberg Trial may well be the most famous trial of the twentieth century, which is as it should be. After all, the Nuremberg Trial, while perhaps not as unprecedented as is frequently assumed, did mark a decisive turning point in the history of international law. It marked the first broadly successful attempt to impose the rule of law not just on the conduct of war but also, in a limited way, on domestic atrocities as well. The fame of this single trial has had the unfortunate side-effect of overshadowing the literally thousands of other Nazi trials that took place after World War II, however. These additional trials can be divided into three categories: those that took place in the domestic courts of victim nations, those that took place in occupation courts, and, perhaps least well-known, those that took place inGermancourts.

Rereading a book is always an uncanny experience in multiple temporalities. If the linguistic turn has taught us anything, it is that the context of reading shapes the meaning of the text that is read. The historicist impulse to reconstruct the original context on the basis of the text itself is at best an asymptotic, at worst a quixotic, pursuit. Yet texts remain, some more so than others. Those texts which continue to be read and reread long after their original context has passed we call 'classics'. This is a term most frequently applied to literature, of course, but also to philosophy and other scholarly works animated by a generalising impulse. It pertains to works, in other words, which lay claim to a significance transcending their original context. It is rarely applied to works whose principle value is empirical or narrowly scholarly. These are presumed to be only temporarily useful interventions into an ongoing scholarly debate, in which later works draw on and 'supersede' the insights of earlier ones, rendering their predecessors superfluous. (Rather the reverse of Jove and his children.) Consequently, relatively few works of historical scholarship are considered classics in the full sense. History's emphasis on the particular, its frequent skepticism of theoretical generalisations, and its embrace of archival empiricism have all tended to preclude the emergence of a broad canon of 'historical classics'. There have, however, been exceptions to this rule.

In recent years, the historiography of Nazi Germany has taken what Neil Gregor has called a "voluntarist turn." By this, Gregor means that the recent literature on Nazi Germany has emphasized "that the panoply of organizations actively involved in occupation and murder, the number of German men and women who actively participated in these crimes, and the range of places in which they committed them, was much, much greater than has hitherto been acknowledged." In the first instance this voluntarist turn has meant an increased stress on the centrality of Nazi criminality and atrocity to the regime, not as one feature, but as the central characteristic, of the Third Reich. Alongside this, however, has come an increased insistence that these criminal policies were both widely known at the time and broadly popular among Germans. As Saul Friedländer has put it, "the everyday involvement of the population with the regime was far deeper than has long been assumed, due to the widespread knowledge and passive acceptance of the crimes, as well as the crassest profit derived from them." In short, then, the most recent trend among historians of the Third Reich is to insist that people believed in the Nazi project, including its criminal aspects.

Rereading a book is always an uncanny experience in multiple temporalities. If the linguistic turn has taught us anything, it is that the context of reading shapes the meaning of the text that is read. The historicist impulse to reconstruct the original context on the basis of the text itself is at best an asymptotic, at worst a quixotic, pursuit. Yet texts remain, some more so than others. Those texts which continue to be read and reread long after their original context has passed we call 'classics'. This is a term most frequently applied to literature, of course, but also to philosophy and other scholarly works animated by a generalising impulse. It pertains to works, in other words, which lay claim to a significance transcending their original context. It is rarely applied to works whose principle value is empirical or narrowly scholarly. These are presumed to be only temporarily useful interventions into an ongoing scholarly debate, in which later works draw on and 'supersede' the insights of earlier ones, rendering their predecessors superfluous. (Rather the reverse of Jove and his children.) Consequently, relatively few works of historical scholarship are considered classics in the full sense. History's emphasis on the particular, its frequent skepticism of theoretical generalisations, and its embrace of archival empiricism have all tended to preclude the emergence of a broad canon of 'historical classics'. There have, however, been exceptions to this rule.

Since the beginning of time, war has been accompanied by atrocity. While there were attempts to regulate such violence, for most of history the penchant toward deliberate atrocity was largely viewed as a political or military problem. During World War II, however, the Allies declared that wartime atrocity was not only morally reprehensible, but also legally actionable and this declaration represented the triumph of a new paradigm for how to think about the conduct of war, the "legalist paradigm." This Article describes the emergence of the legalist paradigm and argues that the emergence of the legalist paradigm of war was a response to the breakdown of a long-standing civilizational consensus among European Elites.