The Language of Human Rights in West Germany 9780812207293

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The Language of Human Rights in West Germany

PENNSYLVANIA STUDIES IN HUMAN RIGHTS Bert B. Lockwood, Jr., Series Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

The Language of Human Rights in West Germany

Lora Wildenthal

universit y of penns ylvania press philadelphia

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania  19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8122-4448-9

For Carl and Vera

Contents

Introduction 1 1. Human Rights Activism in Occupied and Early West Germany: The Case of the German League for Human Rights  17 2. Rudolf Laun and “German Human Rights” in Occupied and Early West Germany  45 3. Human Rights Activism as Domestic Politics: The International League for Human Rights, West German Amnesty, and the Humanist Union Confront Adenauer’s West Germany  63 4. “German Human Rights” Enter the Mainstream: The Case of Otto Kimminich  101 5. Human Rights for Women across Cultural Lines: Terre des Femmes 132 Conclusion 167 A Note on Sources  177 Notes 183 Index 261 Acknowledgments 275

Introduction

Since the Second World War and especially since the 1970s, enthusiasm for the language of human rights has swept around the world. It has answered people’s desire for a moral, legal, and political response to the unprecedented destruction of the Second World War, and to imperialism, fascism, and communism. Human rights have come to comprise the language through which many people “frame their idealism,” as the historian Samuel Moyn has put it.1 This book examines that language of human rights in the particular setting of West Germany (1949-90). Through a set of stories, it shows why various people chose human rights as the language of their idealism, and what specific kinds of content they attached to that abstract language. Why should we talk about a language of human rights? Why not talk about the rights themselves, or more especially violations of those rights? I use the phrase “language of human rights” because it points to what all selfdescribed human rights advocates have in common. Even as controversies regarding the sources and content of human rights divide them, they all find the language of human rights itself compelling. While experts and activists in human rights are generally engaged in what the legal scholar Paul Kahn calls the “project of reform”—how to do things better—this book sets aside problems of reform and advocacy in favor of increasing our historical literacy regarding how the language of human rights has been put into practice.2 In this book, I seek to clarify why West Germans of different generations and political persuasions have called themselves human rights advocates, and what they have understood by that rubric. The language of human rights offers fascinating challenges to the historian.

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Introduction

It is a sweepingly universal rhetoric. Rights are articulated in abstract, universal terms, that is, without reference to time or place. For example, Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” That universal quality is difficult for historians to grapple with. As historians seek to bring such universal norms into one narrative together with lived experience, with its myriad inequalities and lack of freedoms, we are likely to seem either sarcastic about the unattainability of those norms, or else furious at the wrongs of lived experience. Our own responses may then drown out the voices of the historical actors we seek to depict. While lawyers depend on that tension between norm and reality to propel their arguments and persuade others to act, historians prefer to explain or persuade by way of contextualization, not exhortation. To write any kind of historical account of human rights is a challenge to us, because we must describe people whose very use of the language of human rights is purposefully ahistorical. To apply human rights as a criterion is a specific kind of rhetorical maneuver that depends on ignoring historical or other kinds of context. To call something a human right, or to name something a human rights violation, is to intervene in politics as usual in order to place that example of violence or inequality in a new context. In other words, the whole point of invoking human rights is to yank an instance of violence or inequality out of its usual context. The point is to stop seeing it as an expected, if regrettable, fact of life. The power and attractiveness of human rights language lie precisely in its resistance to being explained away by reference to historical, social, or economic context.3 Historians must choose among a number of possible approaches in order to analyze and contextualize this stubbornly ahistorical material. This book takes the approach of treating human rights as a political language. Many books on human rights begin with human rights norms, and claim—or merely assume—that human rights advocates interpret those norms more or less the same way and want more or less the same thing (for example, are “progressive”). Rather than seeing human rights as a language that inherently expresses the good, or that unites people to pursue a common project, this book turns the relationship between norm and advocate upside down to emphasize how divergent the views of serious human rights advocates have been, even within one fairly compact geographical and chronological setting. Two distinctions help us to see human rights as a political language, not a natural or universal one. First, the idea of the universal applicability of human rights norms needs to be distinguished clearly in our minds from how people actually apply the language of human rights, which is not and can never be uni-

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versal. Rather, people apply the language of human rights strategically to force others to confront a specific claim of injustice. A project of applying the language of human rights universally would resemble Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel. Even before reaching that point, it would founder on the fact that some human rights contradict others, or at least are in tension with them, such that their simultaneous realization is impossible. Like all law, human rights norms offer a framework through which a debate may be held, but not the final truth or predetermined outcome of that debate. Even though events one refers to as “human rights violations” are intensely disturbing, at least to oneself, it is important to remember that human rights claims, like all legal claims, are the beginning of a discussion, not the last word. That is something that a human rights lawyer in action is unlikely to emphasize, even though she knows it to be true. A lawyer seeking to win a case or an activist seeking support for a cause hopes to use human rights as a debate-stopper. A historian is not compelled to move so swiftly to a closing argument, or even to make the same kind of argument at all. A second necessary distinction is that between holding rights and using the language of rights. All people can be argued to hold human rights, but not all people can effectively use the language of human rights. I do not mean here such problems as poverty, social exclusion, or coercion, which hinder people’s access to legal remedies that they might otherwise seek out. Rather, I want to highlight the importance of credibility, which is required for using the language of human rights. Even when powerful institutions are arrayed against advocates of human rights, and any victory seems very far off, these advocates must enjoy some minimal level of credibility to initiate the communicative situation that is characteristic of human rights activism. It is not enough for someone to speak out; some people, however few, must be listening. Credibility rests on many social, political, and historical factors. This book’s setting of the post-Nazi Federal Republic of Germany shows the problem of credibility in dramatic fashion. West Germans often lacked credibility before the wider world, and even with each other. This book shows how West Germans wrestled with the problem of credibility in various ways over time. In the setting of West Germany, the use of the ahistorical language of human rights was fraught, controversial, and very interesting. Its users were highly conscious of history, but they turned to the ahistorical language of human rights norms to move beyond certain histories, for certain reasons. Reading empirical stories of human rights activism and legal theorizing in the context of West German and international political history allows us to appreciate the interplay of universalizing norms and particular expectations and credibilities.

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Introduction

These stories only become audible when we shift our attention from the content of human rights to the language of human rights. Such stories remain rare in the rapidly growing scholarly literature on human rights, however. My interest in this area was first piqued by studies highlighting the tensions between historical and legal approaches to the adjudication of crimes and the definition of rights.4 I later discovered the work of Kenneth Cmiel, a U.S. historian, and was encouraged by his model of careful analysis in multiple specific contexts.5 Cmiel and others working in his wake have sought to contextualize the human rights phenomenon without staking their projects on either praise or denigration. While historians have certainly become more interested in researching themes related to human rights, the discipline remains poorly represented in the human rights literature, and the landmark books in that literature that are written by historians proceed at a high level of generality.6 Much of the human rights literature belongs to the “project of reform” and concerns either the documentation of norms and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or studies of their effectiveness.7 Since human rights thinkers and activists have rarely had power on their side, such documentation alone is an act of advocacy, all the more so when the goal is to point out successes. Another part of the human rights literature critiques norms or NGOs through close investigations of particular settings; here anthropologists and feminist scholars are prominent.8 However, in spite of polemics from time to time about human rights as imperialism, hardly anyone repudiates the very idea of human rights tout court, and so almost all such critiques, even harsh ones, can be categorized under the “project of reform.” What I have striven for in the present book is neither to celebrate nor denigrate. The documentation accomplished here is done with the goal of bringing the theme of human rights closer to the disciplinary historical narratives of postwar Germany, not with underpinning a putatively unitary “human rights movement.”9 Readers will have to reach their own conclusions about whether individuals and organizations they find here fit their own hopes or suspicions about human rights. In addition to foregrounding the speakers of the language of human rights, rather than allowing human rights norms to set the historical agenda, I also wish to show that domestic political context is fundamental to understanding the use of the language of human rights. Even when human rights activism is directed at distant international issues, the spurs to that activism are domestic ones. This fact has been obscured, I believe, by the ahistorical, prescriptive rhetoric of human rights, including its claim to universality.

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The West German Setting This book is a history of how West Germans made themselves agents of human rights in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is a local history of the use of a transnational language. It joins the still small but growing literature that systematically or historically examines the components of human rights advocacy in Germany, or elsewhere, for that matter.10 It uses the empirical material gathered here to answer this question: why did West Germany have the kinds of human rights advocates that it did? West Germany is an important and especially interesting setting for a history of human rights advocacy. As a state, its existence has been intertwined with the development of new human rights norms from the beginning. First, international human rights doctrines and institutions of the mid-twentieth century developed largely in response to the actions of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, movements against colonialism being the other main impetus.11 Second, these norms then shaped the West German state’s legal system from its creation. For example, West Germany was the first state to quote phrases from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its new constitution (the Basic Law, Grundgesetz).12 The West German constitution integrated basic elements of international law into domestic law, including international cooperation and peace.13 The European Convention on Human Rights (1950), drawn up by the Council of Europe, enforced by the European Court of Human Rights, and considered the most successful human rights regime in the world, was embraced from the beginning by West Germany. It was a signatory to the convention’s optional protocol providing for the right of individual petition, and it readily adapted its own laws to the convention, insofar as they did not already conform to it.14 In fact, West Germans eagerly participated in various United Nations organizations even before their country was permitted to join the United Nations in 1973; the German Society for the United Nations (Deutsche Gesellschaft für die Vereinten Nationen), for example, was founded in 1952.15 West Germany’s growing de facto power was always cloaked in, and made possible by, the growing power of international institutions, especially at the European level.16 The embrace of international law at the domestic level in West Germany, as well as forty years of division of Germany, render the traditional distinction between the domestic and international arenas rather complex. For example, the extent to which East Germany was a foreign country was a delicate topic; the West German constitution held that the West German government represented East as well as

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West Germans. West Germany was receptive to alternatives to the traditional notion of state sovereignty, be they federalism, the European idea, or holding open the question of its border with East Germany.17 West Germany itself defied a straightforward notion of sovereignty or statehood. Third, a notable feature of the Federal Republic of Germany’s constitution, the Basic Law, is the direct applicability of basic rights. The Basic Law states: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect it and protect it is the duty of all state authority. The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace, and of justice in the world. The following basic rights shall bind the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary as directly enforceable law.”18 Individual citizens are permitted to make constitutional complaints about violations of their basic rights directly to the Federal Constitutional Court—and many have.19 The result has been a political culture characterized by a relatively high level of awareness of basic rights, an important backdrop for domestic human rights activism. The complex intertwining of the domestic and the international meant that discussions of (domestic) civil liberties in West Germany have never been far from those of (international) human rights. Invoking international human rights as a standard by which to measure domestic civil liberties was and is quite common there. West Germans have used the language of human rights to redefine the conditions of justice in their own state as well as abroad. Attending to that local usage of the language of human rights, this book will not make a strong distinction between civil liberties advocacy and human rights advocacy. Fourth, West Germany is an especially interesting setting for a study of the language of human rights because, by however jagged a path, West Germany came to be seen as one of the most successful cases of democratization in the wake of dictatorship.20 West Germans self-consciously measured their progress away from dictatorship. (While West Germany took on the status of successor state to Nazi Germany, East Germany’s official position was that it was a new, discontinuous state.21) The political culture of the Federal Republic of Germany, in both its West German and post-1990 unified German forms, has highlighted two moral claims: to have accepted the specific historical responsibility for the horrors of Nazism, and to have enshrined timeless, universal human rights. The very pairing of those claims illustrates the intertwining of the historical and the universal as well as the domestic and international for West German human rights advocates. While the former depends on a specific context for its significance, the latter, in a different register, asks listeners

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to set aside context. The tensions in this very West German linkage of the historical and the universal shaped human rights advocacy there.

Four Usages of the Language of Human Rights There was and is no single, typical “take” on human rights in the Federal Republic. As elsewhere, people in West Germany have disagreed sharply as they have argued over the sources, content, and proper policymaking role of human rights. However, one can discern four recurring usages of the language of human rights in advocacy there, and also recurring patterns of confrontation among these usages. Analogues to these four can surely be found in other countries. These four, I argue, have been the most influential for the overall shape of human rights advocacy in West Germany. To put it another way, virtually all human rights advocacy there can be categorized according to them. Each was tied directly to an important fact or condition of life in West Germany. Taken together, these usages provide a thematic summary of the examples of advocacy discussed in this book. One usage, present already in 1945 and important today, has been the attempt to sharpen Germans’ sensibility for civil liberties and human rights by promoting a critical examination of modern German history. Activists who appropriated the language of human rights in this way hoped that Germans of all generations would learn more about the crimes of the Nazi past and thereby become more vigilant about present-day human rights violations worldwide. In other words, critical discussion of the Nazi past came to be considered a form of human rights activism in West Germany. (Obviously, the reverse is not true: not everyone who studied the Nazi past did so to be a human rights activist.) The U.S. occupation authority was an early practitioner of this usage, with its policy of “political re-education,”22 but this book focuses on Germans’ own initiatives. I examine two organizations that carried out and promoted such historical work qua human rights activism: the German League for Human Rights (Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte), which is today named the International League for Human Rights (Internationale Liga für Menschenrechte), and the Humanist Union (Humanistische Union). These organizations are analyzed in Chapters 1 and 3. Activists in these and other organizations struggled for years to inculcate a critical approach to the German past among West Germans, and they saw some successes in the 1960s. This first usage has remained important for the self-definition of

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Introduction

German society. It underpins the paired moral claims of historical responsibility for Nazism and the enshrining of universal human rights. The fact of living in a post-Nazi, post-genocidal society was the element of West German political culture that most strongly shaped this usage. A second usage, which also emerged in 1945 and is also still present today, was the appeal to human rights on behalf of Germans who were not Jewish or otherwise targeted by the Nazis, but rather were victims of the Allies. They fled or were expelled from their homes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere in the wake of the Second World War.23 In the early postwar years, West German legal experts and expellee organizations hoped to lodge an international legal case that various postwar states’ expulsions of ethnic Germans had violated human rights. They also decried Allied military and occupation policies, including aerial bombardment, unconditional surrender, and the retention of prisoners of war. These latter efforts were shortlived in their original form, for the facts of defeat, the emerging knowledge of the enormity of Nazi Germany’s crimes, and the Cold War all sharply curtailed their political feasibility. But even though the expellee issue eventually took on a predictable and confining form in West German politics, as the historian Pertti Ahonen has shown so well, these jurists’ influence was not so confined or predictable. Their intellectual roots were broader and their impact on legal discussions more lasting than the phrase “expellee lobby” would imply. As these jurists’ field of international law developed from its rather marginal status in Germany’s law departments prior to 1933 to ever greater prominence after 1949, their legal ideas spread into the scholarly apparatus that today underpins human rights advocacy in Germany. Moreover, while expellee spokespeople have often been politically conservative, such political designations become less useful when we examine a human rights strategy systematically. Human rights norms tend to escape political compartmentalization. Indeed, two of the concepts advocated by these jurists have been embraced (or opposed) across the political spectrum: the individual’s status as a subject of international law, and the right to self-determination. As this book will show, this second usage of the language of human rights did not become obsolete—far from it. International lawyers concerned with the expellee cause, often expellees themselves, have helped to shape human rights law in West Germany. They developed new legal concepts such as the “right to the homeland” (Recht auf die Heimat) and collective rights for ethnic groups (Volksgruppenrecht). These concepts contributed to a wider European and worldwide legal elaboration of group rights, cultural rights, and internal self-

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determination (that is, self-determination that does not aim at secession, but rather at internal arrangements for greater autonomy).24 Such group rights were not included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the European Convention on Human Rights, but in recent years they have gained a foothold in international law at the European level. There are resemblances between this legal literature and the work of jurists and activists in the Americas and elsewhere who have developed concepts of indigenous and minority rights of, for example, Amerindians.25 Both bodies of work grapple with the predicament of groups who lack meaningful representation via individualized citizenship in the states in which they live, sometimes because the state ignores the collective nature of their concerns, and sometimes because the state is actively hostile to the group. The German advocacy examined here, in Chapters 2 and 4, predated and then paralleled the emergence of indigenous rights in the 1970s. The group rights elaborated and so far applied in the European context were therefore not imported from those non-European debates; rather, those rights emerged in large part from the expellee experience and expellees’ legal and political work. Conceptualizing the expellee issue as a human rights issue is a kind of limit case for West German human rights discourse because it highlights tensions between the two moral claims underpinning West Germany. The element of West German political culture that most strongly shaped this second usage of the language of human rights was the presence of millions of German expellees and refugees in West Germany. Germans who fell into this large group at the end of the Second World War were not defined as refugees in international law because they automatically possessed West German citizenship under the Basic Law. The West German state pursued a contradictory policy: it sought to integrate the expellees socially (thereby erasing their distinctiveness), while it also officially held open the expellees’ claims to restitution in their places of origin, which were now outside the borders of West and East Germany (thereby preserving their distinctiveness). This policy did promote eventual assimilation but also nourished a number of vocal lobby organizations that were strong supporters of this usage of human rights advocacy. Critical discussion of the Nazi past played very little role in this second usage. Such critical discussion would not have damaged the legal logic of the expellees’ case, since collective retribution already then clearly violated international law. However, advocates apparently believed that drawing attention to Nazi crimes would blur the line they wanted to draw between Allied perpetrators and German victims. Moreover, numerous public figures

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active in this usage had their own biographical ties to Nazism, and critical discussion of the Nazi past probably would have split the expellee lobby. The lack of critical examination of the recent past in this usage led to intense conflict with those engaged in the first usage of human rights language. Indeed, the conflict between the two has been prominent in human rights advocacy in West and unified Germany. A recent iteration of this conflict has been the debate during the 2000s about the planned Center against Forced Migration (Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen) in Berlin, a museum that will present the experience of ethnic German expellees alongside that of other twentiethcentury European victims of deportation, forced transfer, and ethnic cleansing, including Jews.26 This book examines the second usage through the work of two international lawyers active in expellee politics, Rudolf Laun and Otto Kimminich, in Chapters 2 and 4. Rudolf Laun drew upon his anti-Nazi reputation for credibility as he excoriated the Allies during the occupation years (1945-49). Otto Kimminich, whose career spanned the 1960s through the late 1990s, was just as impassioned but more diplomatic, and he melded his expellee-related work with refugee- and asylum-related work that was eagerly received across the West German human rights movement. Their careers show us that the expellee issue played a formative, though still little-known, role in West German human rights work. The third important usage of human rights advocacy in West Germany was the publicizing of human rights violations in the socialist countries, especially East Germany—in short, an anti-communist usage. In the early years of West Germany, the most important organizations in this usage were the so-called militant anti-communist organizations, such as the Fighting Group against Inhumanity (Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit) and the Free Jurists’ Investigative Committee (Untersuchungsausschuss freiheitlicher Juristen). The German League for Human Rights was also a militant anticommunist organization during the 1950s. The element of West German political culture most salient here was the fact of Cold War division. However, there was also considerable historical depth to this confrontation, extending back through Nazi anti-communism to the struggles of the polarized Weimar Republic and the anti-socialist campaigns of the nineteenth century on the one hand, and back through the strong German socialist and communist traditions, which now East Germany claimed to represent, on the other. This third usage, the endowment of human rights with anti-communist meaning, was the most pervasive one during the 1950s and 1960s in West Germany, as in other Western capitalist countries.27 When it threatened to smother critical

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discussion of the Nazi past, advocates of the first usage founded (or, in the case of the German League for Human Rights, refounded) their organizations in a quest to take back the language of human rights from its dominant Cold Warrior speakers. These efforts produced in 1961 the West German section of Amnesty International and the Humanist Union. The anti-communist usage of human rights advocacy is discussed in Chapters 1 and 3. The fourth important usage of human rights advocacy we see in West Germany is that which most people would probably think of first: activism on behalf of foreigners. In this usage, human rights activists apply norms of international human rights across state borders. Yet this usage of human rights advocacy only emerged after a number of years in the West German case. While the West German section of Amnesty International belongs here, Amnesty International was originally a British creation, and as we shall see the founders of the West German section were actually preoccupied with domestic West German politics. Only in the late 1960s did an organization take hold that was conceptualized by West Germans and was devoted to the human rights of non-Germans: the Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker). Founded in 1968 as the Biafra Aid Campaign (Aktion Biafra-Hilfe), in 1970 it broadened its scope to any “people” (Volk) facing threats to its “security, life, property and development rights, religion, or linguistic and cultural identity.”28 It remains Germany’s most important NGO focused on minority and indigenous rights. The element of West German political culture that helped this fourth usage to emerge was the flourishing of protest movements outside the political parties. In particular, the wars in Algeria and Vietnam served to focus West German attention on the Third World and to bolster the moral credibility of West German critics of the war. It was finally possible for West Germans to lambast the Western Allies without being associated in domestic politics with resentful ex-Nazis. The new political space of the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (Ausserparlamentarische Opposition, APO) enabled critical West Germans—university students, the labor movement, progressive church members, pacifists, and those to the left of the political parties—to form solidarities with non-Germans, such as foreign students, foreign “guest” workers, and anticolonial national liberation movement activists.29 The emergence of this fourth usage marks an important turning point: the moment when West Germans felt themselves to be citizens of a distinct state who had a moral voice in world affairs and could be agents of human rights in a global context.30 Second-wave feminism in West Germany also emerged in this new

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political space. This book analyzes the feminist organization Terre des Femmes as an example of this fourth usage, in Chapter 5. Founded in 1981 with a focus on “honor violence” against women and girls in the Middle East and female genital cutting in Africa, its premise has been feminist solidarity among women around the world. Terre des Femmes has worked to expose exploitation and coercion suffered by women and girls whose citizenship, ethnicity, or geographical location (in any combination) is not German. While it has carried out work at locations outside Germany—the Middle East, Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, and Africa—in recent years it has turned to aiding women inside Germany, and to focusing its efforts on physical violence. The women and girls it seeks to help have a legal status as foreigners or immigrants that renders them vulnerable, or else they, while not legally foreigners, live within a minority subculture that constrains their access to majority resources. Terre des Femmes’s work for the human rights of nonGerman women and of black, brown, Muslim, or other minority German women has a deep historical context in the debate, over a hundred years old at this point, over migration and cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity in Germany. This is the element of political culture most salient here. Terre des Femmes has intervened in debates about how “multicultural” Germany is or ought to be by offering its own vision of unity in diversity: inalienable basic rights for all women. There have been conflicts among the four usages described here, but also convergences. While advocates of political education about Nazi crimes clashed with advocates of ethnic German expellees’ and refugees’ rights, the latter usage was capable of combination with work for foreigners’ human rights. The resemblance between the legal literatures of expellee group rights and indigenous people’s rights has been noted above. Another, biographical example concerns the founder of the Society for Threatened Peoples, Tilman Zülch: he has linked his own experiences as a young expellee with the experiences of the “threatened peoples” that the organization seeks to help, from Biafrans and East Timorese to the Baltic peoples under Soviet rule.31 Zülch was a pioneer in drawing attention to the Nazis’ genocidal treatment of Sinti and Roma.32 He has also long been interested in expellee affairs and is an advocate of the controversial Center against Forced Migration.33 The goals of the Society for Threatened Peoples were, in turn, in some tension with those of Terre des Femmes. As members of Terre des Femmes sought to yank instances of violence against women out of their usual context, refusing to see them as an expected, if regrettable, fact of life, they found little foothold in the

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Society for Threatened Peoples, which defended cultural group rights.34 Although the Society for Threatened Peoples and Terre des Femmes both have supported the rights of non-Germans, Terre des Femmes actually has had more in common with the Humanist Union, a civil liberties organization. Both conflict and convergence are possible among these four usages of the language of human rights, and one cannot completely predict the positions of individuals or organizations in each usage. However, distinguishing the four usages does clarify our thinking about the speakers and intended objects of the most important kinds of activism in West Germany. The chapters that follow are arranged in roughly chronological order, but they do not comprise a single narrative. Chapters 1, 3, and 5 concern nongovernmental organizations, while Chapters 2 and 4 focus on individual legal experts. Chapter 1 takes up the story of German human rights advocacy in the years immediately after the Second World War and follows its subject, the German League for Human Rights, into the late 1950s. The League encompassed the first three usages of the language of human rights in its troubled life: critical discussion of the Nazi past; the use of human rights concepts on behalf of expellees; and anti-communism. It finally found stability by refounding itself with a renewed focus on the critical discussion of the Nazi past. Its travails highlight for us the many stumbling blocks for people who sought to mobilize the language of human rights at the height of the Cold War in West Germany. Chapter 2 takes up the same period of Allied occupation through the 1950s. During those years, the appropriation of the language of human rights on behalf of victims of the Allies, especially the ethnic German expellees, took hold. Contention between the first and second usages was therefore present from the very beginning. Chapter 2 presents the early postwar arguments for a right to the homeland and associated group rights through the example of the jurist Rudolf Laun. His story is important to add to the growing historiography on expellee politics because he placed himself in a progressive international law genealogy extending back to the mid-nineteenth century and the Habsburg Empire. His work helps us to see connections between older human rights thinking among international lawyers and those early West German discussions usually thought to be self-serving apologetics among former Nazis (which they sometimes were). Laun exerted strong but brief influence on discussions of human rights in West Germany. His case helps to recapture that early moment. Chapter 3 leads the reader into the 1960s, focusing on the refounding of

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the German League for Human Rights and the foundation of two new organizations: the West German section of Amnesty International and the Humanist Union. All three, I argue, were manifestations of the rejection of the anti-communist usage of human rights and of demands for domestic reform. Their common tool was critical education about the Nazi past, which they sought to use for building West German democracy. Of course, West German Amnesty also shows us the earliest example of the fourth usage, work on behalf of non-Germans. Yet it took some years for that international focus to emerge, and indeed for West German Amnesty to flourish. West German Amnesty’s earliest preoccupations were domestic, and domestic concerns were to recur in later years as well. Chapter 4 returns to the theme of expellee influence on West German international law. It traces the career of the law professor Otto Kimminich to show how he emerged as West Germany’s leading expert on both refugee and asylum rights as well as on the right to the homeland, self-determination, and ethnic group rights, collectively presented as Volksgruppenrecht, a distinctly right-wing project. Kimminich became important for West German human rights advocates across the board because he wrote general works on human rights at a time when very few in that country did, and he grounded these, and all of his work, on a strong criticism of state sovereignty. His career exemplifies how, in spite of the strong conflicts between advocates in the first usage and those in the second usage, in practice the relationships between the two have become intertwined. A prolific scholar right up to his death in 1997, his direct influence extends into the 2000s. This chapter, with its argument that expellee international lawyers played a formative role in postwar human rights law, contributes to the as yet unwritten history of international law in West Germany.35 Chapter 5 focuses on the feminist human rights organization Terre des Femmes, which seeks to defend the human rights of non-German women and girls. Unlike the Society for Threatened Peoples, Terre des Femmes has been highly critical of group rights, turning instead to an individual rights strategy reminiscent of the Humanist Union and Amnesty International. At the same time, it has remained committed to conceptualizing women across cultural lines as a group. While it has certainly been politically sympathetic to the first usage, in practice the organization Terre des Femmes has seldom referred to the German past. Instead, it has often invoked the colonial past and neo-colonial present, and Chapter 5 pays particular attention to members’ discussions of ethnocentrism and racism. Terre des Femmes’s success

Introduction

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displays yet another form of West German moral credibility, one that relies on a notion of cross-cultural solidarity among women. This book does not offer a comprehensive account of human rights advocacy in West Germany. The goal of comprehensiveness would require me to referee situations that arise directly out of the fact that diverse people and institutions use the language of human rights strategically. If I engaged in such refereeing, the reader would learn much about my idiosyncratic opinions but little about the phenomenon of strategic invocation of the language of human rights. For example, the foreign mission and domestic social welfare organizations of both the Catholic and Evangelical churches are members of the Human Rights Forum (Forum Menschenrechte), a German consortium founded in 1994 that also includes the International League for Human Rights, German Amnesty, the Humanist Union, the Society for Threatened Peoples, and Terre des Femmes.36 Does that mean that those agencies, and the churches behind them, are best understood as “human rights organizations”? Or is that a tent so big as to be unwieldy? A comprehensive account would also require the author to referee which was a “real” (sincere, intellectually disciplined) human rights organization, and which was not. Another member of the Human Rights Forum is the Society for the Protection of Civil Liberty and Human Dignity (Gesellschaft zum Schutz von Bürgerrecht und Menschenwürde), an organization founded in 1991. Its stated purpose is “to contribute to the realization and active protection of the basic and human rights of citizens, as well as their human dignity, particularly in the process of German unification.”37 It is widely understood to be a gathering place for former employees of East Germany’s Ministry of State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS, or Stasi), and so seeks to protect some of Germany’s worst recent violators of human rights. This is on the one hand outrageous, but on the other hand perfectly logical and moreover necessary. Even human rights violators have human rights, and it is obvious that people without respect or power will turn to the law, including international law, for assistance. Protagonists who claim to serve the cause of human rights and are taken up by historians as objects of inquiry deserve neither belief nor disbelief, but rather historical contextualization. This book therefore offers a critical mass of material and some explanations for West Germans’ motivations and contexts for using the language of human rights. It establishes certain facts and patterns, namely the overwhelming salience of the four usages of the language of human rights outlined above; the importance of domestic context in inciting people to use

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the language of human rights, regardless of the geographical location of the intended beneficiaries of that advocacy; and the dominance of advocacy on behalf of Germans (West and East Germans) before the late 1960s and early 1970s, when West Germans began to show perduring interest in advocacy aimed at non-Germans. Throughout, I have framed this as a specifically West German story, and that state certainly did have some unusual features. However, the four usages of the language of human rights and the argument for the importance of domestic political context will aid the reader in analyzing human rights advocacy in other settings as well. Many of the individuals encountered in the pages that follow were or are famous figures in West and unified Germany. Yet their activities on behalf of human rights, and their organizations, remain much less well known than the personnel and organizations for ecology, peace, and feminism—the West German “new social movements” that one often links with human rights advocacy. I believe that the reason why human rights advocacy has remained more elusive than the “new social movements” is its greater political indeterminacy, as well as the only intermittently popular appeal of its legalistic approach. Only in the 1970s, as socialism and Third World solidarity receded in appeal, did human rights begin to become popular under its own rubric in West Germany (and elsewhere). Human rights absorbed energies formerly directed at projects on the left. The language of human rights also lent itself well to projects of institutional democratization, such as within the churches.38 In those cases, “human rights” was a method of self-critique, not a free-standing movement. The political indeterminacy of human rights remains. Unlike ecology, peace, and feminist activists, speakers referring to human rights were using an open-ended language that could not be restricted to specific political goals. Whether they wished it or not, the language of human rights is an arena where very different people meet. What they have in common is their “refusal to learn” (Lernverweigerung), in the sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s phrase.39 That is, they sustain their advocacy by refusing to give in to the overwhelming political realities of our world. It is an overarching goal of this book to illustrate that political indeterminacy and to re-situate the language of human rights as a language of politics, not transcendence. As human rights have become a prominent rationale for political action, this is an important task.

Chapter 1

Human Rights Activism in Occupied and Early West Germany: The Case of the German League for Human Rights

This chapter untangles the story of competing efforts starting in 1945 to refound Germany’s oldest human rights organization, the German League for Human Rights (Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte). The story shows us actors invoking three of the usages of human rights described in the Introduction. They struggled with each other to gain credibility as they tried to link the prewar League’s moral prestige to their own causes. Longtime League members, including Jewish German and other returned émigrés, worked in the first usage, seeking to make critical discussion of the Nazi past into the basis for a new democracy. Nationalists and expellee advocates new to the organization worked in the second usage, attempting to turn it into an expellee organization that would protest expellees’ fate to the world. Another contingent of both old and new members worked in the third usage of human rights, anti-communism, and put the League at the front lines of the Cold War by focusing on human rights violations in East Germany. The League was vulnerable to cooptation from the right, which posed the problem of how to disentangle human rights claims from a self-exculpatory German nationalism, and from the left, which threatened its readiness to criticize Soviet and East German violations of human rights. It also faced efforts at coopta-

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tion from the anti-communist Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), which drew it into its Cold War struggles in Berlin, and from Americans in or close to the occupation authorities who sought to detach it from its traditional pacifism. The tiny and fragmented postwar organization became mired in espionage and corruption, and was almost unrecognizable in the late 1950s. While the League’s organizational story in the late 1940s and the 1950s is one of failure, it reveals much about how West Germans tried to use the language of human rights in the earliest post-Nazi years. It was a time when hardly anyone outside of Germany was listening to Germans’ statements about human rights, a time when Germans themselves were deeply divided about the recent Nazi past and the capitalist and communist present, and a time when the very form of postwar Germany seemed up in the air. Its story demonstrates the difficulties of grafting the universalistic language of human rights onto the political struggles of post-Nazi West German society amid wartime destruction and Cold War division. The universal, abstract quality of rights did not lend itself well to addressing responsibility, a central issue in a post-genocidal society like West Germany.1 The League confronted problems for which no abstract norm could provide guidance: What role was the past to play in current human rights advocacy? How was the organization to define victim and perpetrator? Who could be a human rights advocate, and for whom could a German human rights advocate speak? All human rights organizations must place limits on the possible answers to these questions in order to establish sufficient stability for their work. By the early 1960s, the refounded League had overcome those difficulties by making German responsibility for the Nazi past and the implications of that responsibility for politics in the present into the centerpiece of its human rights advocacy.

The German League for Human Rights before 1945 In order to appreciate how important the League appeared to some Germans after 1945 as a monument to moral credibility—specifically, to anti-fascism, peace, and rights—it is necessary to summarize its prewar history. Unlike other human rights organizations in West Germany’s early years, which focused on domestic issues and were usually inspired and funded by the U.S. Military Government (1945-49) or the civilian High Commission for Occupied Germany (HICOG, 1949-55), the League had a distinguished history

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before 1945.2 Like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), it originated in pacifist circles during the First World War, when the state restricted dissent against the war so sharply that pacifism became a major civil liberties issue.3 It began as the New Fatherland League (Bund Neues Vaterland), founded in November 1914 to promote a peace without annexations and to reveal the truth about the German political leadership’s role in provoking the First World War.4 The organization insisted that domestic political reform was necessary for international peace. After the war, the New Fatherland League worked closely with the French League for the Rights of Man (Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, LDH), a Dreyfusard organization founded in 1898.5 In 1922 the New Fatherland League adopted the French League’s name, becoming the German League for Human Rights, to reflect their common goal of GermanFrench reconciliation. Politically, the League was close to the German Peace Society (Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft), founded in 1892, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Internationale Frauenliga für Frieden und Freiheit), founded in the Netherlands in 1915.6 During the Weimar Republic, the League sought to strengthen Germany’s first democracy at home while pursuing international reconciliation abroad. It took the unpopular position in Germany that the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles ought to be fulfilled and that good relations with France and Poland were paramount. It published exposés of rearmament in violation of the Treaty of Versailles; the Weimar judiciary’s “political justice” favoring the Right; far-right “Feme” and later Nazi Party political murders; and the excessive use of emergency powers in the late Weimar Republic. The League took a consistently strong stand against anti-Semitism in Germany. It also spoke out on behalf of persecuted radicals such as Sacco and Vanzetti in the United States and revolutionaries who had been imprisoned in Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria. It provided legal aid to thousands of German defendants who suffered from unfair trials or Nazi violence. The League’s political affiliations were formally nonpartisan but distinctively left. It was closely allied with the SPD, and sometimes cooperated with the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD). As the Nazi threat grew, some members of the League advocated a popular front (communist and noncommunist alliance) against Nazism. Some of the most famous radical and pacifist intellectuals of the era were members of the League, including Albert Einstein, the sexual rights leader Helene Stöcker, the diarist Harry Graf von Kessler, the journalist and civil servant Hellmut von Gerlach, the president of the German Peace Society,

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Ludwig Quidde, the journalist Carl von Ossietzky (editor of Die Weltbühne), and the satirist Kurt Tucholsky. The League was always small (in 1932 it had only about two thousand members), but that suited it well, as members did not wish it to be a mass organization.7 On the contrary, they wanted to make sure that all members were personally convinced of the group’s goals and able to articulate them independently. The League elicited the hatred of the nationalist right and the Nazi Party, for its politics and for the prominence of Jews in its ranks. Within weeks of the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, many members of the League fled or were arrested. Robert M. W. Kempner, the head of the League’s legal aid office and later a U.S. prosecutor at two of the Nuremberg war crimes trials, destroyed the League’s files before fleeing in order to prevent the Nazis from finding information on their victims. Soon afterward, the Nazis raided and closed the League’s office.8 Carl von Ossietzky, who had been a member of the League’s board, continued to publish criticism of the Nazi regime and was arrested in 1933. He received the 1936 Nobel Peace Prize but was never freed, and he died in 1938.9 Shattered by political and racial persecution, and by emigration, the German League for Human Rights ceased to exist except in name. One general secretary during its Weimar years, Kurt R. Grossmann (1897-1972), fled to Prague, on to France, and then to New York City. The other Weimar-era general secretary, Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt (1873-1964), went to London. From there, Lehmann-Russbueldt used the name “League in Exile” to refer to a tiny, loose group of émigrés. In October 1944, he and a few others met in London to discuss refounding the German League for Human Rights.10 Unlike other exiles who insisted on the existence of an “other Germany” (anderes Deutschland) that had survived the Nazi era morally unscathed and would restore an unbroken tradition of German civilization as soon as the Nazis were defeated, Lehmann-Russbueldt argued that Nazism revealed deep flaws in German political and cultural traditions.11 Even as he and his circle committed themselves to advising and supporting a league to be refounded by Germans inside Germany, they were not very optimistic about its chances. At the same time, émigrés such as Grossmann and Lehmann-Russbueldt were not necessarily popular in Germany even after Nazism was defeated. Many Germans resented émigrés, and anti-Semitism remained strong. Given these unpromising circumstances, how might Germans inside Germany, including Jewish Germans, build a post-Nazi human rights organization? As Katharina Kupsch, one of Grossmann’s most trusted League colleagues from Weimar

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days, put it in 1947: “To intervene in issues that are acute abroad, like we used to do in a case like Sacco and Vanzetti, is, to my mind, not yet appropriate, as long as everyone out there can say we should first get through with our war criminal trials and de-Nazification, and put our own house in order. So, what to do?”12

The Frankfurt and Wuppertal Leagues and the Problem of “German Human Rights” In May 1945, few German organizations could look back on as early, clear, and principled an anti-Nazi position as the League’s. Yet moral authority did not translate easily into organizational strength. One problem was that the League’s prestigious name made it attractive to those seeking private gain. After all, human rights organizations are conduits for money. As one longtime member of the League noted, in the economic hard times of the early postwar years unscrupulous persons founded non-profit organizations for selfish or shady goals: “either they register their apartment as the organization’s office, so as not to have to offer living quarters to the local housing office, or they allocate to themselves, as the ‘executive,’ a monthly income from the organization’s funds, etc.”13 Another difficulty was how to match the political purpose of the League to the social and political conditions of defeated Germany. The prewar League had helped those who, as a result of their own political beliefs, were oppressed by agents of the state—much as the later Amnesty International has helped individual “prisoners of conscience.”14 Persons with strong principles who are also outspoken in the face of danger tend to be few in number. The Weimarera League was accustomed to helping a relatively small number of dissenters and victims of specific instances of political justice, and to acting as a watchdog regarding the state’s abuse of power. After 1945, however, much had changed, and in a morally complex way. The Allies had accomplished the task of defeating Nazism at which the German resistance, including the League, had failed. They were the new powers in occupied Germany—in effect, the state. The League might have resumed its work as a watchdog organization regarding the state’s abuse of power by exposing abuses of power by the Allied occupation forces. Yet to do so would ally the League with its own erstwhile oppressors: the many ex-Nazis and their sympathizers who were now busily pointing out the Allies’ shortcomings. The League could not make

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opposition to the state-like power held by the Allied occupation forces into the centerpiece of its program. Meanwhile, millions of Germans were experiencing very real suffering connected with defeat (wartime aerial bombardment; expulsions from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere; postwar hunger) and they were formulating their suffering in terms of violated rights. Yet their predicament did not fit the League’s model. Either such Germans had been sympathetic to Nazism and so their political beliefs were unworthy of defense, or they were politically inarticulate and so did not fit the “prisoner of conscience” model. Soon, another large group of German sufferers appeared in the Western zones of occupation and later, West Germany: those leaving the Soviet zone of occupation and later the German Democratic Republic for the West. Again, these persons were sometimes politically articulate, but usually they were not.15 How was the League to maintain its continuity of purpose yet also to find a responsive audience after 1945, when it was surrounded by huge numbers of the “wrong” kind of victims? Several local groups calling themselves the “German League for Human Rights” or some similar name, and seeking contact with leaders of the Weimar-era League, sprang up in the British and U.S. zones of occupation between 1945 and 1947.16 There was no central oversight for these Leagues; indeed, any political self-organization required Allied permission and was only permitted to grow gradually beyond the local level. Soon, some local League groups claimed the exclusive right to use the League’s name and threatened to sue other groups who persisted in sharing that name. The Weimar-era members considered themselves the arbiters of which of these League groups were genuine—but they did not completely agree among themselves and in any case were scattered and had difficulty monitoring developments. Two local groups indicated how differently the refounded League could develop: the Frankfurt League, led by a Weimar-era member, and the Wuppertal League, in the hands of newcomers. The Frankfurt League was constituted in June 1947 and run by Josef Kudrnofsky (1886-1950). Kudrnofsky had a typical League member’s profile: a businessman, he had been a longtime member of the SPD, the German Peace Society, and the League. In 1932 he left the SPD, criticizing it for having moved to the right. He remained in Germany during the Nazi years. Briefly imprisoned in 1933 and interrogated by the Gestapo periodically thereafter, he managed to continue aiding pacifists. After 1945, he again joined the SPD and also helped refound the German Peace Society.17 Kudrnofsky formally shared leadership of the Frankfurt

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League with a prominent Weimar-era pacifist and League member, Count Emil von Wedel.18 Kudrnofsky’s Frankfurt League hewed closely to the Weimar-era League’s pacifist and non-communist left commitments with its 1947 program.19 “International reconciliation” and the “abolition of armed conflict” were prominent. References to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “four freedoms” and the United Nations Charter signaled the League’s strong support for the United Nations.20 The Frankfurt League sought the “eradication” of “nationalistic and militaristic writings.” It held that capitalism promoted militarism, and therefore advocated the “abolition of all rule by violence or class” and “a fair and humane economic order.” Kudrnofsky and his colleagues were no orthodox Marxists; the Fabian Society was their model. Not class struggle, but rather persuasion—“campaigning for human rights and social justice by seeking to influence the press, parties and governments”—was their chosen means of social change. Their non-Marxist left politics also appeared in the last point of their program: to promote “cultivation of the personality through the promotion of all intellectual [geistigen] and moral developmental possibilities of the individual person while emphasizing the common interest.”21 In practical terms, the Frankfurt League set the goals of producing pamphlets, scholarly investigations, and expert opinions; holding discussion evenings, public lectures, and rallies; providing legal aid; and maintaining ties with similar organizations around the world. Only in 1947 did the U.S. Military Government permit the Frankfurt League to hold public events at all; by mid-1948, it had already hosted forty-eight public assemblies.22 Its membership rules banned former Nazis and former members of Nazi organizations unless three League members vouched for them and they underwent a oneyear probation.23 The Frankfurt League shared the above commitments with other local League groups that were led by Weimar-era members, such as the Bielefeld League led by Friedrich Welter and the Hamburg League led by Rudolf Herrmann, both of which had been founded by 1947.24 The Wuppertal League took a different approach to human rights advocacy in postwar Germany. Led by outsiders to the Weimar-era League, the Wuppertal League clashed with the Frankfurt, Bielefeld, and Hamburg Leagues over how to define victims, perpetrators, and the League’s audience. The Wuppertal League formed earlier than the others: already in 1945, one Heinrich Dietz gained Allied permission to form an organization, and he held the Wuppertal League’s constitutive meeting in February 1946. Dietz had had contact with the League during the Weimar Republic as a recipient

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of its legal aid services, but apparently he had not been a member.25 It is unclear what he did during the Nazi years; he claimed to have kept the League alive inside Germany singlehandedly, but neither Weimar-era members who stayed in Germany nor those who emigrated had had any contact with him.26 However, Dietz’s Wuppertal League did include some prominent Weimar-era members, such as the pacifist journalist and priest Otto Maria Saenger and the journalist Jakob Stöcker.27 Dietz even invited Kurt Grossmann, the Weimar-era League’s general secretary who was living in New York, to serve as its first chairman. Grossmann responded in a letter that he also published as a statement of the predicament of German Jewish émigrés. In it, he explained that as a Jew and as a new and loyal U.S. citizen, he would not return to live in Germany.28 However, Grossmann did want to help the League in postwar Germany, and his correspondence shows that he invested considerable time in it. Grossmann and other members of the Weimar-era League took Dietz seriously as the new postwar leader of the League and genuinely appreciated Dietz’s initiative.29 From the beginning, however, there were signs that Dietz was not interested in preserving continuity with the Weimar-era League. First, he disregarded the League’s traditionally democratic self-governance: he refused to consult his advisory board (which included members of the Weimarera League) before embarking on campaigns, and he kept the Wuppertal League’s finances secret.30 Second, he sought a mass membership, a strategy with several ramifications that ran counter to the League’s traditions. While the Weimar-era League had ensured political reliability by requiring any new member to be endorsed by two old ones, Dietz dispensed with that procedure even for former Nazis.31 And while the old League had relied on individual members’ willingness to dissent from majority views, the Wuppertal League announced charitable and fee-based services: locating apartments and jobs; finding addresses of German prisoners of war; and a pen-pal program intended to persuade youth abroad to send food and clothing to Germany. Dietz even planned to open a for-profit business under the League’s name aimed at ethnic German expellee customers, to sell them tools to aid in agricultural resettlement.32 None of these projects implied any willingness on the part of members to dissent or indeed to articulate any political values. Yet another ramification of Dietz’s mass membership strategy was that the quest for more members might end up driving his League’s program. Two issues that would certainly attract large numbers of new members, yet were a poor fit with traditional League priorities of international reconciliation, were the

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expulsions of ethnic Germans and the prolonged detention of German prisoners of war in Allied custody, especially in the Soviet Union. The Hanover League, under the influence of the Wuppertal League, drew large crowds with events such as a lecture on defeated Germany’s status under international law. The speaker, the law professor Rudolf Laun, used that issue as the framework for his criticisms of the Allies, especially regarding the expulsions of ethnic Germans and the detention of German prisoners of war (see Chapter 2).33 International law had recognized the prolonged detention of prisoners of war as a human rights violation since 1907, and expulsions of civilian populations were coming to be seen as such during 1945 and are considered clear violations of international law today.34 The German prisoners of war and ethnic German expellees certainly constituted legitimate human rights issues and were much discussed in occupied and West Germany.35 However, they were also the favorite issues of unreconstructed Nazis and nationalists, who invoked them to obscure the origins of the war, relativize Nazi cruelty, and shift blame to the Allies for the horrors of war. Older League members did not deny the importance of these issues, but they believed that the issues lent themselves all too easily to the expression of German nationalism and selfpity.36 They insisted that such issues be discussed together with the fates of non-German POWs and refugees, to express the League’s internationalism, and in the context of a general condemnation of war.37 Without such context, Grossmann argued, the League was in danger of becoming an organization focused only on “German human rights.”38 Older League members also held that, quite apart from the wrongs of the expulsions, it was pure demagogy to suggest to expellees that they would ever be able to return home.39 The Wuppertal League clashed with the other Leagues most fundamentally over the question of defining victims. While Dietz saw Germans primarily as victims, the Weimar-era members saw Germans primarily as oppressors—including Germans who had clearly suffered. Dietz invoked human rights as a source of entitlements for Germans, not as a source of ethical obligation, and he eagerly sought an international audience for his views. For example, Dietz complained to a British pacifist: “outsiders are making a great many unfair accusations against the German people. Please note that these injustices which are being inflicted on our people today have led me to speak out on behalf of my countrymen, just as we in the League have spoken out on behalf of human rights wherever they are most cruelly violated, no matter by whom.”40 Here Dietz was trying to argue that the universality of human rights compelled his attention to Germans. His colleague Karl Kny, a

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Sudeten German who oversaw expellee affairs in the Wuppertal League, likewise sought an international audience for an article in which he complained that Germans were being victimized. Kny suggested that there would be dire consequences if the borders settled at the Potsdam Conference were not redrawn in favor of the German expellees and revived a stock notion of German nationalism in the Nazi years and earlier: that Germans’ industriousness entitled them to Eastern European lands. “It is absolutely necessary to make possible a return to the expellees whose fields now lie fallow and call for their industrious hands,” he wrote. “There is no other way unless one wants to perpetuate present conditions, which would mean nothing less than a new catastrophe.”41 Kny’s invocation of “a new catastrophe” was both threatening and vague: did he mean that the expellees would again suffer on the scale of the original expulsions, in which it was believed that twelve million had been displaced and half a million died?—or that the expellees would start a new war?42 Kny asked Grossmann to help place the article in the U.S. press, apparently oblivious to the fact that such statements made Grossmann and other Weimar-era members cringe. The Weimar-era League members’ point of departure was that most Germans did not value democracy, did not know the full extent of Nazi crimes, and did not want to know. For these older members, German aggression in the Second World War had to be part of any discussion of postwar affairs. As the Bielefeld League put it: “Each one of us [in the League] must know that we are to work, within the scope of our organization, toward restitution, namely the restitution of damages done especially to the racially and politically persecuted. Collective responsibility need not be declared or accepted, but it must be uncontroversial among League supporters that all Germans have taken on a debt [Schuld] so great, that the sufferings of the years after 1945, undeniable as they are, really cannot be called a ‘reckoning,’ in order to be, as it were, even.”43 These members of the Weimar-era League sought to make the League a means of confronting fellow Germans with the facts of the Nazi past and educating them to be democrats conscious of a human rights tradition. The Bielefeld League, for example, held discussion evenings on “the idea of human rights since Voltaire,” and on restitution to Nazism’s victims. It circulated issues of critical and democratic periodicals like the Frankfurter Hefte, and recommended that members read Eugen Kogon’s Der SS-Staat, the earliest major publication on the Nazi camp system.44 These members felt vindicated by the various Nuremberg trials, which ran from 1945 until 1949, in

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their views regarding the importance of documenting atrocity and assigning blame to specific individuals. Only those Germans who had resisted Nazism or who had educated themselves about the nature of Nazism ought to be spokespeople for human rights, they held; otherwise the language of human rights inside Germany risked being discredited. A Bielefeld League newsletter expressed this idea when it stated: “The struggle for justice and human rights is completely justified in the case of Germany as well, but—and this is always decisive—it depends on who feels called upon to be a protector of human rights.”45 The older League members also presupposed a different audience for the League than did Dietz. While Dietz appealed to Germans who felt misunderstood by an unfriendly world, the older League members, with their experiences of exclusion and emigration, wished to use the refounded League as a “bridge to abroad”46 to prove to the world that Germans had repented of their ways and changed. On this view, the postwar League was to be “in a certain sense a guarantee for our German people’s democratic convictions and democratic constructive will.”47 Older League members were acutely aware of how German complaints were received abroad and urged that the League not focus on controversial causes that would alienate its human rights counterparts abroad.48 The German League “must fit itself harmoniously into the great circle of the other Leagues of the whole world,” choosing the same goals, if it were to lay claim to defending human rights.49 As Grossmann declared, “Organizations like . . . the League for Human Rights . . . should try to find sufficient numbers of Germans, and especially influential ones, who are prepared to show the occupation powers through deeds, not words, that German circles are willing and committed to making good-faith sacrifices to prove their goodwill regarding peace in Europe.”50 The older League members, and especially the émigrés, had in mind an audience for the League that extended beyond Germany or was even located primarily outside of Germany. Both Dietz’s and the Weimar-era members’ approaches had their limitations, as the Weimar-era member Katharina Kupsch pointed out to Grossmann in 1947. Like the other old-timers, she rejected Dietz’s approach of appealing to Germans’ self-pity, commenting sarcastically that if the League wanted to take that approach, “we could, for the sake of convenience, ask for the Nazi Party’s membership list, publish a little appeal, and we’d have it made.” But she also rejected the idea of refounding the League for the sake of “moral and material restitution for the human rights violated by Germany.” That was “too retrospective.” “I believe that it is not pedagogically sound—not

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only in the case of children—to first count up all the instances of wickedness in order to show that one must behave better.”51 For Kupsch, it was not a good idea to embark on human rights activism on Germans’ behalf only, yet one could not do so against them either. She pointed out to Grossmann that many Germans, including politically sympathetic ones, were truly suffering in these postwar years and could not accept the idea that Germans were always and only perpetrators, and never victims.52 Even though Dietz’s approach and that of the Weimar-era members were incompatible, the Weimar-era members persisted for a surprisingly long time in seeking an arrangement with Dietz. This was true of Grossmann in New York, Lehmann-Russbueldt in London, and Kudrnofsky in Frankfurt, and of Friedrich Welter in Bielefeld and Rudolf Herrmann in Hamburg. Dietz’s rude responses and threats of lawsuits finally caused a break.53 Kudrnofsky and others wanted to sue Dietz for misuse of the League’s name, but Welter pointed out the depressing truth: Dietz had the stronger case on formal grounds because he had full permission as “the” League in the British zone, while Kudrnofsky’s Frankfurt League was at that time still awaiting U.S. permission for its zone.54 In fact, the Frankfurt League had to wait for almost a year after its founding to be granted a license by the U.S. Military Government.55 By the time it was licensed in April 1948, the imminent currency reform drained its resources. It never did sue Dietz, but rather spread the word informally that “[Dietz’s group] is not our League.”56 At the same time that the conflict with Dietz was coming to a head, the older League members in the Western zones of occupation faced another challenge, this time in Berlin. This Berlin conflict, unlike that with Dietz, pitted Weimar-era members against each other. At issue was how the League would respond to individual members’ communist and neutralist opinions and to the deepening Cold War.

The Cold War inside the Berlin League In late 1945 in Berlin, a newcomer to the League named Theodor Kiendl gathered Weimar-era League members as well as other newcomers. They called their group the International League for Human Rights and applied for Allied permission.57 A few months later they were joined by a small League group around the Weimar-era member Walter Persicaner consisting mostly of Nazi-era racial and political persecutees. Persicaner had founded his League group because he had been unaware of Kiendl’s. Now Persicaner

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gladly joined Kiendl’s, believing that Kiendl was closer to gaining a license from the Allies.58 As it happened, however, almost four years passed before the Berlin League was licensed. During that time, bitter struggles over communism took place inside the nascent Berlin League, and the League itself was made into an instrument of the West Berlin SPD. These events of the late 1940s set the problematic course of the Berlin League through the 1950s. It is not possible to reconstruct what Kiendl, a writer by profession, had done before 1945 or how he came upon the notion of founding a postwar League. Like Dietz, he claimed to have been a League member before 1933, but Grossmann and others had never heard of him.59 Unlike them, he was no nationalist. His statements on the subject of human rights were sometimes silly, but they generally conformed to the League’s traditional goals.60 While Kiendl frequently expressed his opposition to communism in his letters to U.S. authorities in Berlin, he seemed naïve about the Soviets when he spoke airily of plans to distribute a provocative flier on human rights inside the Soviet zone. In spite of his open opposition to the Soviets, he insisted on applying for permission from all four occupying powers in Berlin.61 One of the U.S. Military Government officials who had to wade through Kiendl’s extensive communications called him a “romantic or worse.”62 From the beginning Kiendl’s League included anti-communists as well as communists and neutralists. For example, the novelist Erik Reger belonged to the League’s board. Reger, a Weimar-era member of the League, was a licensee of the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel and was unusually early and outspoken in his opposition to any cooperation with the Soviets.63 Yet Wilhelm Külz also belonged to Kiendl’s board. Külz had not belonged to the League before 1945. A minister of the interior in the Weimar Republic, soon after 1945 he rose to the top of the Soviet-approved Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (Liberaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, LDPD). Külz participated in the People’s Congress movement led by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED), the communist party that the Soviets had forcibly created in their zone out of the KPD and SPD—exactly what Reger abhorred. Kiendl’s group also included Weimar-era League members who were now SED members, like Paul Oestreich and Walter Persicaner, or who did not belong to the SED but advocated working with the Soviets, like Ernst Oehlschläger. Oehlschläger, who was also active in rebuilding the German Peace Society in Berlin, was one of a faction of Weimar-era members inside Kiendl’s League that argued that true neutrality for the League required not only permission from the Western Allies but also from the Soviets. Found-

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ing the League in the western sectors only, they insisted, would make it a mere tool in the confrontation between East and West.64 When the League’s application finally reached the highest level of four-power rule in Berlin in February 1948, the Soviet representative refused to grant a license to the League, citing a technicality, even though the American, British, and French representatives approved of the League.65 The next month, in March 1948, the Soviet representative left the Allied Control Council altogether, never to return. Now Kiendl of necessity gave up his quest for four-power permission and sought only a license from the Western Allies.66 Although he stressed his own anti-communism, he defended the presence of communists on his board, on the grounds that they were authentic old League members and in fact exerted little influence. The League was, he insisted, overwhelmingly supportive of the (anti-communist) SPD.67 But in the tense atmosphere of Berlin in 1948— the time of the Berlin Blockade—the League appeared to the U.S. Military Government as at least potentially a communist organization.68 The League came under pressure to purge its neutralists and declare itself unambiguously anti-communist. The U.S. Military Government turned to the Berlin SPD, making it the arbiter of the League’s political status.69 Although Franz Neumann, the chairman of the SPD, called the League a “camouflaged communist organization,” he apparently also indicated that, as a U.S. official summarized, “The SPD is not disinclined to support the League if a larger part of its sponsors were SPD members.”70 The SPD began to pack the League with people from Neumann’s own circle, and apparently offered the League funding and assistance with its license application.71 The transformation of the Berlin League into an anti-communist organization was also driven by Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt in London. Like Grossmann and Kudrnofsky, Lehmann-Russbueldt was irritated by the Berlin members who were “half- or full-blooded communists.”72 To their old colleague Oehlschläger, they argued that the Soviets would never permit the League in its genuine form because of the Soviets’ entirely different notion of human rights. They also told Oehlschläger that Kiendl’s League was in fact a tool of the SED that was preventing a genuine League from coming to fruition.73 But like Kudrnofsky in his confrontation with Dietz, LehmannRussbueldt had no legal priority over Kiendl and could not sue him for misuse of the League’s name. The Weimar-era League had been legally dissolved under the Nazis. Until Lehmann-Russbueldt could reverse that dissolution by presenting the coercive conditions under which it had taken place, nei-

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ther he nor Kudrnofsky nor any other Weimar-era member had legal priority over anyone else who might use the League’s name. Unlike Kudrnofsky in his confrontation with Dietz, here Lehmann-Russbueldt faced an opponent who had a loyal following of authentic Weimar-era members. They could not be ousted on the grounds of being impostors. In May 1948, the Berlin court did reverse the Nazi-era deletion of the League’s legal registration.74 Now Lehmann-Russbueldt’s allies in Berlin made their move, using anti-communism as the litmus test as they took over Kiendl’s League from within. They told Kiendl that the League’s failure to obtain a license since 1945 was his fault, and demanded that the SED members Paul Oestreich and Walter Persicaner leave the League.75 Certainly Lehmann-Russbueldt shared with the Berlin SPD a strong anti-communism: he wished to go to Germany himself to guide the “reconstruction of the League as a defence organisation on Western democratic lines against totalitarian movements” that had “special tasks for its vanguard in Berlin.”76 It is possible that he also benefited materially from its closer relationship with the Berlin SPD, which seems to have assured the new League’s finances. Both he and his daughter, Ingeborg Lehmann, who lived in Berlin, were very poor and hoped for sinecures through the League.77 After the League was remade as an anti-communist organization, it employed Ingeborg Lehmann as its secretary and invited Lehmann-Russbueldt to serve as honorary president. The Berlin League was finally granted a license by the three Western Allies in Berlin in May 1949.78 Struggles over its political direction continued right up to its constitutive meeting in November 1949. Oestreich and Alfred Kantorowicz (the writer and literary critic) tried to pull the League back to a neutralist, that is, less anti-communist, position, but they failed. At the meeting, there was “stormy discussion of a resolution against the concentration camps, forced labor, and kidnapping of the Eastern zone system.”79 When this resolution passed with a strong majority, the communist members left, and the ensuing vote produced a new board that shifted the League leadership to a more anti-communist position than even the May 1949 licensee list had represented. Six of the ten board members were in the SPD. These included the noted Berlin politicians Jeanette Wolff, a Jewish survivor of Stutthof, and Willy Kressmann, a returned émigré and now mayor of the Kreuzberg section of Berlin.80 As the League’s new chairman, SPD member Jochen Klaus Schaefer, noted, “any attempt to exert communist influence on the League’s work was . . . completely eliminated.”81 The group, which adopted LehmannRussbueldt’s preferred name, German League for Human Rights, now en-

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joyed the support of some of the most influential figures in Berlin, including Ernst Reuter, the hugely popular SPD politician and West Berlin mayor between 1948 and 1953.82 Reuter arranged a pension for Lehmann-Russbueldt, which allowed Lehmann-Russbueldt to move to West Berlin in 1951.83 Communist and anti-communist League members in Berlin agreed on one thing: that Berlin and not Frankfurt ought to be the headquarters for all the Leagues in Germany.84 As the Cold War intensified in 1947 and 1948, Berliners were anxious not to be abandoned by western Germany. Yet from the perspective of those in western Germany, it seemed foolhardy to assume that Berlin would remain outside the Soviet zone of occupation and to base an organization there. Kudrnofsky’s Frankfurt League opposed the communistleaning Berliners but also saw the anti-communist Berliners as troubling rivals. As it happened, Berlin prevailed: the Berlin League gained new backing just as the Frankfurt League missed a chance to gain its own powerful ally. It was really a second Cold War story that sealed the fate of the Frankfurt League, in a demoralizing encounter with Roger Nash Baldwin. The executive director of the ACLU, Baldwin visited Germany in the fall of 1948 at the invitation of Lucius Clay, the military governor of the U.S. zone of occupation. Baldwin was interested in tracking the civil liberties record of the United States as an occupying power. He recommended to the U.S. Military Government that it help found a civil liberties organization to promote Germans’ awareness of the importance of limiting the state’s power over the individual. Having learned about the prewar German League of Human Rights from Grossmann and other émigrés in New York, Baldwin contacted Kudrnofsky.85 Kudrnofsky immediately appreciated that Baldwin’s support was a lifeline for the Frankfurt League. It had finally obtained a U.S. license in April 1948, but the currency reform in June 1948 rendered it unable to raise funds and it survived on volunteer labor, mostly Kudrnofsky’s. With Baldwin’s support, Kudrnofsky hoped to hire personnel and bring Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt to Frankfurt.86 Kudrnofsky had an uphill struggle to convince Baldwin that the Frankfurt League could be the basis for his planned civil liberties organization. Baldwin made clear that the Frankfurt League had to distance itself from communism. Yet the Frankfurt League apparently had no communist members, unlike the Berlin League; Baldwin’s criticism seems to have really been about the League’s Weimar past. Baldwin repeatedly asked Kudrnofsky about communist influence on the League and did not believe the latter’s assurances that the League “has never, since its foundation, been or sympathized with a communist orga-

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nization.”87 Baldwin conceded that proximity to communists was inevitable in the years of fighting Nazism, but he could not get over the stumbling block of the League’s reputation for “fellow-traveling.”88 Baldwin also listened to other Germans who warned him away from the League. Some were conservatives who predictably called the League too left, too Jewish, and too intellectual. Yet even some who were closer to the League politically told Baldwin that a refounded League could never exert the broad influence that a German civil liberties organization modeled on the ACLU would need.89 Baldwin ultimately decided to set the League project aside: “A fresh start had to be made.”90 Yet for Kudrnofsky and the other Weimar-era League members, it was the League’s very history and politics that made its name so valuable after 1945. Kudrnofsky and Baldwin also differed over what strategic approach to human rights advocacy to take in Germany. Baldwin wanted to draw in as many Germans as possible. He was less interested in confronting them with difficult truths than in persuading them of the respectability of defending individuals’ rights over against the state. To ensure such respectability, he objected to the League’s “political” program. Its pacifism, for example, was not “opportune.”91 Baldwin wanted his planned organization to focus purely on domestic civil liberties in order to appear as nonpartisan as possible. He also used the U.S. Military Government’s typical strategy of turning to local notables— in this case Frankfurt University academics, local lawyers, and the German American Clubs—to spearhead a project. The idea here was that local notables’ reputations would attract their conservative and apolitical neighbors.92 Kudrnofsky rejected the strategy of appealing to local notables or the apolitical public, believing that it would dilute the membership’s commitment to the League’s principles. The German American Clubs, a creation of the U.S. Military Government intended to ease the non-fraternization policy, were certainly no hotbed of critical opposition. Kudrnofsky indignantly called the University of Frankfurt faculty “reactionary elements.”93 Baldwin encouraged Germans to lodge complaints about the U.S. occupation, as a way for them to hone their awareness of the individual’s rights against the state.94 Kudrnofsky rejected the idea of attracting new League members by inciting criticism of the occupation, which he associated with the behavior of former Nazis. From London, Lehmann-Russbueldt agreed with Kudrnofsky, ridiculing Baldwin’s idea: “I am tempted to write a satire on the outcome of this experiment.”95 The negotiations between Baldwin and Kudrnofsky dragged on until mid-1949. Baldwin was reluctant to give up the chance of using Kudrnofsky’s connections, and Kudrnofsky hoped he might still gain something from

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Baldwin for the Frankfurt League. Baldwin failed to appreciate the depth of the conflict between old League members like Kudrnofsky and Emil von Wedel on the one hand, and the Frankfurt notables whom Baldwin was also cultivating for his organization, on the other. The two sides clashed in a humiliating meeting in May 1949 at which the League was dismissed as a relic from “bygone times” and “tending sharply to the left.”96 It became apparent to Kudrnofsky and von Wedel that the League’s name was to be exploited while the longtime League members were to be pushed to the side. Baldwin threw his support and that of the U.S. occupation (soon to change from a military agency to a civilian one) behind a new, separate civil liberties organization, the League for Civil Liberties (Bund für Bürgerrechte). If Baldwin thought he had chosen a safer path, he was wrong. Perhaps Kudrnofsky’s Frankfurt League would not have flourished, but Baldwin’s new organization fell far short of his vision for an overarching civil liberties organization that would help educate West Germans about their rights. It lasted only as long as the American money behind it, folding in 1954.97 As we have seen, the Berlin League spent 1949 gaining its license and moving further in a pro-SPD and anti-communist direction. It was now poised to supersede the Frankfurt League as the headquarters for all League groups in West Germany. An ill Kudrnofsky spent the last months of his life in a lawsuit against yet another shady group of League impostors in Frankfurt; he died in 1950.98 Lehmann-Russbueldt moved to Berlin in 1951 to become the honorary president of the Berlin League, having apparently decided that it was the most promising of the local groups.99 Indeed, the Berlin League prospered financially after 1949, as its glossy new magazine Die Menschenrechte and extensive activities attested. I have not been able to determine all its sources of funding, but the Berlin SPD, the city of Berlin, and U.S. funds via the High Commission for Occupied Germany are the likeliest. It definitely received donations from the anti-communist German Trade Union Confederation (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB).100 The Berlin League strayed far from the old League ideal of nonpartisan independence, according to which it was to reject any political party’s endorsement or funding. Meanwhile, old problems—what to do with former Nazis and whether to use charity to draw a mass membership—and the new context of Cold War plunged the League into its deepest crisis yet. The most pressing human rights issue for West Berliners in the 1950s was the repression all around them in East Germany. It produced a stream of refugees into the island of West Berlin. When the League threw itself into that work, it became

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enmeshed in the Cold War intrigues of that city and was overwhelmed by powerful political and material interests. It proved unable to protect people who were inside and outside the League.

The League in West Berlin in the 1950s: Espionage and Corruption The German League for Human Rights, which was now based in West Berlin, had over a dozen chapters across West Germany in the 1950s.101 Claiming independence from political parties, governments, and religious affiliations, it issued statements against dictatorship, colonial exploitation, and violations of individuals’ rights in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. It also emphasized the importance of educating the West German public about Nazi crimes. In 1953 it launched a new periodical, Die Menschenrechte, which critically discussed the Nazi past, for example praising the Nuremberg trials and criticizing West Germany’s decision to grant pensions to Condor League veterans of the Spanish Civil War.102 Such work carried forward the Weimarera League’s internationalist and democratic goals. The League also criticized the Soviet Union. For example, one article conceded that the Western powers posed a threat to peace but stated firmly that the lack of democracy in the Soviet Union and the East Bloc meant that a genuine peace movement could only exist in the West.103 This was an accurate reflection of the position of older League members such as Kudrnofsky and Lehmann-Russbueldt.104 However, the League in West Berlin also exhibited some changes in political direction that disturbed older League members. In May 1952 its members in West Berlin voted to support West German rearmament under the European Defense Community’s plan for a European army.105 This plan did offer an alternative to integrating West Germany into NATO (the latter happened in 1955), and it was consistent with the League’s now absolute anti-communism.106 However, supporting rearmament violated the League’s traditional strict pacifism. In 1953 the West Berlin leadership published a pamphlet commemorating the League’s fortieth anniversary that made public both the vote in favor of a European army and the abandonment of the old League statutes. Membership requirements were changed so that former Nazis could now join as long as they had the board’s approval and “accepted the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948 without reservation.”107 In the mid-1950s, the predicaments of German prisoners of war and expellees appeared as human rights issues in Die Menschenrechte.108

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In 1955 Die Menschenrechte began a regular feature that suggested that communist crimes were on a par with Nazi ones. Entitled “You Are Not Forgotten,” it juxtaposed stories of victims of Nazism with stories of victims of East German Stalinism.109 The most fateful change was the Berlin League’s decision to establish hostels for the East Germans fleeing East Germany and arriving in droves in West Berlin. In 1952 the border between the two Germanies was sealed, making the island of West Berlin the main outlet to the West for East Germans. By early 1953, tens of thousands of East Germans were arriving in West Berlin each month. Then a statewide uprising in East Germany broke out on 17 June 1953, leading to tens of thousands more fleeing into West Berlin. Over half a million arrived from East Berlin and the rest of East Germany in 1952 and 1953.110 West Berlin was overwhelmed. Over fifty camps were set up in West Berlin for fleeing East Germans, and the League became one of many organizations seeking to help the refugees.111 The League opened its first hostel in 1952, and by 1953 it was running four hostels.112 The hostels provoked a debate inside the League about whether charity was its proper task and whether the East Germans were indeed political victims. Karl Retzlaw, a member of the Weimar-era League now speaking for the Frankfurt League after Kudrnofsky’s death, argued that the League was “not a welfare organization.” He pointed out that the political views of these fleeing East Germans were unknown. Having only their material need in common, they were unlikely to become principled defenders of causes beyond their own situations.113 In fact, the mass flight from East Germany did not fit well with the League’s traditional definition of refugees as narrowly political, that is, persons who had individually articulated their political opposition to a dictatorial regime. As historians have more recently shown, when these East Germans were interviewed upon arrival in West Berlin, most did not give specifically political reasons for their journeys. It is also notable that the West German state, which was otherwise eager to represent the mass flight as the result of the lack of freedom in East Germany, recognized only 14 percent of East Germans as official political refugees.114 Retzlaw believed that the Cold War preoccupation with the East Germans was a way of turning attention away from still-inadequate restitution to victims of Nazism and from the creeping “re-Nazification” of West German society: “Eastern zone refugees are ‘fashionable,’ while we fighters against Hitler and the war are not only ‘unfashionable’ but also in the highest degree unwanted.”115 The Berlin League, however, asserted that the East German regime deserved condemnation as

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much as Nazism did.116 It felt vindicated in late 1952 and early 1953, when the Paul Merker trial took place, an East German version of the Soviet “doctors’ plot” and Czechoslovak Slánský trial.117 All three trials employed antiSemitism, and most East German Jews had fled their country by March 1953. The League established a hostel especially for them.118 It proved perilous for the League to run these hostels in such a politically charged environment. The East Germans whom the League sought to help were magnets for spies from both sides. Soviet and East German intelligence agencies recruited fleeing East Germans to inform on each other in reception camps in West Berlin, while Western intelligence agencies hoped to gain from them information about the internal affairs of secretive East Germany. Intelligence officers from the United States, for example, demanded access to East Germans who were undergoing official West German review for recognition as political refugees.119 Some West Germans in militant anticommunist organizations also sought to use East Germans to distribute clandestine anti-communist literature to relatives and friends left behind in East Germany. These organizations included the Fighting Group against Inhumanity (Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit), the Free Jurists’ Investigative Committee (Untersuchungsausschuss freiheitlicher Juristen) and the June 17th Committee (Komitee 17. Juni).120 As money from the CIA as well as from West German political parties and other organizations flowed into the militant anti-communist organizations and the League moved into their orbit, the League became a tool of Cold War politics and a source of money for unscrupulous people. Conflicts among League members over these issues came to focus on the person of the extraordinarily energetic Alfred Götze. He had been elected to the board at the constitutive meeting in November 1949, and then became vice president. The League’s president was Jochen Klaus Schaefer, a lawyer also apparently new to the organization. Götze soon held simultaneous League posts as general secretary, head of the supplies department, and head of a department he created for refugees fleeing East Germany.121 It was Götze who was behind the project of the hostels. With the help of League members who held posts in the West Berlin government, such as his close friend Otto Bach, he arranged for the West Berlin Senate to allocate public monies to the League, as it did to other organizations that ran shelters for the refugees.122 Götze was the one who drew the Berlin League into the milieu of the militant anti-communist organizations.123 Götze was also the author of the controversial fortieth-anniversary

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pamphlet. Its text foregrounded his own activities, especially regarding the hostels. In it, he mentioned having taken trips on behalf of the League to France each year since 1946 to meet with the French League for the Rights of Man and to affiliate the League with the Paris-based International Federation for the Rights of Man (Fédération Internationale des Droits de l’Homme, FIDH) in 1947.124 In fact, the League hardly existed as a coherent organization in Berlin in those years, and the French League for the Rights of Man was apparently in no better shape.125 Moreover, Lehmann-Russbueldt and other Weimar-era League members wanted to affiliate the League with the International League for the Rights of Man (ILRM) in New York City, not the FIDH.126 Götze’s pamphlet included other statements that were not corroborated in old League members’ correspondence and did not fit traditional League goals. For example, he claimed to have cooperated with the LDH to negotiate successfully with the French Ministry of War to ameliorate conditions for German prisoners of war held by France and for Germans imprisoned and awaiting trial for war crimes. He even claimed to have helped secure the release of some of the latter.127 The traditional goals of the League certainly did not include aiding Germans accused of war crimes. Götze’s pamphlet provoked outrage from Frankfurt. Retzlaw cited the rearmament vote, the hostels, the failure to exclude ex-Nazis from membership, and the numerous violations of League traditions as reasons for distancing himself completely from the Berlin League. He forbade Götze to use the League name anywhere near Frankfurt.128 Emil von Wedel wrote a furious public letter of resignation.129 The Frankfurt League, refusing to cave in to the Berlin League yet unable to stop it, became dormant.130 Likewise provoked by the pamphlet, some members in West Berlin accused Götze in late 1953 of espionage and embezzlement at the hostels and of having concealed his Nazi-era membership in Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS).131 They demanded his expulsion from the League. In early 1954 a committee assembled by Schaefer exonerated Götze. Oddly, the committee did not directly refute the SS allegation but rather stated merely that he “need not reproach himself about his political past.”132 Götze’s critics on the League board did not accept the committee’s exoneration of Götze and resigned from the League. Now Götze’s most vocal opponents were gone, and new elections to the board resulted in a strong mandate for his side. Schaefer even entrusted Götze with a tour of West Germany in late 1954 to strengthen the West Berlin League’s relationship with the various League groups on the basis of its Cold War priorities, including the hostels. Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt then

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asked the new board to reopen the investigation into Götze’s record. When the board refused, he resigned as honorary president and publicly distanced himself from the League. This was a major embarrassment, for LehmannRussbueldt was the most famous link to the League’s Weimar past. Oddly, Götze’s past had only gradually come to light. A former Freikorps and SS member, Götze first appeared in the Berlin League in the summer of 1947, as one of SPD chairman Franz Neumann’s circle who had helped to pack the League with SPD members.133 He ingratiated himself with several of the authentic League members who opposed Kiendl, including Ingeborg Lehmann.134 Already then he had been caught out by Kiendl and others in a lie about having been imprisoned in 1933 for League work. In fact, he had served time and been expelled from the SS for another offense entirely.135 Götze was able to join the League’s board only after it was licensed because he refused to fill out the de-Nazification questionnaire that was required of everyone seeking to become a League licensee. Already in early 1949 the U.S. Military Government had retrieved his SS record and noted him as a “doubtful element,” and it granted the League’s license on the condition that the organization be watched.136 Apparently, an unintended side effect of marginalizing Kiendl (who knew the truth about Götze) and of strengthening the hold of the SPD on the League was to render Götze’s position in the League more secure. Götze was also apparently a spy for the Second Bureau (Deuxième Bureau), the French military intelligence agency. His wife, Anneliese Götze, indicated that French intelligence agents had approached him after 1945 with the suggestion of reviving the League.137 This puts Götze’s energetic work for the League—especially his trips to France and interest in the hostels—in a different light. Apparently his value to French intelligence depended on the access to East Germans that the hostels provided. Under Götze and his supporters, the League sought to gather information from East Germany and to distribute illegal literature inside it. He recruited people to do this dangerous work. These people were to work in groups of three there, with one serving as a courier to bring materials to the West Berlin apartment of a League employee. Götze, his wife, Anneliese, and their allies turned to the people in the hostels, who were dependent on and therefore vulnerable to those who administered them. Some were willing to participate, or could be persuaded when plied with food, drink, and payment. Official West German recognition of a person’s status as a political refugee could be dangled before an East German as an enticement, or the possibility of its

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denial could be used as a threat (such recognition carried material benefits and, as we have seen, was relatively rare). Others were manipulated or even coerced into passing on information or recruiting their relatives who remained in East Germany. For example, addresses of a hostel resident’s relatives in East Germany were conveyed to the League office without the hostel resident’s knowledge, and then the League sent requests for secret reports to those relatives, giving the impression that the hostel resident wished them to comply, or would fare better in the West if they did. Affairs and even rapes (alleged of one hostel manager) arose out of these power imbalances. The hostels and espionage fed corruption. The Götzes apparently lived well from Götze’s income from the French and from the funds for the hostels.138 The hostel funds were apparently easy to augment by overreporting the number of residents (the Berlin Senate paid DM 2.50 per day for each resident) and by inflating the number of employees maintaining them, and all the while compelling the residents to perform maintenance work for low or no wages. The Götzes could secure the loyalty of their allies by sharing the goods intended for hostel residents, and the Berlin official responsible for allocating residents was lavishly entertained to ensure that the League hostels continued to receive them well after the uprising of 1953, when the overall number of refugees fell.139 How could the Götzes get away with it? According to an unofficial agent (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, IM) for the East German Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS or Stasi), “the League was financially supported in everything by the [West Berlin] Senate . . . but the Senate did not monitor where the money ended up”; the hostels were a “gold mine.”140 Götze’s activities certainly did attract the attention of the Stasi. In December 1952, the Stasi caught six underground League members in the East German city of Chemnitz. The Stasi claimed that the League was developing a network inside East Germany for the distribution of anti-communist leaflets and for gathering information on the population’s mood, Red Army troops, and industrial infrastructure. By early 1953, the League was, in the Stasi’s eyes, a “neofascist” organization conspiring to overthrow the communist regime on “Day X” (Tag X).141 Then when an uprising really did take place in June 1953, almost everyone in East and West was surprised. The Stasi, unable to accept that the uprising was spontaneous, wove the League and other militant anti-communist organizations into its own explanation of the uprising. It claimed that Western intelligence agents had been planted in various locations in East Germany to attempt a coup, and that the whole uprising

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had been organized from afar.142 In the months after the uprising, the East German state therefore targeted persons from the militant anti-communist organizations. One such person was Wolfgang Silgradt. Silgradt had come to West Berlin from East Germany in 1951 and was a caseworker in the League’s department for East German refugees between August 1953 and February 1954, helping East Germans whose applications for official refugee status had been rejected. In February 1954, he was kidnapped from West Berlin and taken to East Germany, and convicted in a show trial in June 1954 with three others who also worked in anti-communist organizations. Silgradt served ten and a half years of a fifteen-year sentence before he was released to West Germany in exchange for hard currency payment.143 The League had become caught in an awful symbiosis. For Götze, the League’s Cold War political work was probably attractive in the first place because it offered opportunities for personal enrichment and power. For those League members who were ardent Cold Warriors, the work of sifting through the refugees for information and maintaining a network in East Germany was important and Götze could do it effectively—and so they were apparently willing to overlook his troubling sidelines. Because documents are so few and scattered about the League in these years, it is not possible to reconstruct exactly what various League members knew about the Götzes and those who cooperated with them.144 In the wake of Götze’s supposed exoneration in 1954, League president Schaefer held a press conference and tour of the hostels to demonstrate that the League was in good working order. He stressed the importance of documenting human rights violations in the “Eastern zone” and insisted that that work had nothing to do with espionage and that any reproaches to that effect were false.145 Götze continued his work at the League for a year after his exoneration, then resigned as vice president and general secretary in August 1955.146 In October 1955 the Götzes left abruptly for Beirut, Lebanon, where they lived until 1959. Anneliese Götze later recalled that someone warned them that their children were in danger of being kidnapped by the Stasi.147 Götze’s actions and the internal disputes they caused did serious damage to the League. Many old League members became disaffected and left it. Grossmann traveled through Germany in 1956 and noted that the League existed “only in name.”148 (After Götze’s exposure, Grossmann of course rejected the Berlin League as an authentic successor.) The dormant Frankfurt League wearily resumed its effort to topple the Berlin League

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as headquarters by establishing the West German League (Westdeutsche Liga), and Lehmann-Russbueldt declared his support for it.149 But its leader, the Weimar-era League member Guido Senzig, was ill and the initiative foundered. For these old League members, the mid-1950s were a new low point. As the Weimar-era League member Emil von Wedel told Grossmann, “The whole catastrophe is above all due to the chaotic Berlin situation with its atmosphere of espionage.”150 And the League remained in the sights of the Stasi. The Stasi, having included the League in its official explanation of the uprising in 1953, now intensified surveillance of it. In 1956 the head of the Stasi division for foreign intelligence, Markus Wolf, sent one of his top spies, Wolfram von Hanstein, into West Germany. Hanstein’s career was even more complicated than Götze’s. In Weimar days, he participated in the Kapp Putsch and Freikorps, but he also joined the League and became a communist. After the Second World War he spied for the Soviet Union and East Germany as well as for the Social Democratic Party’s Eastern Bureau and perhaps for France and the United States. He held the odd distinction of being convicted of espionage by both the Soviet Union and West Germany.151 In 1956 Hanstein left East Germany for West Berlin and gained official recognition as a political refugee. He joined the Berlin League and rose rapidly in it, holding Götze’s old posts of vice president and general secretary. Using his position in the League, he gathered information on League members, other anti-communist groups, and West German politicians. He enjoyed the trust of unsuspecting East Germans helped by the League. He sent information on all these contacts to the Stasi, which used it to kidnap East Germans who had fled.152 As one historian put it, the League was a useful “Trojan horse” for Hanstein’s espionage work in West Germany.153 Hanstein was rumored to be a spy well before he was exposed. Yet Berlin League president Schaefer defended Hanstein just as he had defended Götze. In December 1958 Hanstein, with Schaefer’s backing, carried out a coup in the League. They held a meeting in Hamburg, where most Berlin members could not attend, elected a new board, and immediately recorded the result in the Hamburg court register for voluntary associations, making it legally binding. Hanstein then declared that all Berlin memberships were now invalid, and Schaefer put a new lock on the Berlin League’s office so that no original board members could enter. Their plans behind these actions can no longer be reconstructed. At some point, Hanstein stole the League’s files from that office and delivered them to the Stasi. The League had lost all its records already in 1933; now, it lost them

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again. Today, archivists of Stasi records believe that those files were destroyed in late 1989, when the Stasi rushed to prevent its information on West Germany from falling into Western hands. Back in West Berlin, the old board members learned that the only way to undo Hanstein’s entry in the Hamburg register was a lawsuit. They decided not to waste money on a lawsuit but rather to create a new organization—yet again. In January 1959 they founded the International League for Human Rights (Internationale Liga für Menschenrechte), based in West Berlin and affiliated with the ILRM in New York.154 The new organization immediately distanced itself from Hanstein—and just in time. When a Stasi agent named Max Heim defected to West Germany in May 1959 and denounced Hanstein, the whole story of Hanstein’s espionage career hit the press. Hanstein was imprisoned, then he escaped to East Germany in 1964. A remnant of Hanstein’s League still exists today.155 The years of crisis in the League reveal fundamental dilemmas of mobilizing a universalist language in the practical, and highly political, world. Its history between 1945 and 1960 reveals the fault lines on which most human rights organizations are built. These organizations depend on information and money, but both can damage their reputation for independence, which is the sine qua non for the public’s reception of their work. An organization survives on these fault lines by avoiding the dangers of cooptation on the one hand and irrelevance on the other. Investigating the history of such organizations is complicated, for the usual tactic of human rights organizations when facing difficult questions concerning their own work is a sophisticated silence. All the while, they also can face real danger, as did the League when it was in the grasp of the Stasi. By adopting the universalist language of human rights in postwar West Germany, the League felt the overwhelming pull of the expellee and German prisoner of war causes and of anti-communism—truly popular movements that almost engulfed it. The League struggled with the question of how to compare Germans—as perpetrators of human rights violations, as victims, and as advocates of human rights—with non-Germans.156 No clear consensus regarding this question of situating Germans as victims of human rights violations has emerged. As we will see, some have eagerly taken up the language of human rights for issues such as the expulsions of ethnic Germans, while others have found that it is too decontextualized to capture human agency in the horrors of the Second World War and its aftermath. The League’s story reminds us that conflicts concerning the relationship between specific histori-

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cal responsibility and timeless, universal human rights had emerged already in the late 1940s and 1950s, when Germany’s oldest human rights organization tried to gain a foothold in occupied and early West Germany.

Chapter 2

Rudolf Laun and “German Human Rights” in Occupied and Early West Germany

Immediately after the Second World War, a confrontation between two usages of human rights advocacy emerged. On one side stood those who wished to sharpen West Germans’ awareness of human rights by emphasizing Germans’ violations of others’ human rights under Nazism: nonGermans and German minorities targeted according to racial, political, or sexual criteria. Central to any discussion of human rights, this side held, were the tasks of informing the West German public about the Nazi past and critically analyzing postwar Germany in light of that past. On the other side of the confrontation stood those who attached human rights language to those Germans who, while not targeted under Nazism, had suffered under the Allied occupation. In the immediate postwar period, those Germans who claimed that the Allies had violated Germans’ human rights were probably the more numerous and vocal, and certainly they were to be found all across the political spectrum, not just on the right.1 They cited aerial bombardment, arbitrary seizure of property, prolonged detention of prisoners of war, and the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other places in Eastern Europe.2 During the Allied occupation, organizations representing the expellees were banned; the Allies feared their far-right political potential.3 After the creation of West Germany in 1949, the Basic

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Law guaranteed the right of such groups to form, and they quickly grew. German international lawyers worked with these groups, applying their professional skills to defining occupation- and expellee-related issues as human rights violations. The tension between West Germany’s two moral claims, historical responsibility for Nazism and universal human rights, emerged most sharply in these claims that the Allies had violated Germans’ human rights. This chapter focuses on one actor in this confrontation, the international lawyer Rudolf Laun (1882-1975). Laun, a professor of law and legal philosophy at the University of Hamburg, was the earliest of the German international lawyers to criticize the Allies for violating Germans’ human rights. His insistence on applying concepts consistently, in spite of their different political meanings in different contexts, fueled confrontation. Laun’s case certainly shows us that human rights functioned as a political language, allowing Germans to cast themselves as victims and to suggest that Germans’ earlier heinous actions had been balanced out. Yet Laun’s case is more than merely illustrative, for his arguments had legal-historical depth that is worth exploring. Laun, Walther Schücking, Hans Wehberg, and others helped import ideas from the progressive international law movement of Western Europe into the pre-1933 German legal scene, where they were little known or observed.4 Laun also helped to import discussions about self-determination and peace from Habsburg Austria to Germany, and after 1945 he helped bring both traditions into the international law field of postwar West Germany. The problems he foregrounded continue to be important and controversial in international human rights debates today. Germans’ claims against the Allies fed into the larger question of whether individuals and non-state groups (such as ethnic groups) could be subjects of international law with standing in international institutions. The German expellees’ claims also raised the question of whether such groups had a right to self-determination, including, by right of indigeneity, a right not to just any homeland but to a specific and irreplaceable homeland.5 These are globally resonant concepts, and the debates presented here are part of these concepts’ history. These debates are passed on today to law students in Germany through lists of recommended reading in law textbooks, and so are part of how international law has been practiced in West and unified Germany.6

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Laun’s Concepts: The Autonomy of Law, the Conscience Publique, and the Right to National Self-Determination Laun was an important figure in interwar German jurisprudence. An ethnic German from the Bohemian lands of Austria-Hungary, he became involved with pacifism while serving as an officer in the First World War.7 He was active in attempts to revise the Austrian constitution’s treatment of nationalities both during and immediately after the First World War. Laun strongly advocated the union of Austria and the Sudetenland region with Germany. When the Entente forbade that and instead placed the Sudetenland inside the new Czechoslovakian state, Laun experienced one of the greatest disappointments of his life. He left Austria for Germany to become a professor of public law and legal philosophy at the newly created Hamburg University.8 By the end of the First World War, Laun had become a Social Democrat (though not a Marxist), and he joined the SPD in Hamburg.9 He was a vocal defender of the Weimar Republic, yet he continued to advocate the union—through peaceful means—of Austria and the Sudetenland with Germany.10 Meanwhile, his work in legal philosophy contributed to discussions of administrative discretion, a vital issue for the new democracy, and the relationship between morality and law.11 During the Weimar Republic, Laun set out his basic concepts regarding international law’s sources. These were the notion of the autonomy of law, that is, that law was a category of human action separate from mere power or coercion; the notion of a conscience publique, or widely held sense of justice; and the right of national (today one might say ethnic) self-determination. This last concept was, in his view, an outgrowth of the first two. Laun drew these concepts from the work of the Belgium-based progressive Institute of International Law (Institut de droit international), founded in 1873.12 To turn to the first of these concepts: the autonomy of law, a Kantian concept, held that it was impossible to impose genuine law on people without their participation, such as through autocratic political authority or brute violence.13 Rather, genuine law was created when people obeyed statutes out of their own conviction that those statutes were moral. For Laun, a state could not govern over people, but only through them. That was a significant limitation on state sovereignty. The autonomy of law in effect shifted to ordinary persons the power to define law. The autonomy of law also applied to international law contexts. For example, if a state annexed territory and denied self-administration in a manner that violated inhabitants’ nationality rights,

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that state would be ruling through sheer coercion.14 Coercion was a fragile form of rule, Laun argued, because if rule were based merely on power, then no one could be certain who would hold power in the future, and the door would be opened to anarchy as various factions vied for power. As this brief summary suggests, Laun was vehemently opposed to legal positivism, the conventional doctrine in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany (and elsewhere), according to which law consisted of the explicit, positivized acts of sovereign states, rather than deriving from some source outside or above the state such as God or nature. While traditional international law, which confined itself to the willed acts of sovereign states, fit well with legal positivism, the progressive international law movement argued that states had obligations that limited their power to act unilaterally and arbitrarily. For Laun, adherence to legal positivism was tantamount to capitulating to amoral state coercion and could not be reconciled with democracy. The second of Laun’s central ideas was the conscience publique, which he defined as people’s views regarding what was just.15 Like the autonomy of law, the notion of a conscience publique meant that ordinary people had the power to define law. The conscience publique emerged from individual persons’ moral reflection. Laun claimed that it was remarkably consistent among the majority of populations and across state boundaries, though he conceded that this form of public opinion could not be observed at moments when people’s views were likely to be deformed by propaganda or warfare. Like the founders of the progressive international law movement, Laun argued that the conscience publique was a valid source of international law, just as treaties and customary law were. The concept of the conscience publique allowed progressive international lawyers to locate a source of power beyond the reach of any state. That may sound similar to natural law, but progressive international lawyers in fact wished to distance themselves from natural law doctrine as well. Laun considered the German historical school of law of the early nineteenth century to have invalidated natural law, and held that efforts to revive natural law merely promoted arbitrary legal reasoning.16 Laun and other progressive international lawyers claimed that the conscience publique, unlike natural law, was grounded in sociological reality. Over the long term, Laun insisted, the conscience publique favored democracy and popular sovereignty. Given the chance to express themselves without coercion, most people would prefer democracy over undemocratic forms of state rule. Coercion could never be the ultimate guarantor of state power in a democracy.17 Violence as a means of settling human affairs was

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being steadily displaced by “voluntary obedience and, above all, autonomous juridical-moral action.”18 Obviously, there was reason in the 1920s and 1930s to doubt Laun’s claim that such a trend was underway. Yet Laun saw Soviet communism, Italian fascism, and Hitler’s seizure of power as only temporary aberrations. A dictator’s rule did not mean that the population had by and large rejected democracy; if people could speak without fear, they would still prefer democracy, he argued.19 He also noted that even dictators invoked mass support, which revealed that the idea of democracy retained its power.20 In July 1933 in his afterword to his book-length exposition of the conscience publique, he insisted that “the recent events in Germany do not authorize us to change the judgment regarding this ancient process of twenty-five centuries that we have set forth in the last chapters of our work.”21 Laun’s third major concept was the right to national self-determination.22 Just as the conscience publique had come to embrace democracy, so had it come to embrace nationality. Laun believed that nationality, like the conscience publique, was natural, prepolitical, and perduring: people naturally valued freedom, and if they were free, they would naturally seek to sustain and express their nationality. But affirming nationality, for Laun, did not mean affirming the nation-state as a political goal. While I will use a literal translation of his terms Nationalität (nationality) and nationale Selbstbestimmung (national self-determination) the reader must bear in mind that Laun does not mean here a right or a movement to achieve state power for a nationality. For Laun, state power and a nationality’s power ought not to be combined, because a nation-state, once established, would simply use state coercion to oppress the inevitable minorities inside its borders. In fact, he also rejected the term “minority,” because he held that in a multinational, federal state each group deserved to exercise its cultural rights regardless of the numerical proportions among groups. For Laun, the political, amoral state was a threat to the natural, moral nationality. Nationalities needed international law to protect themselves from state coercion. Displaying the Austro-Marxist influence on his thinking, Laun described his ideal political arrangement as a federal, multinational state that was limited domestically by its constitution as well as internationally by strong international law controls.23 Only such a state would reliably enable the democratic exercise of cultural rights. True nationality rights, then, required stronger international law: “The more validity that the national idea conquers in the legal sensibility and conscience of the world, and the more the idea of state sovereignty recedes accordingly, the stronger the

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influence of international on domestic law must be in all areas that are in any way connected with the national question.”24 Moreover, strong international law controls promised to democratize international law by giving non-state groups a place on the international law stage—a stage that had been dominated for so long by states. Laun thereby separated the right to national self-determination from state sovereignty—an approach quite different from that, for instance, of postcolonial politicians, who have wielded the right of national self-determination as a state’s prerogative. It is hard to reconcile Laun’s theoretical views of nationality as dissociated from state power with his equally explicit desire for a union of Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland; as we shall see, Laun jumped between political and putatively unpolitical realms in his arguments. By 1933, then, Laun had laid out his basic concepts of the autonomy of law, the conscience publique, democracy, and the right of nationalities to selfdetermination within states. Genuine law emerged from people’s voluntary obedience based on their moral beliefs, which had come to include nationality and democracy, he argued. Domestic and international law ought to take account of these. For Laun, then, the clauses in the peace treaties after the First World War that forbade the union of Austria and the Sudetenland with Germany were both illegal and undemocratic—a position with which the Nazis, and indeed most Germans at the time, would have agreed.

Laun’s Human Rights Concepts after 1945: The Individual as a Subject of International Law and the Right to the Homeland During the turbulent years of the late Weimar Republic, Laun was known as one of the “left” on his faculty. He was an emphatic defender of the Weimar Republic and of socialist student groups at the university. He spoke out against völkisch politics. As an active member of the Social Democratic Party—the only one in his law faculty—Laun faced dismissal under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in 1933. However, he managed to keep his professorial post, at a reduced salary, probably due to his activism on behalf of German minorities in interwar East-Central Europe.25 Although he did publish less during the Nazi years than he did before or after, he did not alter his scholarly work to suit the regime. In 1935 Laun published a new, expanded edition of Law and Morality, his main work on the relationship between the two.26 In 1942 he published The Principle of Reason: An Epistemo-

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logical System, his most complete account of the autonomy of law. It implicitly criticized Nazi concepts such as the Führerprinzip and racial hierarchy, stating for example that “there are many religions, many peoples, many states, many languages, but only one science.”27 One historian of Hamburg University has singled out Laun’s publications as proof that it was not necessary or inevitable that one conform to Nazi dictates to pursue one’s work in those years.28 In 1945 that anti-Nazi reputation propelled Laun into leading positions at the university: he became dean in May 1945 and once again rector in 1947 (he had served as rector in 1924). Laun was also pivotal in his field’s professional society, as the re-founder and first postwar chairman of the German Society for International Law (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerrecht, DGVR). Before 1933, this group had been the forum of noted German progressive international lawyers such as Walther Schücking and Hans Wehberg.29 The Allied occupation of Germany shocked and infuriated Laun. He continued to write about nationality rights and democracy after 1945, just as he had before 1933. Laun pointed out his consistency to his students with sarcastic pride, telling them that his lectures, “which had their roots in imperial Austria, could be given again, essentially unchanged, in the Austrian Republic, the Weimar Republic, National Socialist Germany, and most recently in the British Military Government’s regime of the military leadership principle (soldatischen Führerprinzips).”30 Two aspects of his thinking emerge here. First, he clearly considered the cause of German nationality politics in East Central Europe to be unscathed by its horrific mobilization in dictatorship, world war, and genocide. Second, he perceived a continuum of German victimhood across 1945: Germans had been victimized by the Paris peace settlement, Nazi rule, Allied occupation, and as expellees. Immediately after 1945, Laun applied his basic concepts to Germans qua victims. Referring to the autonomy of law, he argued that Germans’ compliance with the Nazi regime was overwhelmingly due to coercion. What the Nazis imposed was not genuine law, because it had been imposed on the German people; they had not embraced it. Using the conscience publique, he made a similar point, arguing that just because many Germans obeyed Nazi precepts did not mean that they accepted them. On the contrary, he insisted, most Germans had favored democracy and human rights all along.31 Laun seemed to reason that if coercion were present at all, then any inquiry into political will or opinion was moot. His idea of a conscience publique allowed him to avoid considering the possibility that dictatorship could be genuinely popular (or that that popularity could be complexly layered). Laun insisted

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that coercion—now Allied coercion—could not create genuine law. He argued that Germans were victims of numerous human rights violations under Allied occupation, and cited the right of national self-determination to condemn the expulsions of ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Indeed, for Laun Germans were the unrecognized pioneers in the history of human rights thought. Religious freedom was the first human right to gain recognition, and “thus human rights first emerged in the first half of the sixteenth century in Germany,” demanded by the Anabaptists and Martin Luther.32 Germans—including a delegate from Austria—had also produced the Weimar constitution, the “freest constitution in the world.”33 No wonder Laun was popular in those years immediately after the war: he had a clean political past, he imparted clear lessons in law that were explicitly informed by morality, and he reassured Germans that they were valuable people with a distinguished past who were being maltreated. Laun repeatedly likened the Allies to Hitler and the Nazi regime. Both were, for Laun, the pure expression of amoral coercion legimitized by legal positivism, under which Germans had to suffer: “We yield to the new positive law . . . as we had to yield to the positive law of the Hitler regime.”34 Everyone ought to be concerned about the treatment of defeated Germany after 1945, Laun insisted, because it was a warning to all who may one day experience defeat themselves.35 His was not a discussion of human rights that was intended to provoke Germans’ critical introspection. For that reason, some in Germany as well as abroad responded angrily to his writings, seeing him as no more than an apologist for Nazism.36 Laun focused on two additional concepts in the post-1945 era: the individual and the non-state group as full, or fuller, subjects of international law, and the right to the homeland (Recht auf die Heimat). These concepts certainly related to his work before 1933: the autonomy of law and conscience publique had already broached the issue of the individual’s voice in international law, and the right to the homeland was a reformulation of the right to national self-determination. As was true of his interwar concepts, these new concepts in his late work were not unique to Laun. Along with many others in the post-1945 era, Laun claimed that an “international law of human rights” was gradually displacing an older “international law of the sovereignty of state power.”37 His postwar concepts fit with that development by limiting state power and augmenting the voice of non-state actors (such as individual persons or nationalities) in international law. In his international professional context, Laun’s distinctiveness lay in applying these concepts to Germans.

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According to traditional international law, only states were recognized actors in international law. If an individual were to be recognized as a subject of international law, the international legal order would place states in a very different position. A plaintiff could advance directly to an international forum to have a complaint heard or a case tried, without having first to find a state to represent him or her. The states’ monopoly on international law would be broken. The standing of individuals was important not just as an abstract ideal, but as a practical reality for Germans under occupation between 1945 and 1949. The German state had ceased to be effective; in the view of some, it had ceased to exist entirely.38 The Allies stepped into its place: neither annexing nor occupying Germany in the traditional sense, they replaced the state. In such a case, traditional international law seemed to afford individual Germans no standing to raise complaints. They seemed to be outside the realm of international law.39 Laun’s own position was that Germans did have standing under international law to protest violations of human rights by the Allies. First, he argued that international law had recognized individuals as a kind of subject in the Hague Convention of 1907, which outlined the laws of war. The Hague Convention defined a military occupier’s obligations to protect individual civilians, thereby protecting the rights of individuals, not governments.40 For example, it set limits on requisition in order to protect individuals’ private property; it banned collective punishment to protect individuals; and civilians were not to be relocated unless it was militarily necessary. It also protected soldiers as individuals by requiring adequate care for prisoners of war, freedom from forced labor, and their earliest possible release. Second, Laun argued that Germans were not in fact without a state after 1945: if the Allies had eliminated the state, then they must have annexed the territory, giving the population the rights of their own citizens. If the Allies were occupying the state, then the Hague Convention covered Allied actions. Either way, policies such as forced deportation, forced labor, and requisitioning were subject to legal review. And, importantly for Laun, the Hague Convention mentioned— and thereby positivized—the conscience publique as a source of law.41 One of the most important tools for enacting individuals’ status as subjects of international law was the right of individual petition. Like numerous other human rights advocates in the wake of the Second World War, Laun insisted that the right of individual petition was the only effective way to protect human rights. Yet, as Laun complained, it was already falling victim to the opposition of the great powers by 1950, when the United Nations’

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Commission on Human Rights decided that its human rights convention would permit petitions from individuals and NGOs, but that these petitions would not entail a binding hearing before the Commission. This amounted to an empty right of individual petition, as Laun pointed out, and indeed petitions were filed away, unheard, for years.42 The right of individual petition was also discussed, though initially rejected, during the drafting of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1950). After a few years, the right of petition became part of an optional protocol, so that signatory countries were not obliged to accept it (West Germany did).43 Here again, we see that Laun’s concepts were part and parcel of current thinking in progressive international law. What was unusual, at least outside of Germany, was Laun’s expectation that Germans might use them effectively on their own behalf. Laun’s arguments concerning the Hague Convention and occupied Germany appeared mostly in law journals. In more popular versions of his arguments, Laun summarized these issues as a matter of “human rights.” “Human Rights” was the title of Laun’s public lecture for a lay audience in 1948, given on the fifteenth anniversary of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor.44 That date, together with his lecture’s content, were intended to indicate that Germans were now subject to dictatorship for a second time. Laun explained that human rights were, by their very nature, rights held by individuals against states—their own as well as foreign.45 As such holders of human rights, Germans could not be legitimately subjected to the “total authority” (totale Gewalt) of the Allies that the formula of unconditional surrender implied.46 Laun’s main examples of such total authority were the expulsions of ethnic Germans and the Allies’ retention of German prisoners of war. He argued that the Allies ought to be held to their own standard as enunciated in the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Charter. (The latter, in the course of asserting the illegality of certain acts by Nazi Germany, held that all states had recognized Hague rules as recently as 1939.)47 With such lectures and publications, Laun contributed to his German audience’s understanding of “human rights” as concerning Allied wrongs and German victimhood. In 1949 the Allied military occupation came to an end. From then on, Laun focused his international law work on the expulsions of ethnic Germans, in the hope that one day a case could be brought before an international forum. While his work on the law of war had focused on the individual gaining a voice in international law, his work on the expellees turned to the non-state group (here the nationality) as a fuller subject of international law.48 Laun

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saw no tension between individual rights and group rights: an individual’s cultural rights clearly implied group rights, as cultural rights could not be exercised in isolation. Laun sought to advance here the concept of the right to the homeland. This concept, which overlapped with the more general concept of national self-determination, has been theorized mainly by Germans and Austrians associated with the expellee lobby.49 However, the concept certainly applies beyond that context, as it addresses problems of indigenous and ethnic groups’ rights that have arisen all over the world.50 Specific aspects of the Sudeten expellee case, along with Laun’s progressive international law background, helped to propel him to a radical position on limiting state sovereignty. Like other spokespeople for the expellee cause, Laun tended to lump together two categories of displaced Germans and refer to a total number of about fifteen million “expellees” (Vertriebene). While the lived experience of brutalization and trekking westward was common to virtually all persons in this large group, they did have varying legal statuses with corresponding ramifications. At least seven million of them were from the former Prussian provinces and were usually called refugees (Flüchtlinge), not expellees.51 German citizens living inside the boundaries of pre-1945 (and even pre-1937) Germany, they fled to escape the advance of the Red Army. A second, legally distinct group was the three and a half million German citizens who found their region of Germany transferred to Poland by the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945. They were denied the possibility of remaining in the postwar Polish state: the Polish government expelled them.52 At the same time, postwar Czechoslovakia expelled its three million ethnic German citizens. Unlike the Polish case, almost all of these expellees had been Czechoslovak citizens and, if they were old enough, Habsburg citizens before that. Now they were stripped of their Czechoslovak citizenship; specifically, the Czechoslovak government upheld Nazi-era law that had made ethnic Germans there into citizens of Germany.53 Finally, postwar Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia expelled about six hundred thousand ethnic Germans from among their own citizens.54 As many as one and a half million of all these refugees and expellees died in these ordeals.55 By 1950, about eight million refugees and expellees were living in West Germany, four million in East Germany, and half a million in Austria.56 Just as Laun and other expellee spokespeople conflated the refugees and expellees, they also conflated the basis for claims to their homelands. There was a clear legal basis (though little political chance of success) for protesting Poland’s annexation of German lands. As West Germany formally asserted

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until 1990, the Oder-Neisse Line between East Germany and Poland was not to be considered permanent until it was confirmed by a peace treaty between all of Germany on the one hand, and all four of the Allies on the other—as had been envisioned before the Cold War. Until such time, West Germany maintained, the legal borders of Germany were those of 1937 (the baseline for determining what was Germany proper, before Nazi Germany’s territorial gains). By contrast, ethnic Germans from places outside Germany’s borders of 1937 had no such legal claim. The largest group in West Germany for whom this was true was the Bohemian or Sudeten Germans.57 The Sudetenland had never been part of any German state except for Hitler’s, after the 1938 Munich Agreement.58 Of all the expellee spokespeople, those claiming to represent the Sudeten Germans were the most in need of legal innovations that would help them outmaneuver traditional, state-based international law. The specific legal predicament of the Sudeten German expellees led legal experts such as Laun to commit themselves to concepts and institutions that would place strong limits on state sovereignty. That, in turn, situated them on the leading edge of international law and human rights argument. They became committed to that innovative approach because they had no choice: no state would espouse their complaints. Certainly the expelling states and the Allies would not revisit the issue. And while West Germany offered the majority of the expellees a home as well as extensive social legislation and political sympathy, it did not—and could not—bring a case for international deliberation.59 No international agreement expressly banned state-ordered mass deportations or expulsions at Laun’s time of writing—that only happened in 1963, and then only at the European—not United Nations—level.60 However, the expulsions of ethnic Germans obviously violated numerous basic human rights. It was a simple matter for Laun to establish that individuals had suffered loss of property, liberty, and life without due process.61 According to Laun, these violations of widely recognized basic human rights showed that a right to the homeland—in its narrowest definition, the right not to be forcibly removed from one’s home region—was already practically in existence. To develop the argument for a right to the homeland further, Laun revived his old concept from progressive international law, the conscience publique. While mass expulsion was a technique that belonged to traditional international law based on state sovereignty, Laun argued, the new international law of human rights accepted the conscience publique’s high valuation of nationality.62 (Laun never discussed the possibility that expulsions could be truly popular, rather

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than merely the act of a sovereign state, just as he had not raised the question of whether dictatorship could be popular. To do so would have threatened to dismantle the concept of the conscience publique.) Had the conscience publique not been drowned out by the hatreds of the First World War and subjected to the coercion of an international law of state sovereignty, Laun continued, it would have offered self-determination for Sudeten and other Habsburg Germans in 1919, permitting the Sudetenland and Austria to join Germany. Sudeten Germans’ rejoicing in 1938 reflected the end of their longdenied national self-determination, Laun insisted, not their admiration for the Nazis: “They would have applauded any German regime.”63 Once again, Laun placed nationality on one plane, and politics on another. Given the ongoing coercion of sovereign states and the ineffectiveness of individual petitions that went unheard, Laun called for extending the right to self-determination to non-state groups. “We stand before the legal question: can a people, in the sense of a natural formation arising from a common descent, sedentary nature and mother tongue, appear in the international law community as an independent legal subject, one that is different in kind from states, but that nevertheless can realize its own rights?”64 He hoped the answer was yes, and cited two precedents. The first was Pasquale Mancini’s argument in 1851 for the “principle of nationalities,” which held that nationality, not domicile, should determine the law under which a person was placed.65 The second was the Entente’s decision during the First World War, in 1917 and early 1918, to take up diplomatic relations with the Czechoslovak National Council, accepting it as a treaty partner. At that time, Laun pointed out, the Habsburg Empire was still intact, and so the Czechoslovak National Council was a natural, not a political, state-like unit.66 To treat the nationality as a fuller subject of international law, Laun insisted, would radically democratize international law, which had traditionally been so undemocratic.67 Certainly it would mean a profound transformation of existing international law. Laun also called for nationalities, newly empowered with his proposed right of self-determination, to link themselves legally to specific territories, through making “homeland” (Heimat) a category in international law.68 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights did state that a person had a right to leave and return to that person’s country (Article 13), but here “country” seemed to be defined merely as any state in which a person was normally permitted to live. Laun did not seek a right to just any homeland (after all, the Sudeten Germans did have a legal home in West Germany, where they immediately gained citizenship), but rather to a nationality’s supposedly

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unique and irreplaceable homeland. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights said nothing about what Laun saw as the necessarily collective nature of a homeland, and it did not distinguish between a recent arrival to a given region and a person whose ancestors had lived there for generations.69 Here Laun was obviously thinking of the Czechoslovak government’s policy of dispatching settlers to formerly German-speaking areas after the expulsion. Using a phrase redolent of decades of German nationalism and anti-Slav racism, he complained that the excessively individualist Article 13 could not prevent “Slavs and Mongols” from saying tomorrow that the Sudetenland was their homeland.70 There had to be a way, Laun insisted, to differentiate among various meanings of the word homeland and various claims of individuals and groups to it. In order to give priority to a group with a claim of greater antiquity of residence in a given territory, he suggested this refinement to the right to the homeland: a “right to the ancestral homeland” (Recht auf die angestammte Heimat).71 Laun’s idea of subject status in international law and self-determination for nationalities and his proposed right to the ancestral homeland raised the problem of how to define membership in a group. In the first years after the First World War, Laun had emphasized that nationality was a matter of the individual’s choice of affiliation, and not of descent; it was a “fact that people may change their nationality in the course of time.”72 Likewise, after 1945 he explained that one’s national affiliation was, like one’s religion, a “spiritual and moral” (geistig-sittlich) matter.73 He reasoned that it would be absurd to determine nationality by descent, which no one could choose, and in any case inherited traits were often indeterminate. Such arguments fit well with those of his Viennese mentor Edmund Bernatzik, as well as the Austro-Marxists.74 Yet in 1958, near the end of Laun’s scholarly life, he came to emphasize the permanence of inherited traits: “One can no more get rid of one’s descent than one can get rid of the history of one’s ancestors and one’s homeland, or of inherited, physical racial traits and inherited mental qualities of character.”75 He did concede that factors other than descent could affect one’s choice of homeland, such as if a child moved with its parents to a different country and learned a new language there. But rather than allowing such reallife ambiguity to stand, he now impatiently asserted that there were limits to it. Contrasting such contingent events with supposedly clearer racial differences, he asserted: “through sudden events and acts of will, a Catholic can become a Protestant, a capitalist can become a proletarian, and vice versa, but an Anglo-Saxon cannot become a Russian or Chinese, for example.”76 He now

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insisted that the legal definition of homeland had to take account of these permanent traits. In addition to calling for the development of a new international law concept of homeland, Laun also proposed to solve the problems of nationality and homeland in Europe by turning back the clock, legally speaking. He cited a precedent from the Thirty Years’ War for such legal time travel: to undo the expulsions of Protestant princes, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 had determined a baseline year of 1624. Princes expelled between 1624 and 1648 were to be allowed to return home. Laun likened the right to the homeland to religious freedom, and argued that the rights of the Protestant princes “correspond to the right to the homeland of the Poles, Jews, Germans, etc. expelled since 1933 or better since 1914.”77 He proposed turning the clock back to 1914; for Laun, clearly, the First World War and its peace settlement was when everything had begun to go wrong. By declaring 1914 to be the point of departure for the proper or natural arrangement of nationalities, he was implicitly suggesting that all the intervening events, including here the genocide of European Jewry, be simply ignored. In fact, Laun mentioned Jews only rarely in any of his work. In his work after 1945, he mentioned them as an example of a nationality, and Zionism and the Israeli state as evidence of the strength of the right to the homeland.78 He thereby implied that Jews had never had a proper home in Europe. Meanwhile, he claimed the term “genocide” for the expelled Germans.79 Laun’s proposal to turn back the legal clock was absurd, but it did show the coherence of his interventions over the previous decades: he had been fighting the Treaty of St. Germain all his life.

Laun and the West German International Law Profession after 1945 Laun was no outlier, politically or professionally, in the first postwar years. Yet his standing declined from about 1949 on. His arguments remained the same, but now they began to embarrass his West German colleagues. His polemics had suited the mood of the early occupation era, but as West Germans sought legitimacy for their new state in the new context of the Cold War, his bitter attacks on all four Allies ensured his obsolescence. It is also likely that by the 1950s his opposition to Nazism was no longer as important a qualification for a public intellectual. While in the late 1940s he was able to lend some respectability and legitimacy to highly compromised colleagues who shared his concern with Germans’ ethnic rights but not his liberal principles,80 by

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the late 1950s that was probably felt to be unnecessary. Two of his professional endeavors suggest this pattern of early postwar prestige and then rapid obsolescence: his leadership in reconvening the German Society for International Law, and his participation in a major official research project on the expellees.81 The German Society for International Law, founded in 1917 as the associational home of Germany’s progressive international lawyers, held its last prewar meeting in 1932.82 In 1947 Laun gathered about twenty old members and newcomers for a conference. In 1948 he hosted a second conference that drew over forty people. A third conference in 1949 marked the Society’s official refounding, with Laun as the chairman. The Society’s proceedings in the early years show that not everyone agreed with Laun’s criticisms of the Allied occupation—or, if they did agree with them, they did not wish to dwell upon them.83 Nevertheless, Laun used the Society as a vehicle for his criticisms of the Allies. In 1947 and 1948 the Society voted unanimously in favor of nine resolutions that, taken together, were a summary of Laun’s arguments. The first three in 1947 concerned Germany’s international law status, holding that the German state had existed continuously before, during, and after Nazism; that Germany was a subject of international law; and that the Hague principles applied to the Allied occupation. Two more resolutions focused on “human rights,” stating that “universal human rights” were part of international law and had been violated by both sides in both world wars, and that the human right of individual freedom included the right to the homeland. The next two resolutions focused on the expulsions: they held that mass deportations violated international law. The final resolution of 1947 concerned German prisoners of war, stating that their retention beyond the cessation of hostilities violated international law.84 In 1948 the group simply passed one overarching resolution: that the German people had a right to self-determination and could demand protection of their basic rights from the Allies.85 The fact that all these resolutions were passed unanimously indicates that Laun was hardly an outlier. The next year saw a sharp turn. The Society’s members voted in 1949 not to issue any more resolutions that took scholarly positions on controversial topics; to do so would “run the risk of lending scientific authority to opinions.”86 In 1953 Laun stepped down as chairman and board member and the Society’s meetings ceased to focus on German issues from that time onward. Instead, they took up topics of general concern among international lawyers everywhere, such as decolonization, economic treaties, and multiple states’

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use of natural resources. Hermann Mosler, an advocate of this new approach, avoided criticizing Laun directly in an internal history of the Society, but he made it clear that the Society was only to be taken seriously on the international level after 1953, when it had joined the international consensus regarding which topics were important.87 Human rights, whether Germans’ or anyone else’s, were thenceforth not a major concern in the Society’s proceedings—nor were human rights important to the field of international law anywhere until recent years.88 Laun’s last institutional engagement was to join the editorial board of a massive research project on the German refugees and expellees, the Documentation of the Expulsion of the Germans from East-Central Europe (Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa).89 This project, which lasted from 1951 until the early 1960s, was sponsored by the Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees, and War-Damaged (Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte). Laun, the sole non-historian on the board, was to advise regarding the usefulness of the documentation as evidence on behalf of Germans during peace negotiations with the Allies and for a planned complaint to the United Nations.90 Yet the unfolding political situation was such that a peace treaty or a United Nations case on behalf of the expellees was not feasible. Meanwhile, as the project’s team of historians waded through the huge documentary material, their own goals changed. Rather than present the expulsions as unique events, they shifted toward seeing them in the context of Nazi-era forced population movements and the longer history of German nationalism and imperialism in Eastern Europe. This had nothing in common with Laun’s analytical or political approach and he apparently disengaged from the project.91 Nor did the project’s sponsors support such a broad contextualization of the expulsions, fearing that that would appear to excuse the expulsions. The controversy exemplifies the tensions between those who seek to use the language of human rights because it is decontextualized and ahistorical, and those who object to it for those very reasons. Several volumes were published, but the project remained unfinished.92 Rudolf Laun did not publish any more scholarly work after 1960. Laun’s usage of human rights points to several elements in the history of human rights thinking in West Germany. As we have seen, his mode of advocacy—on behalf of Germans as victims—was one of the earliest modes among Germans after 1945. For Germans generally, human rights were associated with a discourse of German victimhood. At that early moment, that

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usage of the language of human rights drew support from across the political spectrum, from the Social Democrats to the far right. As the Cold War deepened and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s policy of Western integration was put into practice, support for this usage became concentrated on the right. Soon after Laun concluded his scholarly career, Amnesty International was founded in Britain in 1961 and the first West German chapter formed later that same year. One of its West German founders, the journalist Carola Stern, recalled that when she and her colleagues were first approached with the Amnesty idea, some were skeptical, believing that “then old Nazis will just come and demand that the war criminals imprisoned in the Spandau Citadel be set free.”93 While Laun had sought to attach Germans as victims to the concept of “human rights,” Stern and others sought to attach a critical approach to the Nazi past to human rights. The next chapter will trace this effort to apply human rights in that spirit to both Germans and non-Germans, through an analysis of the re-founded International League for Human Rights and the emergence of West German Amnesty and the Humanist Union. Laun’s calls for individuals to have some kind of immediate standing in international law, for group rights, and for a right to the homeland did not disappear, however, even as the West German political context changed. As we will see in Chapter 4, these concepts, presented abstractly, made their way into the legal and human rights advocacy mainstream.

Chapter 3

Human Rights Activism as Domestic Politics: The International League for Human Rights, West German Amnesty, and the Humanist Union Confront Adenauer’s West Germany

It is common in the literature on human rights to draw a distinction between civil liberties and human rights. This distinction holds that while civil libertarians invoke their country’s domestic law to secure greater freedoms for those within that domestic space, human rights advocates apply norms from international agreements across borders, to wrongs in another country. That is the special power of international human rights: they make it possible for citizens of one state to bring a legal case about another state’s treatment of its citizens. This distinction between civil liberties and human rights has a lawyerly clarity. It specifies whether the source of law invoked is domestic or international. Yet it does not necessarily reflect how West Germans have actually used the language of human rights. This chapter shows how three of the best-known organizations working in the area of human rights today in Germany emerged from their founders’ concern about West Germans’ freedoms at home. While they were also concerned about the rights of people in other countries, the rights of West

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Germans loomed larger. The organizations are the re-founded International League for Human Rights, the West German section of Amnesty International (Amnesty International—deutsche Sektion, hereafter West German Amnesty1), and the Humanist Union (Humanistische Union). At first glance, only West German Amnesty would seem to meet the definition of a human rights organization. The International League continued its pacifist, leftist internationalist work, and the Humanist Union was primarily a civil liberties organization. Yet the individuals behind these organizations who used “human rights” to present their cause were not being sloppy. They were responding to the West German Basic Law’s invitation to invoke rights prior to any state, as discussed in the Introduction.2 They were also responding to the fact that the dominant users of the language of human rights were the state socialist countries, including East Germany, on the one hand, and anticommunists in the West, on the other. The persons profiled in this chapter claimed the language of human rights to create a space cordoned off from East Germany’s communism and West Germany’s anti-communism, a space in which they could criticize their own state’s domestic and foreign policies outside political party lines. These three organizations in their early years are best understood as loose affiliations of articulate public intellectuals along with persons from those intellectuals’ various audiences—no more. One must resist the anthropomorphization of an organization. These persons did not follow their organizations; rather, the organizations followed them, in all their sprawling diversity. They formed organizations to amplify their voices, not constrain their thinking. In those years before direct-mail marketing and fundraising from a mass membership, human rights organizations were face-to-face groups and only lightly administered.3 Today, we know of Irene Khan or Salil Shetty only because they have been secretaries-general of Amnesty International; the general public did not know of them before. By contrast, the individuals profiled below needed no introduction to the West German public at the time they engaged themselves in these three organizations. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that much of the political history of early West Germany can be written through the careers of the individuals in these organizations. Indeed, so strongly represented were historians, jurists, social scientists, and politically active creative writers in these organizations that in many cases they have literally written that history. These individuals found the language of human rights appealing as they discussed West Germans’ freedom of opinion and what they saw as the lack of will to speak out against state action. The three

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organizations that these articulate individuals formed ought to be viewed together as expressions of a common dissatisfaction with West Germany’s political culture under Konrad Adenauer. Adenauer, the leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (Christlich-Demokratische Union, CDU), was already seventy-three years old when he became West Germany’s first federal chancellor in 1949. He remained in office for the first fourteen years of the new state. Only Helmut Kohl, who was chancellor both before and after unification in 1990, was in office longer. By the late 1950s, Adenauer’s critics had numerous complaints. They fretted over his advanced age. They feared that his sheer longevity in office indicated that the new democracy in West Germany was slipping into authoritarian stasis. They objected to Adenauer’s reliance on anti-communism, the integration of former Nazis, and church authority as pillars of his government. Anti-communism shaped his entire foreign policy: West Germany did not extend diplomatic recognition to East Germany, and Adenauer’s Hallstein Doctrine refused diplomatic relations with any state that did, except of necessity the Soviet Union. West German politicians and ordinary citizens referred to East Germany as “the zone of Soviet occupation” or “the zone.” To use its official name, the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik), was considered a gaffe. Anti-communism was also fundamental to Adenauer’s domestic policy. He and his political colleagues readily accused domestic political opponents of giving aid and comfort to East Germany. In the late 1950s, the West German state even conducted a large-scale campaign against West Germans who were real or suspected communists. At the same time, Adenauer’s government advocated the rehabilitation and integration of former Nazis.4 Finally, Adenauer helped endow the Protestant and Catholic churches with increased public authority as guardians of morality.5 In the eyes of both Adenauer and his critics, to shake any one of those pillars was to undermine all of them. The organizations analyzed in this chapter eagerly set about shaking them. Each had a special emphasis: the League shined a light on ex-Nazis in public life, West German Amnesty rejected anti-communism as a guide to political action, and the Humanist Union confronted the churches’ disproportionate influence in public life. But in fact the organizations overlapped a great deal. They all objected to the entrenchment of a socially conservative and conformist order that was uncritical about the Nazi past and dominated by the Catholic and Protestant churches. They all objected to the use of anti-communism to promote rearmament and heighten tension with the Soviet Union, and all urged new foreign policy directions.

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All three objected to how anti-communism functioned domestically to close down debate, and all three sought to encourage West Germans’ political education and activism. They all felt Adenauer’s Germany to be a political and cultural straitjacket. Domestic political concerns propelled all three organizations from their inceptions. Events in other countries did so only to a lesser degree. And even where events abroad did motivate them, for members of these organizations human rights did not only refer to improvements in the lives of those distant sufferers. Rather, all three organizations understood human rights as a method for cultivating freedom of expression and critical public opinion at home, among West Germans. They wished to instill human rights thinking in West Germans’ political discussions, regardless of whether the topic was local or international. Although domestic conditions were so prominent in their thinking, as we shall see they distanced themselves from any idea of “German human rights” in Heinrich Dietz’s or Rudolf Laun’s senses. For example, Carola Stern, a co-founder of West German Amnesty, saw a connection between Germans’ anti-communism and their self-absorption, a connection that she hoped “human rights” would disrupt. Responding in 1965 to those who reproached her for not making fellow Germans in East Germany the sole focus of her work in West German Amnesty, she wrote, “We cannot expect understanding and assistance from abroad for political prisoners in the GDR if we are not ourselves prepared to offer our help and support wherever similar wrongs take place.”6 A few years later, she used even sharper words: “Many people in the Federal Republic expect the sympathy of the whole world given the division of Germany and the Wall, but they themselves behave with an appalling lack of sympathy toward that world.”7 Human rights work in West German Amnesty, she hoped, would de-provincialize political thinking among West Germans.8

The Domestic Political Moment circa 1961 The International League for Human Rights was re-founded in 1959, and West German Amnesty and the Humanist Union were founded as new organizations in 1961. Several political developments converged in those years. First, in 1958 the Constitutional Court handed an important victory to advocates of free speech who were critical of Nazis. Second, the traditional left was hard-pressed in West Germany in the 1950s and into the 1960s by the West German state and also by the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische

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Partei Deutschlands, SPD). At the same time the Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei, FDP), a liberal party, raised hopes among its less conservative supporters, then disappointed them. Altogether, in the late 1950s and early 1960s a growing number of leftists and liberals felt a sense of political homelessness, whether or not they belonged to a party. When, in August 1961, East Germany suddenly erected the Berlin Wall, these dissatisfactions with Adenauer’s West Germany overflowed. The 1958 Constitutional Court case of Lüth v. Harlan highlights the meaning of human rights to West Germans at that time as free speech.9 The filmmaker Veit Harlan had been a favorite of the Nazi regime and in 1940 made the anti-Semitic film Jud Süss. However, Harlan was cleared in postwar de-Nazification proceedings. He resumed his film career in West Germany. The Hamburg journalist Erich Lüth, who was personally committed to reconciliation with surviving Jews and to teaching youth about the Nazi past, refused to stand by and watch Harlan begin a new, lucrative career as a supposedly innocuous filmmaker.10 In 1950 Lüth called for a boycott of a new romantic film by Harlan. Harlan’s film company then sued Lüth for interfering with Harlan’s privacy and livelihood. Pitted against each other were the right of Harlan to his privacy, which in context meant his right to expect the public to forgive and forget as he went about his business, and Lüth’s right to use a boycott to remind the same public of Harlan’s repellent past. Lüth and his supporters combined a critical approach to the Nazi past with a defense of freedom of expression and full public debate in the West German present. The Court decided in Lüth’s favor, and highlighted free speech in its judgment. It held that Lüth’s freedom of speech ought not to be limited to protect Harlan’s private material interests. The judgment went further, stating that the West German Basic Law contained a “hierarchy of values” (Wertordnung), and that the prime value was the “dignity of the human personality developing freely within the social community.”11 The League, West German Amnesty, and the Humanist Union all drew inspiration from the Lüth case. The League chose Lüth to serve on the committee that awarded its Carl von Ossietzky Medal, which it has given annually since 1962 to “persons or groups who have done great service in the defense of human rights.”12 Carola Stern invoked the Lüth judgment as an important statement of Amnesty International’s idea that freedom of opinion and expression were highest-order human rights, not to be relativized by other priorities.13 The Humanist Union has been a watchdog organization for the principles of the Lüth judgment and has invoked it virtually continuously in its publications, from its founding until today.

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The Constitutional Court did not always act to protect civil liberties, however. Adenauer’s government had asked the Court to ban Germany’s historic Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) already in 1951, only two years after the founding of the West German state. The KPD had originated in a split within the SPD during the First World War. Banned under the Nazis, it reemerged in 1945, but in East Germany it was forced into fusion with the Social Democrats to form the Stalinist Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED). In West Germany, it was a very small party, but it did field deputies.14 After some delay, in 1956 the Constitutional Court did ban the KPD. The West German state then used the judgment’s wide provisions to persecute West German radicals in numbers far in excess of the actual KPD membership. These people were placed under surveillance; punished with loss of their jobs, pensions, and restitution for Nazi-era persecution; and even imprisoned.15 This assault on the left inside West Germany was the domestic counterpart of Adenauer’s foreign policy of confrontation with the East Bloc. The SPD did not wish to identify itself with the persecuted KPD. The SPD had been the largest opposition party since 1949, but it was unable to win a plurality. In the late 1950s, the new strategy of the charismatic Berlin mayor Willy Brandt and his circle was to gain votes by discarding the SPD’s traditional Marxist ideology, moving toward the center, and expelling its left wing. In 1959 it adopted a new party program that repudiated Marxism and classbased politics, the Bad Godesberg Program. Part of the SPD’s move toward the center was to support rearmament, which Adenauer advocated as part of his own policy of integration into the Western military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The question of rearmament, and especially the question of nuclear arms being located in West Germany, was hotly debated in the 1950s. It brought forth a significant extra-parliamentary opposition in that decade, with movements such as the St. Paul’s Church movement (Paulskirchenbewegung), the campaign Fight Nuclear Death (Kampf dem Atomtod), and the Easter March movement (Ostermarschbewegung).16 Pacifism and peace-related issues continued to be important through the 1960s and beyond, and specifically to members of the League, West German Amnesty, and the Humanist Union. However, the critique of Adenauer’s West Germany in the name of human rights raised many issues beyond peace and required no particular position on pacifism. While the League was a pacifist organization, that was not necessarily true of West German Amnesty or the Humanist Union.

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In 1961 matters came to a head when Adenauer, now eighty-five years old, announced that he would run for a fourth term. His critics were appalled both at Adenauer’s refusal to step down and at his openly authoritarian heir apparent, the Bavarian politician Franz Josef Strauss of the Christian Social Union (Christlich-Soziale Union, CSU). The new SPD saw the election of September 1961 as its proving ground, with Willy Brandt as the candidate for the office of federal chancellor. Then, the month before the election, in August 1961, East Germany suddenly erected the Berlin Wall. The election became a referendum on Adenauer’s foreign policy of confrontation with East Germany and Western military integration. The SPD and FDP criticized Adenauer’s government for having failed to ameliorate the now-worse division of Germany. The Wall, on this argument, meant that Adenauer’s policy of isolation had failed and that it was time for a foreign policy that recognized the status quo of East Germany’s existence. The FDP even declared that it would not enter a coalition with the CDU/CSU. As it turned out, however, the CDU won a plurality in the election of September 1961. The FDP reversed itself and joined the CDU/CSU in coalition, infuriating many of its liberal and libertarian supporters.17 The SPD remained in opposition, but it had polled more votes than before. Willy Brandt and his allies believed that their new strategy was vindicated, and the SPD continued its march to the political center. In November 1961, the SPD took the next step, expelling its own student organization, the Socialist German Students’ Union (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, SDS), for its persistent criticisms of rearmament and the Bad Godesberg Program.18 For our story, the important outcome of these events between the ban on the KPD in 1956 and the election in 1961 was that a new political space opened up outside the parties.19 This space offered a political home to West Germans who found themselves expelled from the SPD, were frustrated by the SPD’s move to the center or the FDP’s lack of principle—or just frustrated by the continued power of Adenauer’s CDU. The League, West German Amnesty, and the Humanist Union took hold in that new political space. They were operating outside the parties, even as they sought to hold the parties to a higher standard. They staked out a meta-position about how democracy ought to function and what role the individual ought to play in it. Unlike the peace movement, these organizations were not really issuespecific, and they used the language of human rights because it was not issue-specific either. It was precisely the open-ended nature of language of human rights that attracted them.

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The International League for Human Rights: Confronting Adenauer’s West Germany with the Nazi Past As we have seen in Chapter 1, the German League for Human Rights had a troubled history of cooptation in the 1940s and the 1950s. In 1959 several public intellectuals sought to rescue its distinguished reputation by refounding it in West Berlin.20 Some of these public intellectuals were soon to be active in West German Amnesty and the Humanist Union as well. Legal complications required that it gain a new name: the International League for Human Rights. Unlike the German League for Human Rights, the new International League for Human Rights was able to sustain its work, and it has prevailed as “the” League in Germany.21 Positioned well to the left on the German political spectrum and never well funded, the International League has possessed little besides its moral authority and the prestige of its members. Today it is best known in Germany for awarding the Carl von Ossietzky Medal. Over the 1960s, the League publicized a wide range of human rights issues all over the world, but it gave most of its attention to educating the West German public about the crimes of Nazism and to exposing former Nazis in West German public life.22 Over half of the events and campaigns that the League sponsored in its first few years concerned Nazi crimes and their legacies; the remainder took up issues related to decolonization and communism. In other words, it used history to put pressure on the Adenauer government. The unpopularity of publicizing the Nazi past at that time probably served to protect it from the exploitative interlopers it had faced in the 1950s. Among the most prominent figures involved in the re-founding of the League was the political science professor Ossip K. Flechtheim.23 Born in 1909 in Russia to a Russian-German-Jewish family, Flechtheim grew up in Germany and studied law. In 1927 Flechtheim joined the KPD, but he left it in 1933, disgusted by its enmity with the SPD. As a member of the underground group Beginning Anew (Neu Beginnen) he was detained in 1935, and he went into exile the same year. He returned to Germany in 1946 to work for the Nuremberg successor trials. In 1952 he returned permanently to teach at the German Institute for Political Science (Deutsche Hochschule für Politik), later the Otto Suhr Institute (Otto-Suhr-Institut, OSI) of the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin). A postwar member of the SPD, he left it in 1962, angered by the Bad Godesberg Program and the SPD’s undemocratic treatment of the SDS. He, Carola Stern, and others announced their decision with a well-publicized open letter.24 Until 1981 Flechtheim did not belong to

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any party; that year, he joined Berlin’s Alternative List, which in turn became part of the Green Party. Flechtheim was a prolific scholar of Marxism, political parties, peace studies, and futurology, a field he helped create.25 One of his abiding themes was the Stalinization of the KPD, and he described himself as “anti-totalitarian.”26 Flechtheim, along with colleagues such as Theodor Ebert and Ulrich Albrecht, made the Otto Suhr Institute into a prominent center for political science and peace research.27 Flechtheim retired in 1974 but remained politically active. His home near the Free University was a meeting place for streams of academics and activists over the years. Known in the years of the student movement as the “professor who talks to the rebels,” he was a major influence there and in the Green Party.28 Flechtheim was also important for West German Amnesty and the Humanist Union. He joined the Humanist Union in its first year, 1961, and was almost continuously on its advisory board and co-editor of its journal, Events (Vorgänge). While he had no such formal post in West German Amnesty, he was a powerful influence on key individuals of multiple generations in that organization. One example was Carola Stern, a co-founder of West German Amnesty who was born in the 1920s; another is Wolfgang S. Heinz, who was born in the 1950s. Stern studied with Flechtheim at the Otto Suhr Institute in the 1950s and was deeply influenced by his pacifism and discussions of a third way between capitalism and communism.29 He and his wife, Lili Flechtheim-Faktor, also a returned German Jewish émigrée, were personally close to Stern. Lili Flechtheim-Faktor founded West Berlin’s first Amnesty group, at Stern’s urging, and Wolfgang Heinz joined it in 1970 as a high school student.30 Heinz, who was also personally close to the Flechtheims, is exemplary of those in Germany and elsewhere who have been able to forge important careers under the explicit rubric of human rights since the proliferation of human rights organizations and scholarship from the 1970s onward. After almost a decade in West German Amnesty, and directly inspired by that work, Heinz wrote a dissertation under Ulrich Albrecht and Ossip Flechtheim on the causes of human rights violations in the Third World.31 Heinz also rose to a post on West German Amnesty’s board, the office of its federal chairperson (1977-79), and then Amnesty International’s International Executive Committee. He continued to publish, teach, and write numerous country reports through the 1990s and 2000s. Today he is one of Germany’s most experienced experts on international human rights, particularly regarding Latin America, and he holds posts at the German Institute for Human Rights, the Council of Europe, and the United Nations.32

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Flechtheim did not belong to a local Amnesty group himself; it seems likely that the private and putatively unpolitical work of writing letters to political prisoners did not appeal to him. Their daughter humorously speculated that perhaps Lili threw herself into Amnesty group work because that was the one mode of political activism Ossip did not dominate.33 Both Flechtheims strongly supported West German Amnesty: in 1970, for instance, they gave it a substantial cash gift of 20,000 DM.34 Ossip Flechtheim saw the League, the Humanist Union, and West German Amnesty as facets of the same political project. For example, he proposed a “Benno Ohnesorg Prize” for “victims of state violence and capricious acts” to be awarded by the League, the Humanist Union, West German Amnesty, and another organization, hoping that deliberations over the awardee “could bring the various civil liberties organizations closer together.”35 (Benno Ohnesorg was the young man whose fatal shooting by a policeman at a demonstration in West Berlin in 1967 against Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran marked the beginning of West Germany’s student uprising.36) A second prominent figure active in refounding the League was the philosopher Margherita von Brentano (1922-95), one of Flechtheim’s friends and colleagues at the Free University.37 Brentano was influential in the Berlin student movement, especially in anti-nuclear activism. It was she who in 1958 urged a young Wolfgang Fritz Haug to take over a newsletter that the League sponsored, connecting it to an anti-nuclear student group at the Free University. In the years thereafter, he and Frigga Haug developed that newsletter into Das Argument, the leading left journal in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. The Argument-Klub was the official student group of the League.38 Another strand of Brentano’s work was the analysis of antiSemitism. In 1960 she organized “Overcoming Anti-Semitism,” the first academic conference devoted to that topic to be held in West Germany, which influenced many young scholars and activists.39 Over the next several years, she taught a related seminar with Peter Furth.40 Brentano also took up the issue of the disadvantaged place of women in higher education in her political and university work.41 Numerous members of the League also focused their activism and scholarship on the Nazis’ murderous policies toward Jews and on wider anti-Semitism. The League helped sponsor some of the most important early exhibits and publications that offered West German audiences factual knowledge about Nazi crimes. One member was Joseph Wulf (1912-74), a survivor of Auschwitz. With Léon Poliakov, a French historian of anti-Semitism, Wulf was the author of the earliest documentary histories of Nazism and the Holo-

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caust, and he was the original advocate of creating a museum and study center at the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held.42 Another member was Gerhard Schoenberner, who has been a prolific writer on the Nazi past as well as the state of West and unified German democracy.43 In 1960 Schoenberner published The Yellow Star, a book of photographs and documents drawn from the exhibit “The Past Admonishes Us” (“Die Vergangenheit mahnt”), which was sponsored by the League. This exhibit aimed at educating a popular audience about Nazi crimes, and the League estimated that about two hundred thousand West Germans saw it.44 When the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site was finally established in 1992, Schoenberner was its founding director. Yet other members were Manfred Rexin and Ansgar Skriver, who in 1960 jointly published a book on the history of anti-Semitism in Germany and became prolific authors.45 Rexin helped Margherita von Brentano organize the “Overcoming Anti-Semitism” conference of 1960.46 Reinhard Strecker, another member of the League and a student of Margherita von Brentano’s, publicized continuities in leadership personnel between Nazi Germany and the Federal Republic. Two of his best-known efforts were an exhibit he opened in 1959 entitled “Nazi Justice Not Atoned For” (“Ungesühnte Nazijustiz”), which exposed the cruel sentences imposed by Nazi-era judges who remained on the bench, and a book published in 1961 entitled Dr. Hans Globke, which documented to similarly explosive effect the Nazi-era career of Adenauer’s right-hand man, the state secretary in the chancellor’s office.47 Reinhard Strecker also exposed the past career of Heinrich Bütefisch, the recipient of the Federal Cross of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz) in 1964. Bütefisch had been an SS officer in charge of forced laborers at Auschwitz, and the ensuing scandal forced him to return the award.48 Such exposés were controversial in West Germany not only because careers were at stake, but also because they often relied upon documents supplied by East Germany, Poland, and other state socialist countries.49 These and other members of the League also discussed current affairs. The League sponsored numerous events related to issues outside of West Germany, such as Reimar Lenz’s exhibit on the Algerian War and a protest against King Hassan II’s repressive regime in Morocco.50 Other members and events focused on issues inside West Germany. For example, Manfred Rexin spearheaded the Kampf dem Atomtod campaign in 1958, and Ansgar Skriver’s volume of essays entitled Berlin and No Illusions, published in 1962, carried forward the debate about the Wall’s implications for West German foreign and domestic policy. Skriver’s volume also posed the question of the extent

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to which West German society had actually absorbed democratic values. In it, various authors including Gerhard Schoenberner and yet another League member, Dietrich Goldschmidt, advocated an easing of tensions between East and West that was soon to be called “détente.”51 Likewise in its early years, the League held events on neo-Nazism in West Germany, the Spiegel Affair (with then-SDS member Ulrich K. Preuss, later a noted constitutional law scholar), and on the West German state’s efforts to keep Easter March participants from entering West Germany.52 Freedom of thought and speech in Adenauer’s West Germany was a high priority for the League. Overall, the Nazi past was the single most prominent theme in its activism. Educational work about Nazism and its legacies—unlike its earlier work with fleeing East Germans—allowed the League to engage controversy and absorb newcomers without facing cooptation and losing control of the League’s ideals. The League no longer faced the problem of interlopers seeking to use the League’s anti-Nazi reputation to hide or retouch their own pasts. Ex-Nazis had had by now many opportunities to re-integrate themselves into Adenauer’s West Germany. There was no generous public funding for education about the Nazi past that might tempt interlopers. Jews, the Holocaust, and criticism of the Nazi past were not popular topics in the West Germany of the late 1950s. The League was not entirely alone, however; its renewal coincided with the beginnings of a wider West German critical discussion of the Nazi past. The Ulm Special Task Commado (Einsatzkommando) trial (1958) and the Auschwitz trial (1963) helped publicize Nazi-era crimes to West Germans. In 1965 the parliament held the first of several debates regarding extending the statute of limitations on murder and genocide.53 Such public debate was no longer primarily an Allied effort, but rather a confrontation among Germans. Over the 1960s, the League continued to dispute the proper usage of the language of human rights with the expellee lobby. For example, in September 1965, at “Homeland Day” (Tag der Heimat), the quasi-official annual memorial event for expellees and refugees, the League of Expellees declared that 1965 should be the “Human Rights Year.” The League responded with a press release in which it insisted that only the United Nations could properly declare a Human Rights Year, and the United Nations had already planned to declare 1968 as the Human Rights Year to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Moreover, “the tradition of struggle for human rights commands that one act above all for the rights of others, and not invoke the universal idea of human rights only to serve one’s

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own interests.” The League suggested that a more appropriate way of commemorating “the necessity of protecting human rights” in September would be to mark the day on which Germany started the Second World War, “since Hitler’s policies in violation of international law were the cause of the wrongs done to the expellees.” The response from a far-right newspaper defending the League of Expellees was to dismiss the League as a “radical left” organization.54 To the extent that the League involved itself in left politics, it was still vulnerable to the pressures of the rivalry between West and East Germany. The political scientist Wolfgang Kraushaar has argued that the 1960s and 1970s saw a shift from the anti-totalitarianism of elders to an anti-anti-communism of younger cohorts. This shift is discernible in the League as well. In the 1960s, the League frequently spoke out against East Germany; it did so much more rarely in the 1970s and 1980s.55 Evidence from East German archives shows that leftist circles in and out of the student movement were infiltrated by Stasi spies.56 More subtly, radical West Germans adopted phrases for their own materials from fliers circulated by the Stasi, unaware of the fliers’ provenance.57 Some of this may have been true of the League. The distinctions could be subtle indeed, given that the League was genuinely committed to certain causes that the East German regime also favored. The League’s consistent focus in the last years before German unification was on anti-racism, education about the Nazi past and anti-Semitism, and anti-anti-communism. This even remained true after 1990: two of the last political actions of an elderly and ill Margherita von Brentano were to support the campaign for a Holocaust memorial in Berlin (which was built after her death) and to defend Heinrich Fink, the theologian and former president (Rektor) of the East German Humboldt University, from the accusation that he was an unofficial Stasi spy. (In the meantime, this accusation has been substantiated with recovered Stasi records.58) The League probably had been infiltrated with official or unofficial Stasi spies by the 1980s; it would be surprising if it were not, and the same is true of any similar organization in West Germany. In 1988 the League had the doubtful distinction of receiving this gentle criticism in a Stasi internal report: “Although progressive tendencies clearly predominate in the organization’s activity, there have been a few criticisms of socialist states in the past years.”59 That was no compliment for a human rights organization. Nevertheless, the League has not been destroyed by those pressures. Today, it is tiny and lacks the prominent intellectuals in leading positions that it had at the time of its re-founding in 1959. However, it continues its work on the

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rights of immigrants, refugees, the right of asylum, and on anti-racism, and it frequently cooperates with the Humanist Union in its programming.60

West German Amnesty: Cultivating Human Rights Thinking at Home In late May 1961 Peter Benenson published his first newspaper piece for Appeal for Amnesty (as his group was at first called), “The Forgotten Prisoners,” in the Observer. West German Amnesty was founded over the summer of 1961, during the suspenseful run-up to the election that fall. Things moved quickly. In late June, the first personal contacts were made between Benenson’s group in Britain and some West German journalists in Cologne.61 In late July, those journalists held a constitutive meeting for a West German section of Benenson’s organization.62 The first officers were Gerd Ruge (chair), Carola Stern (vice chair), and Felix Rexhausen (treasurer). Before July was out, Ruge traveled to Luxemburg to attend the first international meeting of Appeal for Amnesty. He helped make the decision there to turn the temporary Appeal for Amnesty campaign into a lasting organization, Amnesty International.63 West Germans were, then, part of Amnesty from almost the very beginning. Indeed, the West German section was the first Amnesty International section to be founded abroad.64 This section of the chapter examines the preoccupations that moved Ruge, Stern, and Rexhausen (as exemplary early members) to become involved in Amnesty. Like its British parent organization, West German Amnesty has its distinctive foundation myth, an oft-repeated story of its spontaneous origins.65 As Stern recalled for interviewers: “In late June 1961, at Goltsteinstrasse 185 in Bayenthal [a district of Cologne], a summer party was being held. . . . At about ten o’clock in the evening the doorbell rang, and since Gerd Ruge and I happened to be standing at the door, we opened it. And in came an Englishman named Eric Baker—he was a friend of Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International. He told us about this new organization, and we decided that very night to found the German section.”66 West German Amnesty’s foundation myth is not wrong, but it leaves much out. Who were the early members, and what did they think they were signing up for? Most were based in Cologne, an important radio and print media center located near West Germany’s capital city of Bonn. They were a mix of Cold War liberals and anti-Stalinist socialists, united by their anti-totalitarianism. They were all attracted by Benenson’s effort to recast the commitments of the non-commu-

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nist left into a moral language of political protest that brilliantly ignored the Cold War. Yet we should not think of the West Germans who started Amnesty groups in Cologne, and later Hamburg, as carbon copies of the British members. They made use of Benenson’s inspiration, but they were different people responding to their own domestic political environment.67 The Amnesty statutes had specific appeal for West Germans who were critical of Adenauer. Amnesty’s overarching goal was the “support and promotion of measures and institutions suitable for bringing about the release of persons imprisoned due to their political or religious convictions.”68 This focus on political prisoners resonated powerfully for West Germans generally. West Germans had been watching the East German state incarcerate thousands over the 1950s, East Germany’s most repressive decade, and Adenauer’s critics and supporters alike were concerned. The other main Amnesty idea appeared in the statutes as follows: “The organization works in equal measure for persons from the Eastern world, the Western world, and from the remaining countries.”69 The idea that political prisoners in noncommunist states even existed, and that they moreover deserved the same attention as ones in communist states, had far narrower appeal in West Germany. Indeed, it took at least a decade for Amnesty to become popular in West Germany. But if we ask what motivated its founders, as opposed to what had broad appeal, then we can see clearly that the Amnesty idea of naming political repression in non-communist states was key. Wolfgang Leonhard, a member of the original board and the bestselling author of the anti-Stalinist memoir Child of the Revolution, considered West Germany to exhibit a “manipulated mixture of democracy and authoritarian state.”70 Stern complained that in West Germany, “anti-communism was the state religion.”71 Amnesty’s version of human rights allowed them to denounce the wrongs of the East German dictatorship without being counted among Adenauer’s supporters. If West Germans honed their sense of human rights with work in Amnesty International, these founders hoped, then they would protest more strongly against political repressiveness inside their own country as well as elsewhere. The dual commitment to political prisoners in East Germany and to criticizing West German repression drove the founding of West German Amnesty in the summer of 1961. Essentially, West German Amnesty emerged as a splinter group out of the anti-Stalinist arts and letters organization Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Six of West German Amnesty’s nine founding board members were members of the CCF in Cologne.72 The CCF initiated contact with Benenson as soon as “The Forgotten Prisoners” appeared. Mel-

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vin Lasky, the editor of the CCF periodical The Month (Der Monat) who was based in Berlin, wanted to supply Benenson with the CCF’s information on imprisoned East German intellectuals such as the philosopher Wolfgang Harich. The most important CCF chapter in West Germany was in Cologne, and so Lasky sent Sabine Rühle, a CCF staff member in Cologne, to meet Benenson in Paris in mid-June 1961. Benenson was equally interested in contacting West Germans and asked Rühle to help start a West German branch of Amnesty. Benenson sent his friend and Amnesty co-founder Eric Baker to visit Cologne, and Rühle introduced Baker to as many potential supporters as she could. That is how Baker came to attend that summer party, which was hosted by the CCF.73 As it happened, Baker met Gerd Ruge, Carola Stern, and others precisely at the moment when their engagement in the issue of East German political prisoners was most intense. In addition to well-known cases such as that of Harich, who had been imprisoned since 1956, the summer of 1961 brought a new case: Heinz Brandt, a former member of the Socialist Unity Party in East Germany who had defected to the West, was kidnapped from West Berlin and imprisoned in East Germany. His kidnapping took place in mid-June 1961, less than two weeks before that summer party. Ruge, Stern, Rühle, and Leonhard had immediately thrown themselves into publicizing Brandt’s kidnapping. When Eric Baker met them, they were in the midst of that activism, and logically enough, the Harich and Brandt cases became prominent ones for Amnesty International. Brandt was its “prisoner of the year” in 1963; both were released in 1964.74 The very first cases for West German Amnesty were political prisoners in East Germany as well as Ghana, Hungary, Indonesia, and South Africa. While the Brandt case was turned over to the British section, with the idea that British Amnesty members could gain a hearing from East German officials more easily than West German ones, the East German cases were nonetheless important motivations for Ruge, Stern, and the others to promote Amnesty inside West Germany.75 Speaking in the 1980s, Stern recalled that she and her colleagues were aware of political prisoners in the Soviet Bloc, of course, and in Spain and Portugal—but nowhere else. They had no wider awareness of political repression in Africa, Asia, or South America.76 It was their activism for West German Amnesty that brought them that wider awareness; it did not motivate their engagement in the first place. Their motivation was concern for political prisoners inside Germany in both senses: inside East Germany (which was not entirely a foreign country to West Germans), and also inside West Germany.

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It was the early members’ concern for political prisoners inside West Germany that set the West German Amnesty founders apart from the various West German anti-communist organizations of the 1950s, including the CCF branch in Cologne. Indeed, they would not have splintered off otherwise from the Cologne CCF. When they explained at the time and in later years why Amnesty appealed to them, they cited their concern about West German leftists imprisoned or otherwise censured inside West Germany since 1956.77 While still members of the CCF in Cologne, they had begun to push beyond anti-communism as a program, seeking to highlight the “problem of cultural freedom in the whole world,” that is, in the West as well as the East.78 But they ran up against the chairman of the CCF in Cologne, the publisher Joseph Caspar Witsch, who was in some cases also their employer.79 Witsch was an ardent anti-communist who idolized Adenauer and railed against his fellow CCF members’ preference for the SPD. He rejected any CCF project other than clearly anti-Stalinist ones.80 Ruge, Stern, and other members of the Cologne CCF shared Witsch’s hatred of the East German dictatorship, but they did not want to be restricted to criticism of communism and they wanted to break the grip of Adenauer and his supporters on West German political culture. The Amnesty idea, as they heard about it from Eric Baker at the summer party, offered them a way to evade Witsch and do the work that they were already proposing among themselves. The individual stories of the three original officers of the Cologne group, Ruge, Stern, and Rexhausen, support the argument that domestic motivations were primary in West German Amnesty’s founding. Gerd Ruge was by far the best informed of the three about the world outside of Germany, but he was just as focused on domestic issues as the others. Born in 1928, this radio, print, and television journalist specializing in foreign affairs started his career at Cologne’s West German Broadcasting (Westdeutscher Rundfunk, WDR) in 1949. In 1950 he became the first West German journalist admitted to Yugoslavia since the Second World War, and in 1956 the first to be based in Moscow. In 1961 he had just returned from Moscow to Cologne to rejoin the WDR as its foreign affairs editor. Ruge had almost unparalleled journalistic access to communist countries in the years of Cold War and détente.81 Like several others among the first cohorts of West German Amnesty, Ruge was an early advocate of détente, and hoped that it would relax the grip of anticommunism on domestic affairs. In the 1950s and early 1960s he published books, aimed at a popular audience, that sought to humanize Soviets and other East Bloc denizens, showing them in everyday situations talking about

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clothes, food, and children. Ruge reminded West Germans to be skeptical about sweeping generalizations about life under communism, and he also gently reminded West Germans of their own ugly past of anti-Slav prejudice and Nazi conquest.82 Ruge, with his extensive international experience, was an ideal chairman for the new organization, and he worked hard for it.83 While Stern and several others in West German Amnesty considered themselves democratic socialists, Ruge was a liberal.84 Yet he was no less concerned about the persecution of leftists after the ban of the KPD in 1956 than they were. From the vantage point of 2001, Ruge recalled what was on his own and others’ minds at the time of that summer party. Notably, everything he mentioned concerned West or East Germany. He himself, he recalled, had been mindful of the persecution of German communists after the ban of the KPD and the bravery of lawyers such as Gustav Heinemann who defended the rights of the accused.85 Stern and Leonhard were preoccupied with the Stalinist East Germany they had escaped. Rexhausen was concerned with the insidious effects on freedom and self-respect of the criminalization of homosexuality.86 These were, as Ruge remembered them, the issues that moved them to become engaged in Amnesty International. Ruge organized West German Amnesty’s first major public event in 1962. Domestic freedoms were at the center of attention there. The event was a symposium in Cologne entitled “Treason, Freedom of the Press, and the Formation of Public Opinion in a Democracy.”87 It concerned the Spiegel Affair, a political scandal of the first order. In late 1962, at the instigation of Franz Josef Strauss, Adenauer’s minister of defense, police raided the offices of the newsmagazine The Mirror (Der Spiegel) and arrested some of its journalists. The magazine had published an exposé of NATO military readiness and of Strauss’s plans to supply the West German army with nuclear weapons. The government charged the journalists with disclosing state secrets. In 1965 the Constitutional Court dismissed the government’s case, at which point the journalists brought a case claiming that their freedom of speech had been infringed by the government’s raid and the charge of treason. The decision in 1966 in this second case is considered, after the Lüth case, the second landmark decision regarding freedom of speech in West Germany, for it condemned the arrests of the journalists. In fact, however, it did not offer any definitive approach to balancing press freedoms with state security.88 In any case, the Spiegel Affair had proven its real importance long before the Court drew up its decisions: it did immediate and lasting political damage to Adenauer, and it derailed Strauss’s career. Here, finally,

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was the turning point Adenauer’s critics had hoped for. Ruge’s symposium in Cologne was one of several events all over West Germany that drew large crowds protesting the government’s action.89 Among Ruge’s invited panelists were Ossip Flechtheim, the jurists Helmut Ridder and Fritz Bauer, and the editor of the prestigious newsweekly Time (Die Zeit), Theo Sommer.90 From Britain there came two Amnesty International co-founders, Louis Blom-Cooper and Norman Marsh, and from France the journalist Claude Bourdet, who was the editor of France Observateur and a former member of the Resistance. They discussed the definition of treason and the extent to which the law ought to treat journalists differently from spies. They made comparisons both to the French and German present, and to the German past, especially the Carl von Ossietzky case, in which Ossietzky, a Weimarera League member and journalist, had exposed the Weimar Republic’s rearmament in violation of its treaty commitments, and was then accused of treason. The participants’ overarching concern was how the public could be well informed in a democracy without endangering the state by exposing military or other security matters that truly required secrecy. These issues of freedom of information and state security concerns were fundamental to debates about political crime everywhere, and key to fighting the causes of human rights violations—and at Ruge’s symposium they were being examined in the context of West Germany itself. While Gerd Ruge was the dominant figure in West German Amnesty between 1961 and 1964, he was eventually overshadowed by Carola Stern, his successor as chairperson in 1966. She was the public figure most closely identified with West German Amnesty from the 1970s until her death in 2006.91 In the 1960s, Carola Stern was known as an expert on East German political affairs and worked as an editor at the publishing house Kiepenheuer und Witsch. Numerous important Cold War works reached the reading public by way of her desk, including Leonhard’s bestselling memoir. From 1970 to 1985, her voice was familiar to West Germans as a political commentator and editor at the WDR. In those years, she was one of very few women in her field of political commentary.92 She was already a media name when she helped found West German Amnesty, and as her own reputation grew she consistently attached it to the Amnesty cause. In 1972 the International League for Human Rights awarded her its Carl von Ossietzky Medal for her Amnesty work. Although Stern came to be well informed about worldwide political affairs, she was knowledgeable only about East and West Germany at the time of West German Amnesty’s founding. Unlike Ruge, she lacked any facility

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with foreign languages, including English, and had only occasionally and unhappily traveled outside of Germany.93 Throughout her life, the material that she worked and reworked for her political messages was primarily German. In order to highlight the importance of a politics of humane respect for the individual, she used stories from her own youth, when she was an enthusiastic Nazi, as well as stories from her husband, Heinz Zöger, a communist imprisoned first under the Nazis, then under the East German regime. Recalling in the 2000s what had moved her to involve herself in Appeal for Amnesty, she named exactly those two biographical elements: her own past, and her husband’s.94 For her, politics had to be closely tied to morality and required a confrontation with the Nazi past.95 Like Leonhard, Stern turned experience inside communist institutions into the foundation for a career in the West, at considerable personal cost. In 1945, when she was twenty years old, her hometown of Usedom became part of the Soviet zone of occupation and then East Germany. She took a librarian’s job at the Soviet-run rocket science institute, the Institut RABE, in the town of Bleicherode.96 She joined the SED and gained admittance to a teacher-training course at its Party School (Parteihochschule) at Kleinmachnow near Berlin, through which much of the political leadership of East Germany passed. In 1951 she fled the school and escaped into West Berlin. Stern eventually made her way to the Otto Suhr Institute at the Free University and to Ossip Flechtheim, studied political science, and wrote about the SED.97 She joined the SPD in the mid-1950s but resented being assigned “‘women’s work.’”98 During these years, fearful of abduction by the East German secret police, she took the pen name Carola Stern (her real name was Erika Assmus). In 1959 she decided she had to leave the island of West Berlin for a place of greater safety inside West Germany, and she abandoned her studies. She even tried to abandon the entire subject of East Germany and begin a journalism career in another area, but her lack of gift for languages and repeated invitations to make use of her East German expertise kept drawing her back. Witsch’s publishing house specialized in the state socialist countries and the East-West conflict, and he hired her as a political editor.99 This sketch of Stern’s life suggested a narrative familiar in West German political culture: a young, naïve Nazi lives through the painful disillusion of Nazi Germany’s defeat, turns to communism in hopes of participating in a genuine idealism, becomes disillusioned with it too, and escapes to the West. For many years Stern allowed this version of her political biography to stand. Toward the end of her life, however, she published two autobiographies in

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which she revealed that she had never been a Marxist and that she had joined the SED and attended the Kleinmachnow Party School at the direction of U.S. intelligence. In exchange, her American agent paid for medical care for her mother, who was fatally ill with cancer. She fled the Party School when the staff there discovered her espionage. During the 1950s in West Berlin, she feared being kidnapped by East German agents—a justified fear, according to Stasi records. An East German who had fled to West Berlin, was interviewed by Stern at the Marienfelde reception camp, and then returned to East Germany denounced Stern as the head of a “Titoist-Trotskyist ring.”100 (The refugee-packed West Berlin of the 1950s was, of course, the same dangerous and coercive environment in which League member Alfred Götze had operated.) Lili and Ossip Flechtheim intervened at this point by helping her leave West Berlin in the late 1950s for London, where she stayed with their friend, the poet Erich Fried; after that, she moved to Cologne. These revelations in the last years of her life caused much comment in Germany. In our context, this part of her biography is unsurprising. In the late 1940s and early 1950s anyone with insider knowledge of the East, as Stern had of the Soviet– East German Institut RABE for rocket science and the Kleinmachnow Party School, was not unlikely to be approached. The possibility of espionage was ubiquitous in West German Amnesty and the Humanist Union in the 1960s, just as it was in the German League for Human Rights in the 1950s.101 Wherever such critical minds met and debated, it can be assumed that Western and Eastern intelligence gathering was not far behind. While historians are only able to find archival evidence of espionage by chance or long after the fact, it is important to bear in mind its constant presence in human rights work. Felix Rexhausen (1932-92), like Ruge and Stern, worked at the WDR in the early 1960s. An economist by training and a journalist and satirist by trade, he wrote in varied genres. Rexhausen was a supporter of the Humanist Union as well as West German Amnesty. Rexhausen’s avocation was dislodging newly prosperous West Germans’ self-satisfaction in order to spark greater critical and democratic participation in political affairs. He believed that West Germans had not yet put enough distance between the Nazi era and their own political habits of thought. Anti-communism, excessive respect for authority, and suspicion of those who thought differently were, he claimed, still strong continuities from before 1945. The antidote was vigorous and rational public debate. The continuing stigmatization and criminalization of sexual acts between men in §175 certainly was a continuity across 1945 (the law was reformed in 1969).102 Rexhausen was an important early advocate of

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homosexual rights in West Germany, and he steadfastly affirmed gay relationships and eroticism in his writings. Typical for Rexhausen was his motto, “Gay? Don’t worry about it. Others are straight, and they don’t worry about it.”103 A friend recalled, “He set an example for us of what it meant to be proud and gay.”104 Practically everything Rexhausen wrote, whether serious or satirical, fiction or nonfiction, expressed his avocation of encouraging the everyday, frequently unrewarded work that was necessary for sustaining rational and democratic debate in a democracy. His economics dissertation of 1963 was on the key topic of transparency in public finances, and he stressed there that “democratic politics” was not possible without the “participation of the governed.”105 Apparently a liberal himself, like Ruge and Stern he did not seek to garner support for a particular party, but rather to challenge all parties’ bromides. He was particularly alert to commonly used phrases that mobilized prejudices through vague accusation, such as Zersetzung. This word can be translated as “disintegration,” and suggests the corrosion of solidarity and patriotism; it was a favorite term of the right in Weimar, the Nazi regime, and then of anti-communists in West Germany. In 1965 Rexhausen argued in a speech before university students that West Germany was sliding into authoritarianism, and that critical citizens must reject such broadly denunciatory terms as Zersetzung. By 1965 Adenauer had been replaced by his protégé Ludwig Erhard, but the issues remained the same, from the SPD’s anti-communism to the prudery of church-influenced censorship of the arts. If only, Rexhausen humorously noted, the people or ideas often accused of being disintegrative (zersetzend) actually were! He proposed to his audience that they refuse to conform to the attitudes behind such slogans, and instead “gawkily,” “awkwardly” (linkisch—a play on the German word for “the left,” die Linke) ask questions. One ought to persevere in seeking to protect individual rights and question received wisdom, even if the outcome seemed as hopeless as “taking apart the pyramids with a garden trowel.”106 His arguments for such stubborn, minoritarian political work were exact parallels with the ethos of Amnesty International’s work for political prisoners: so that one need not later reproach oneself for not having done what one could, and so that the minority in West Germany that did wish to halt this slide into authoritarianism could take comfort in one’s support even if all efforts did prove fruitless. Humor was Rexhausen’s main means of arousing citizen interest and outrage, and he was quite explicit about his goal of using satire for politi-

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cal education—which detracts not at all from his works’ hilarity.107 He first became widely known as a humorist in 1963, due to a scandal that exemplified the very repressive political conformity that Adenauer’s critics were resisting. Rexhausen read a humor sketch on the air entitled “Living with Bavaria,” in which he mocked that state in West Germany’s federation as a cause of “constant creaking and cracking in the rafters of democracy.”108 Among other things, he referred to the Bavarian politician Richard Jäger, who had just praised Portuguese colonialism and the Portuguese authoritarian regime of António Salazar, and to the Bavarian minister of culture Alois Hundhammer, who had just censored a production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro because it included images of cupids fondling each other. Rexhausen’s punch line was that West Germans should resign themselves to living with Bavaria in the same spirit in which people had to live with the unavoidable reality of the atomic bomb. Rexhausen’s sketch drew a gleeful response from many listeners, and also some death threats. The high-level political response was predictably humorless: the Bavarian politician Alfons Goppel demanded “appropriate steps for the restoration of Bavaria’s honor,” while Adenauer assured Bavarians of his sympathy. More insidiously, the director at the WDR gave Rexhausen and his colleagues a scolding about the need to take into consideration the political effects of their intended programming—an obvious effort to chill expression.109 At least the attention Rexhausen gained from this media scandal helped his books to sell well, and he lived by his pen, writing for Der Spiegel and other periodicals, and publishing his own books, until his death in 1992.110 His book With German Ink (1965) exemplified how he used humor to run through essentially all the major issues that concerned Adenauer’s critics in organizations such as West German Amnesty, the Humanist Union, and the League.111 This book consisted of model letters offered to the reader for use in life’s awkward situations. Rexhausen sent up West German anti-communist hysteria in “You Said ‘GDR’” (a letter for confronting a television announcer who slipped up by using East Germany’s proper name instead of calling it the “zone”) and in “Asking Forgiveness for Having Insulted a Politician” (a letter for apologizing to an SPD politician for having called him a Marxist). He mockingly highlighted the integration of former powerful Nazis into West German public life in “A Nazi Judge Is Exonerated,” and anti-Semitism in “Our Nephew Is Marrying a Jew.” He satirized the usual excuses for West Germany’s authoritarian and racist allies in “Spain Is Different” and “South Africa Has to Be That Way.” He skewered expellee politicians and militant

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anti-communists, and he mocked homophobes in “175 Years of Research on Michelangelo.” Rexhausen mocked political allies as well as opponents: “A Left-Wing Intellectual Refuses to Join” satirized the laziness clothed in supposed principle of an intellectual invited to lend support to an organization resembling West German Amnesty or the Humanist Union. Nor did his fellow German gays escape his humor: “German gays are really just Germans,” he sighed.112 In 1966 he published a book, The Lavender Sword: Documents of a Peculiar Revolution, that satirized the new Grand Coalition of CDU and SPD—the SPD’s reward for its drive to the center—as well as German gays.113 Purporting to be an archive of documents recovered from a failed uprising of twenty thousand gays that briefly toppled the homophobic governing coalition, and complete with East German spy reports, The Lavender Sword mixes invention with all-too-true facts and a cameo appearance of the Humanist Union to create a comprehensive and hilarious indictment of West German political culture.114 It remains a gay literary landmark. An even braver publication, in those days of frequent obscenity prosecutions before the reform of §175, was his publication of Contacts: Time-Travel through the 1960s, a lightly fictionalized autobiography written for gay readers that was also a practical survival guide.115 Rexhausen lent a serious edge even to his books that would seem to be wholly humorous or erotic (usually both). For example, Doing It: TwentyOne Variations (1968) was a collection of short stories individually tailored to arouse readers from certain occupational or social groups, such as athletes, policemen, gay opera fans, librarians, and so forth. Rexhausen added a quite serious introduction, however. If one wanted to be a successful author, he advised readers in its introduction, one should write a sex book. Hundreds of years of repression of sex in Christianity and European history would ensure its success. “Even today, German judges have books of ‘immoral character’ pulped, claiming that their authors have reduced people to ‘sexual beings.’ . . . But that just means that those books take sex just as incredibly seriously as they do—those judges, those guardians of the people (Volkswarte), those morality police (Zuchtwächter).”116 The latter two terms referred to neighborhood denouncers in the Nazi era, and so intensified the bitterness in his words. By 1966, Rexhausen had left the board of West German Amnesty. It is unclear what his later involvement may have been, but he apparently gave most of his attention to the Humanist Union and its campaigns for sexual rights. When thinking back on what had most shaped him, Rexhausen invoked the Nazi

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past and, given that knowledge, the imperative to act morally: he named his childhood memories of “the Nazi era with its Youth Service [Jungvolk-Dienst] and its burning houses and its concentration camp pictures afterward . . . and family—we don’t grovel, and we don’t lie, and we think for ourselves.”117 For those who founded West German Amnesty, each West German needed to become an engaged, “articulate citizen” (mündige Bürger) through human rights work—or Mübü, as Rexhausen shortened it in yet another satirical work, On Elections: A Guide for the Paying Audience.118 These founders’ interest in political prisoners was motivated by the desire to cultivate themselves as conscientious speakers against injustice. Drawing upon interviews with other founding members, the historian Linda Schmidt describes how these early Amnesty members were cultivating their own courage to speak out in their new West German democracy, with political prisoners as their inspiration: “just as political prisoners were prepared to express their convictions publicly, campaign members were prepared to speak out, on the basis of their own convictions, for the release of those prisoners.”119 The vision Stern held out to her readers was that very ordinary West Germans, such as a “housewife in Bergisch-Gladbach” or a student group at the University of Bonn, could offer hope and encouragement to prisoners in places like Cuba and Southern Rhodesia.120 Only twenty years after the end of Nazism, it must have been a comforting thought to her readers that Germans, through their individual actions, could play a positive, moral role in the world. Early West German Amnesty members frequently drew a connection between the Nazi past and their Amnesty efforts. As Stern wrote, “Almost all of us had experienced the Nazi era: some in exile, others as enthusiastic supporters of the regime. . . . What united us was the conviction that the crimes of the Nazi era could never and nowhere be allowed to be repeated, and that not only the international community of states but also every single person was called upon to do his part.”121 Unlike in the League, there was no explicit place for education about the Nazi past in Amnesty’s work, but it was obviously important to the founders of West German Amnesty too. The early members of West German Amnesty, and certainly its first officers profiled here, wished to relax the grip of anti-communism on domestic affairs in West Germany. They hoped to cultivate domestic debate among citizens, and they hoped that West Germans would become, through their Amnesty work, more willing to challenge authority and convention at home and to hold their own government to a high standard. As Stern put it in 1983, “Credible human rights policy must begin at home. Only those who can

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prove that no one in their own country is persecuted for their convictions can expect to be listened to abroad.”122 By that time, she was no longer referring to the repression of leftists in the 1950s, one of the motivations for her original engagement in Amnesty, but to the Decree on Radicals (Radikalenerlass) imposed by Willy Brandt in 1972 in response to the Red Army Faction and other domestic terrorism. “The main prerequisite for human rights work,” she wrote, “will always be public opinion.”123 Ruge, Stern, and Rexhausen perfectly exemplified this concern with fostering informed public debate in West Germany. Ruge, Stern, and Rexhausen were only three of numerous impressive personalities close to West German Amnesty in those early years, before Amnesty International became large and well known in several countries. The organization itself, however, remained a minor one for years. In 1964 West German Amnesty had no more than one hundred members, in sixteen local groups; several of those groups consisted of a single person. At that time, Stern recalled, most were “Christians and liberals.”124 By 1969, however, West German Amnesty had doubled. It then grew continuously, and in the latter half of the 1970s it was the largest of any national section, including the British one.125 Stern attributed that growth to students. The student movement brought West German Amnesty many new members, but also controversy and transformation. In 1977, when Amnesty International won the Nobel Peace Prize, the publicity assured its continued growth. Let us return, however, to the political moment of 1961 to observe the emergence of the third organization, the Humanist Union.

The Humanist Union: Claiming Human Rights for West Germans This chapter has argued that the League and West German Amnesty had strong domestic concerns alongside their international human rights concerns, especially at their inceptions. In other words, it has argued that they were more like civil liberties organizations than one might think. The Humanist Union, by contrast, was always explicitly a civil liberties organization. Yet it too sought to wrest away from anti-communists their seeming monopoly on the language of human rights, and to use that language instead to incite West Germans to think critically about freedoms in their own society. Gerhard Szczesny, the founder of the Humanist Union, wrote that the “pronouncement of human rights” was one of the “basic conditions of life in a

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civilized society. What distinguishes our idea from the purposes of the fascist and Bolshevist systems, even if they were to dismantle their secret police and concentration camps, is . . . the conviction that only the freedom to be able to choose among very different interpretations of the world and ways of living makes possible a dignified human existence.”126 This passage was typical of the Humanist Union’s pleas for pluralism. Reference to open-ended rights was necessary to such rhetoric. The key for the Humanist Union was not to be for something, but rather to be against anything that was unnecessarily limiting. It therefore had frequent recourse to first principles in the West German Basic Law, which its members praised as an excellent constitution for a democratic and pluralist society. The problem lay not in West Germany’s constitution, they argued, but rather in the conformist and authoritarian attitudes of public figures and ordinary citizens. These attitudes, the Humanist Union’s members held, were preventing West Germans from taking seriously and fully enjoying the rights they held under the Basic Law. The Humanist Union was founded over the same summer of 1961 as West German Amnesty. Gerhard Szczesny, a journalist at Bavarian Radio (Bayerischer Rundfunk), drew up a manifesto for his proposed new organization and sent it to two hundred public intellectuals, artists, and politicians, many of whom apparently responded eagerly. He also published it in a volume edited by the novelist Martin Walser entitled The Alternative, or Do We Need a New Government?127 The challenge to Adenauer could hardly be plainer. Szczesny and the other contributors to The Alternative wanted to break Adenauer’s continuous hold on political power, and they urged readers to vote for the SPD. However, they were also critical of the SPD, and they wished their project to be seen as a meta-political intervention.128 Among them were several who were soon active in the Humanist Union: the journalist Axel Eggebrecht, the left-Catholic Gerd Hirschauer, and Gerhard Schoenberner, whom we have encountered in the context of the League. All were concerned about the state of democracy in West Germany. They feared that the loss of a true opposition heralded West Germany’s “Portugalization,” or a deepening authoritarianism enjoying church approval.129 They all noted with concern the pillars of Adenauer’s West Germany: anti-communism, the uncritical integration of former Nazis, and church authority. The Berlin Wall was erected in the weeks between the appearance of Szczesny’s manifesto and the founding meeting of the Humanist Union. The Wall demonstrated that unification was now deferred indefinitely. That realization only deepened Humanist Union members’ commitment to take

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West Germany seriously, rather than continuing to see it as a provisory state. To take West Germany seriously meant to ask just how free and democratic it really was.130 They wished to judge the state of West Germany’s democracy by an international standard, not by the special standard of the “German problem.” Humanist Union members therefore encouraged their audience to make international comparisons and to link their constitutional rights to broader traditions of natural and international legal thought.131 Szczesny and his supporters abhorred the notion, implicit in the praise of Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal by politicians of the CDU and CSU, that West Germans needed an authoritarian government because they could not be trusted to choose for themselves how to live their lives.132 Of course, as we have seen in Chapter 2, there were certainly other Germans calling for respect and international equality for Germans in these years, such as Rudolf Laun. Humanist Union members differed from Laun and others, especially in the expellee lobby, in their combination of those demands with an insistence on the exposure and punishment of Nazi crimes.133 The question of expellees’ human rights did arise very occasionally in the pages of the Humanist Union’s journal Vorgänge, to be dismissed not as rights, but as a strategy for practical politics given West Germany’s status quo.134 The hope of the Humanist Union’s founders was that West Germans would learn to appraise critically both the freedoms under which they lived and the freedoms available to people in other countries—the same political education offered by the League and West German Amnesty. Szczesny’s manifesto targeted church authority more than anti-communism or ex-Nazis, but they were hard to disentangle completely. Over against Adenauer and his supporters’ vision of the “Christian West” (christlicher Abendland), Szczesny called for an “open, pluralistic society” secured by “basic rights,” prominent among them the separation of church and state guaranteed in West Germany’s Basic Law.135 His manifesto was a ringing condemnation of the condition of West German democracy: Sixteen years after the end of the Nazi rule, and in the middle of a confrontation with Bolshevik dictatorship, we are compelled to face the fact that even a state in which the rules of democracy are valid can sacrifice diversity to uniformity, tolerance to partisanship and truthfulness to convenience. We have become collaborators in a conspiracy that demands our disenfranchisement and coordination [Gleichschaltung], this time in the name of a Christian doctrine of salvation.

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We are not talking about the right of the believing Christian to spread his faith. We are talking about the ever more blatant and arrogant attempt to subordinate a society that consists only in part of believing Christians to the total claim to power of a Christian control over speech, thought, and behavior.136 Szczesny even spoke of a “Christian totalitarianism.”137 He was concerned about how popular conformity with the wishes of the Catholic and Protestant churches served to intimidate those who held dissenting views and to reduce the diversity of publicly available opinion. Formally leaving the church or otherwise acting in a religiously nonconformist manner carried some social opprobrium in the early 1960s. Moreover, since all adult Germans paid church taxes collected by the state unless they formally left the church (and still do), church membership was not as simple a matter as choosing where to go on Sunday morning. Yet West Germans in the early 1960s were also showing unmistakable signs of secularization. Countervailing trends of “reChristianization” and secularization were both underway, and this situation no doubt provoked and enabled protests such as the Humanist Union’s.138 It is not surprising that Szczesny, as a journalist, led a confrontation with the churches, or that journalists and other media professionals were prominent in the ranks of the Humanist Union. The Catholic Church’s influence in Bavaria was a fact of Szczesny’s professional existence at Bavarian Radio. Bavarian politicians, at the urging of church officials, had sought to censor program content on numerous occasions. Szczesny was even fired in 1962 after complaints about a broadcast he had arranged of Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher of Marxism. Kolakowski, a well-known critic of Poland’s state socialist regime, still lived in Poland at that time, and in the broadcast he praised how in Poland the Catholic Church and politics were quite separate. The implied—and unfavorable—comparison with West Germany’s politically active Catholicism was what infuriated Szczesny’s critics.139 Szczesny became an independent writer and publisher thereafter. His was one of several politically motivated firings of journalists in those years. The historian Christina von Hodenberg has demonstrated that in the early 1960s journalists were turning from an older pattern of shoring up West Germany’s international reputation by refraining from criticizing political figures to a new one of challenging Adenauer’s government, the political parties, and other public institutions.140 In 1964, for example, the television show Panorama dared to examine critically the post-1956 persecution of communists in West Ger-

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many, the first time a television program had done so.141 This new pattern in the media of challenging authority figures was clearly upsetting to politicians and church officials—no doubt all the more because the journalism done in this mode was wildly popular. When journalists’ employers deemed the pressure from the government or parties to be too much to bear, the adventurous editors at Panorama and elsewhere were fired or, as in Rexhausen’s case, scolded. These firings should be seen in the context of yet other media-related scandals at the highest levels of government. In 1958, for example, Heinrich von Brentano, the foreign minister, tried to criminalize journalism that was mocking about the private lives of heads of state and their family members (his draft legislation was nicknamed “Lex Soraya” for the wife of the Iranian shah Reza Pahlavi). In 1960 Adenauer attempted to create a CDU-friendly television channel at public expense. And in 1962 there was, of course, the Spiegel Affair.142 In all these cases, Adenauer’s side lost, both in court and in the court of public opinion. Szczesny and his allies in the cause of freer expression were winning over the long term. But in the short term, these individuals took very real career risks. Unlike West German Amnesty, the Humanist Union struck a chord right away. It quickly gained members, exceeding one thousand by early 1962 and growing continuously to its highest membership to date, in 1969, of fortyfive hundred.143 These may not seem like large numbers, but after all it took West German Amnesty over fifteen years to reach a similar size, and the League never reached that size at all. Even more impressive than the Humanist Union’s rapid growth in membership was the remarkable prestige of its members. Szczesny knew the intellectual and cultural elite of West Germany and did not hesitate to call upon them.144 Early board members included the jurist Fritz Bauer, the journalists Gerd Hirschauer and Walter Fabian, the novelist Hermann Kesten, the sociologist René König, the philosopher Ludwig Marcuse, and the psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, as well as Ossip Flechtheim and Wolfgang Leonhard, among others.145 So glittering was this array of public intellectuals that a young political scientist who was to play a leading role in the Humanist Union himself, Jürgen Seifert, at first avoided it as too much of a “club for dignitaries” (Honoratiorenverein) for his egalitarian taste.146 These were individualists who joined together only for particular political actions, not because they in any way intended to subordinate themselves to any statutes. To make something happen, one apparently just telephoned Szczesny. Szczesny’s intention was that each member speak out on issues about which he or she was qualified to speak; the organization sim-

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ply created the venue but did not need to develop its own internal consensus.147 The Humanist Union in its early years demonstrates how misleading it can be to focus on the forest of an organization and not the trees that are its members. And yet an accounting of these early board members’ careers would fill volumes. With that caveat, the remainder of this section will give the reader a brief tour through the Humanist Union’s main themes. The Humanist Union expressed them through press conferences, letters to periodical editors, public lectures and symposia, petitions to the parliament and to the Constitutional Court, and through its journal founded by Szczesny, Vorgänge, which still appears today. The Humanist Union’s very first campaign was for the mixed-confession school (Gemeinschaftsschule), that is, a school that children of Catholic, Protestant, and any other faiths would attend together. These, Szczesny hoped, would replace the confessional schools (Bekenntnisschulen) that were predominant in Bavaria and permitted by law in any municipality where a confessional group was large enough. In the confessional schools, children were surrounded by those of their own confession only, and the respective church’s influence over the school was especially strong. Szczesny and his allies saw the mixed-confession school as the key to breaking the pattern of confessionalization of public life.148 Such church-related issues have remained important for the Humanist Union, from church taxes to a secular replacement for the state-mandated curriculum on religion, to the 1995 Constitutional Court case that banned crucifixes from classrooms.149 A second very early theme was censorship. The Humanist Union spoke out to defend Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, Luis Buñuel’s film Viridiana, and the German satire periodical Pardon, for example.150 The Humanist Union’s own founding myth belongs to this theme: that Szczesny was moved to act by the ban on a production of The Marriage of Figaro in Augsburg by Alois Hundhammer, the Bavarian minister of culture. In this area of obscenity and censorship, Ludwig Marcuse was a leading voice, with his critical account of ideas of obscenity.151 Members of the Humanist Union were vigilant about youth protection campaigns such as the Campaign for Clean Movie Screens (Aktion saubere Leinwand), seeing them as stealth efforts to censor content for everyone.152 Dagmar Herzog has highlighted a key comparison for critics of censorship in those years: that between church and government authorities’ concern about exposing youth to sexual obscenity, and the same parties’ seeming lack of concern about the obscenity (in a different sense) of permitting the same youth to be governed or taught by former Nazis.153

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The Humanist Union gave considerable attention to the Nazi past as it figured in the West German present. Like the League, it helped expose former Nazis in positions of honor and influence, such as Götz von Pölnitz, who was named the founding rector of the new Regensburg University in 1965 and had to resign when his Nazi-era writings reemerged. The Humanist Union praised and publicized Rolf Seeliger’s The Brown University, a series of exposés of former Nazis at West German universities that appeared between 1964 and 1968.154 As in the case of Reinhard Strecker’s League-sponsored exposés, The Brown University was controversial because it made use of archival documents that East German officials supplied as part of their own campaign to discredit West Germany. Members of the Humanist Union did more than simply support exposés of individuals, however. Fritz Bauer, a member of the Humanist Union’s board and a public prosecutor general (Generalstaatsanwalt) from 1950 to his death in 1968, elaborated whole legal approaches to the problems of the right of resistance, the defense argument of superior orders, and the statute of limitations for Nazi-era murder.155 He was the key figure behind a series of trials that are landmarks in the history of the West German judicial response to Nazi-era crimes, including the Auschwitz trials of 1963-65. In 1952, Bauer was the prosecutor in the trial of the far-right politician Otto Ernst Remer for defamation. Remer was claiming to his audiences that the conspirators against Hitler around Claus Stauffenberg in July 1944 were guilty of national and high treason. Bauer took this opportunity to develop an argument about the right of resistance, quoting Friedrich Schiller’s William Tell to insist that “there is a limit to the power of a tyrant.”156 The possibility of invoking a higher law to overcome a tyrant exemplified Bauer’s belief in a connection between individual and universal rights that no mere written law at a state level could sever. He therefore criticized the argument of superior orders (Befehlsnotstand, that is, the claim that one had no choice because one had been ordered to do something), which was often used to defend Germans on trial for killing civilians in the Nazi era. Bauer insisted that for both the conspirators of 1944 like Stauffenberg and for the defendants in the murders committed in the Nazi era, a space existed for the individual to choose moral action. Bauer advanced this argument as prosecutor in the Auschwitz trials. Suprapositive rights—human rights—were absolutely key to Bauer’s arguments regarding the judicial confrontation with the Nazi past, as he indicated in the title of an autobiographical essay of 1955: “In Struggle for the Rights of Man.”157 These legal arguments concerning the Nazi era, presented by Bauer and others, were discussed at length at the Humanist Union’s events and in the pages of Vorgänge.

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There were both church and Nazi-era connections to a third theme important to the members of the Humanist Union, sexual rights. Here Fritz Bauer and Hans-Joachim Schoeps, the historian of religion, were leading voices.158 The Humanist Union advocated the reform of §175 to decriminalize sexual acts between consenting adult males. Members also advocated the ready availability of divorce, contraception, and sterilization. The Humanist Union was the first organization in West Germany to advocate abortion on demand, and its arguments directly shaped a law of 1974 permitting abortion at the wish of a pregnant woman; the law, however, was struck down by the Constitutional Court.159 It also advocated full legal equality for children born outside of marriage. In the 1960s, the Humanist Union generally advocated a libertarian notion of equality between men and women; in the 1970s it turned to some interventionist approaches to women’s rights, such as quotas for political representation, a state commitment to reduce violence against women, censorship of some pornography, and the right of asylum for victims of gender-specific violence.160 These ideas tended to conflict with the libertarianism of many of the men, as well as with the conservatism of individual members—for by no means were all members of the Humanist Union on the left or center—Schoeps, for example, was a monarchist! A fourth major theme was penal reform. Members of the Humanist Union, especially the defense attorney Heinrich Hannover, pointed to the abuse of the idea of political crime, thereby sustaining the critical response to the state’s persecution of leftists after the ban on the KPD in 1956.161 Hannover, Bauer, and the prison director Helga Einsele turned attention to the rights of ordinary prisoners, including everyday prison conditions, rehabilitation, and social reintegration after release.162 Einsele’s work was so valued by the Humanist Union’s members that she received the first Fritz Bauer Prize, an award inaugurated after Bauer’s death in 1968. Hannover, Bauer, and others also argued for limiting the scope of sexual crime, and Bauer in particular wrote about unexamined Christian influence on legal concepts such as guilt and the propriety of the death penalty. (West Germany did not have the death penalty, but some wanted to institute it, and the Humanist Union argued against them.)163 One more major theme of those early years was the campaign against draft legislation for a state of emergency (Notstandsgesetzgebung).164 Ever since the Allies granted extensive sovereignty to West Germany in 1955, the latter needed to replace Allied measures for maintaining public order in a state of emergency with its own. Early drafts affected matters such as freedom

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of the press, assembly, demonstration, and compulsory labor for industrial workers. This legislation touched many raw nerves for West Germans who were suspicious of perduring authoritarianism. The state of emergency legislation was debated passionately from the late 1950s through 1968, when the Grand Coalition of the CDU and the SPD passed it in revised form. Ossip Flechtheim and Jürgen Seifert were prominent voices here. The issues in this debate remained current when the West German state confronted terrorism in the 1970s. The Humanist Union was particularly concerned to intervene against the idea that those who defended terrorists’ rights were themselves “sympathizers” with terrorism.165 In all these areas, the Humanist Union saw considerable success. On more than a few occasions, parliamentarians have adopted its proposals, sometimes almost word for word.166 For that matter, numerous politicians have themselves been members of the Humanist Union. Politicians who belonged to the generation of the “1968ers” and then came to the fore in national politics from the 1980s through the 2000s were especially likely to be members. The top members of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s SPD government (in office 1998-2005) were longtime members: Schröder himself; Joschka Fischer, the foreign minister; and Otto Schily, the minister of the interior.167 Although the Humanist Union was preponderantly male in its early years, in contrast to West German Amnesty, which was closer to gender parity, those women who did belong to the Humanist Union were often in important posts in the center and left parties.168 It is inherent in civil liberties work that complete success is not achieved or achievable; debates on its major themes are necessarily ongoing. At the very least, however, as members observed on the occasion of the Humanist Union’s fortieth anniversary in 2001, Germany has become a very different place than it was in 1961, and in many ways it has moved in a direction advocated by the Humanist Union.

“Human Rights” in West Germany in the 1960s The League, West German Amnesty, and the Humanist Union crisscrossed each other with respect to members and issues. It was obvious that West Germans in and out of those three organizations perceived them as aspects of a common project. As Carola Stern noted, one always saw the same people at these organizations’ events, regardless of which organization was actually the host.169 The League and the Humanist Union formally cooperated on numer-

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ous occasions, and have even contemplated a merger.170 More rarely, West German Amnesty cooperated with one or the other; in general it has been reluctant to cooperate with other organizations.171 Meanwhile, members of the public with a particular cause seem to have approached whichever of these three organizations seemed to be the best known (the Humanist Union and the League in the 1960s, West German Amnesty in the 1970s), regardless of what the organization’s statutes specified.172 Members of these organizations also engaged in such crossing of statutory lines. Members of West German Amnesty could not resist some domestic issues, not only in the case of the Spiegel Affair but also in the 1970s, when Amnesty’s rule that members could only work on cases in countries other than their own (the “work on own country” rule) was well established. They raised issues such as the rights of demonstrators, guest workers, asylum seekers, and of foreigners in general who lived in West Germany.173 The most notorious example was the pressure on West German Amnesty from members and non-members to condemn as torture the conditions in Stammheim, the purpose-built maximum security prison where Red Army Faction prisoners were held. Demonstrators even occupied West German Amnesty’s office in Hamburg in 1974. When Amnesty officers had the police remove the occupiers, another painful organizational debate was unleashed, for by that time some on the left were convinced that the police represented the true, fascistic face of the West German state.174 Stern and Heinz recalled how they were berated and dismissed for their supposed conservatism.175 British-based Amnesty International members took on the case of the imprisoned members of the Red Army Faction, and Stern accompanied them on their fact-finding trip, but under the auspices of the League. She concluded that the Red Army Faction prisoners were definitely not being tortured, and was instead shocked by the treatment of ordinary prisoners that she observed, which came much closer to torture in her opinion.176 Wolfgang Heinz visited Stammheim in 1974 to try to persuade Holger Meins, a member of the Red Army Faction, to end his hunger strike. On top of all those struggles, leaders of West German Amnesty found themselves under suspicion from the state, too: in 1977 the police searched the apartment of West German Amnesty’s press spokesperson as part of its investigation of the Red Army Faction’s kidnapping of the industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer.177 Just as West German Amnesty members turned to domestic issues, so did the Humanist Union show interest in the rights of foreigners and rights in foreign countries. Usually its interest in foreigners had a domestic connec-

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tion, as when foreign students’ right to demonstrate in West Germany was constrained (some rights in the Basic Law held for all persons on German territory, not just citizens), or when foreign students left West Germany for their politically repressive home countries (such as the South African Neville Alexander). It also took a strong interest in families with mixed citizenship.178 The most notorious example of pressure in the Humanist Union to take a stand on a non-domestic issue was the demand from 1966 onward by the Humanist Students’ Union (Humanistische Studenten-Union), its affiliated student organization, that the Humanist Union condemn the U.S. war in Vietnam and U.S. imperialism generally.179 Some in the older generation in the Humanist Union, particularly the returned émigrés who had spent time in the United States as refugees and who were all too well acquainted with Nazi-era anti-Americanism, objected to committing the Humanist Union’s name to that position; others did condemn the war, but on their own terms.180 The student movement’s radicalization unleashed much argument in all three organizations, but the student movement’s real impact was not on whether an organization took this or that stand on a particular issue. Rather, the student movement’s lasting impact was on the structure and nature of these organizations.181 By the 1970s the organizations were no longer loose affiliations of prominent personalities. They became, and have remained, bureaucratic organizations whose principles and procedures are better known to the public than their increasingly faceless members. This bureaucratization resulted from demands for democratization from younger members who felt shut out by the older members’ intellectual acumen, exceptional media access, and informal networks. The League probably had the best relations with the student movement, since the Berlin student movement arose in part from the League’s midst. Everyone, it seems, already knew each other from the Free University’s classrooms. There were disputes, for example over the role of violence, and the League sought to limit the influence of student members such as the lawyer Horst Mahler, at that time on the far left and later in life a right radical, or Günther Möllendorf.182 The League was so small, however, that the student movement essentially dwarfed it. For West German Amnesty, the student movement was occasionally a real burden. In addition to the debates about the Red Army Faction, radicals also wanted Amnesty International to support the fighters of armed liberation movements, and West German Amnesty almost split in the 1970s over the question of neutrality and of supporting only political prisoners who were nonviolent.183 Among the various national

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sections of Amnesty International, the West German one was seen by the others as the most politicized and furthest to the left.184 Overall, however, the student and other protest movements were a lifeline for West German Amnesty. Until the late 1960s West German Amnesty had barely enough members to survive. The Humanist Union was probably the hardest hit by the student movement, although it did survive the encounter. Of the three organizations examined here, it was probably the most conservative—or to be more precise, its members spanned a broader political range than the other two, certainly more so than the League. The Humanist Union grew steadily over the 1960s, but membership peaked in 1969. It had spawned its own competitor in 1964: the Humanist Students’ Union. The Humanist Students’ Union grew rapidly in the mid-1960s, quickly reaching eight hundred members and holding over a hundred events of its own. Soon the two were embroiled in bitter battles, and the looseness of the Humanist Union’s procedures left it ill prepared for the Humanist Students’ Union’s demands. For example, it was possible to belong to the student organization without joining the main one—and yet such student members automatically had a vote at the main Humanist Union meetings. West German Amnesty, with its clearer statutes and procedures, was more protected. By 1969, Szczesny felt very distant from his creation: “the transformation of a civil liberties organization into a radical leftist pacifist sect was in full swing.” He did not seek another term as chair.185 The historian Samuel Moyn has argued that human rights first became truly popular in the 1970s as a replacement idealism for socialism. His argument fits these organizations. However, we must bear in mind that these organizations had first seized upon the language of human rights in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in a different political moment. Under the impact of the new popularity of human rights in the student movement in the 1970s, and due to the influx of those disillusioned leftists, they became different organizations. They were no longer what they had been circa 1961, the moment that this chapter has sought to recapture. The student movement left its mark on all these organizations, but it left one aspect of them untouched: the organizations’ public position, or rather lack of one, on East Germany. East Germany always fell between the cracks: it belonged to members’ “own country” for West German Amnesty, and it belonged to the abroad for the Humanist Union. The League, for its part, was cautious about managing its own leftist past and present. Occasionally members challenged an organization to take public positions on East German issues, but nothing more than perfunctory acknowledgment is discern-

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ible.186 If we return to the political moment of circa 1961, we see that members of each of these groups were deeply opposed to the East German regime, and that they bore that concern very much in mind as they created these organizations. Nevertheless, their political project of intervening against Adenauer’s West Germany practically required them to set aside the question of human rights violations in East Germany. The reasons why later cohorts in these organizations continued to do so in the 1970s and 1980s require a separate analysis. The unintended effect was to leave the human rights field of East Germany to the militant anti-communist organizations, including their newer incarnation, the International Society for Human Rights (Internationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte), founded in 1972.187 These did not share the ambition of the League, West German Amnesty, and the Humanist Union of democratizing West German society and politics internally.

Chapter 4

“German Human Rights” Enter the Mainstream: The Case of Otto Kimminich

During the same years when the League, West German Amnesty, and the Humanist Union emerged and began to flourish, some West German international lawyers took up where Rudolf Laun left off, developing human rights arguments with the expellee cause in mind. The expellee organizations had always been interested in international law, but international law became even more valuable to them as the expellee population became more diffuse as a political force and assimilated into West German society over the 1960s and 1970s.1 The expellee organizations worried about the West German government’s shift toward the policy of détente or Ostpolitik, that is, the easing of tensions between West and East Germany. Ostpolitik required West German politicians to downplay the expulsions of ethnic Germans and the Soviet and Polish annexations of the Eastern Territories (Ostgebiete). It was hardly feasible to seek compromises with the East German government over, for example, family contacts while disputing vehemently East Germany’s eastern border. In these years, the expellee organizations’ relationship to Bonn cooled, and they supported legal work on the “right to a homeland” (Recht auf die Heimat) and a new “law of nationality groups” (Volksgruppenrecht). The goal of this work was to specify in legal terms the losses of the German expellees, and to merge the German case with others in generic legal arguments. When human rights talk took hold in the 1970s, international law arguments

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concerning the expellees and generated by expellee legal experts gained a new lease on life. This chapter illustrates the history of the articulation of expellee rights as human rights through the example of the international law scholar Otto Kimminich.2 In contrast to Rudolf Laun, Kimminich became neither marginalized nor dated as he elaborated his human rights concepts on behalf of the expellee cause. On the contrary, Kimminich participated fully in the proliferation of human rights advocacy of the 1970s and after in West and unified Germany. While he died in 1997, his work remains widely cited today and his ideas continue to circulate. Otto Kimminich was skilled at developing legal arguments to address expellees’ grievances and then bringing these arguments into the mainstream of West German human rights activism. He engaged the second and fourth usages of the language of human rights: human rights for Germans other than those targeted by the Nazis, and human rights for non-Germans. Kimminich did not belong to the very top rank of West German international human rights lawyers, and he remains little known outside of Germany. However, inside Germany his work has been cited extensively among human rights activists and experts. There are several reasons for this. He chose issues that have been highly topical over the past few decades, and remain so: refugee and minority rights, asylum, humanitarian intervention, peace, nuclear energy and weapons, and the environment, among others.3 He wrote in a clear and accessible style, and several of his publications addressed laypeople as well as legal scholars. He was prolific, publishing some eight hundred titles, including over twenty-five single-authored books, between the late 1950s and his death in 1997.4 Most important, Kimminich produced general arguments for refugee, asylum, minority, and human rights in the 1960s at a time when human rights were an unimportant topic even among international lawyers. This meant that his oeuvre was largely in place when human rights gained wide attention in the 1970s, and he was well positioned to become West Germany’s leading expert on refugee, asylum, and minority rights. He was certainly received as such by West German Amnesty and other human rights organizations and activists. In all his work, he was at pains to decenter the state as a subject of international law and to formulate strong defenses of individual and group rights. All the while, Kimminich also elaborated concepts vital to the expellee lobby. He wrote the standard work on the “right to a homeland.” He also wrote in favor of the validity of the Munich Agreement of 1938, against the validity of the Eastern Treaties with Poland and the Soviet Union produced

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by Ostpolitik, and in favor of Germans’ right of self-determination. Kimminich was particularly interested in the right to self-determination because it, alone among widely known human rights, referred to an international law subject that was not a state. If the right to self-determination were strengthened, it would breach the monopoly of the state in traditional international law. Self-determination was important not only to Kimminich and others associated with the expellee lobby, but also in West German international law discussions generally, because of the Allies’ division of Germany and the West German Basic Law’s deferral of a true constitution until Germany was someday united. West German jurists regularly affirmed that self-determination was a genuine principle of international law.5 Kimminich also advocated the development of a body of law regarding nationality groups that would protect group rights inside a multinational state, Volksgruppenrecht. Some scholars, such as the political scientist Samuel Salzborn and the historian Karen Schönwälder, have analyzed Volksgruppenrecht as völkisch, a term connoting rightwing nationalism and racism. Völkisch thinking is, as Schönwälder writes, characterized by an “appeal to ancient and lasting ties, vaguely anchored in common descent, language, history, and way of life, along with a demarcation over against the foreign, and a defense of the supposedly threatened original unity.”6 This certainly describes Kimminich’s work. Völkisch ideas are, of course, very controversial, as Nazism is generally understood to have emerged from völkisch politics in the years before the Weimar Republic.7 It was the abstract, dehistoricizing language of human rights that made possible the links among his various fields of legal work. The question of whether Germans could be or should be viewed as the same as other people— key for the abstract language of human rights—was controversial. The story of Otto Kimminich’s career and reception highlights the tensions between historical context and the universalism of the language of human rights. Kimminich can be exposed as a völkisch thinker, but he cannot be retroactively extracted from West German human rights thought. Nor can he be dismissed as an impostor in human rights activism, for he produced authoritative and much-used work. I have chosen him for analysis here over other international lawyers who were advocates of the expellee cause and Volksgruppenrecht because he had the broadest reception among a wide range of other West German human rights advocates. If we were to approach the story of his career with the intention of distinguishing between genuine uses of the language of human rights on the one hand, and false or cynical uses on the other hand, we would miss a major part of the history of the human rights phenomenon

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in West Germany: the formative role played by the expellee cause. That is in turn part of an international history of the formative role of various kinds of conservatives in post-1945 international legal and policy work, especially regarding human rights and European unification.8 It is more fruitful to approach human rights as a strategic political language. The advocacy of human rights is not an arena of consensus; it is one of contestation. Kimminich’s career is best interpreted with the guiding questions of this book: Who has sought to use the language of human rights in West Germany? And why did West Germany have the kinds of human rights activists that it did?

Otto Kimminich and Rudolf Laun Compared Like Rudolf Laun, only more effectively, Otto Kimminich taught West Germans that they ought to be full participants in international discussions of rights, that they had a rich history of thinking about rights and international law, and that they had serious grievances that required the world’s attention. Like Laun, he emphasized Germans’ sufferings in and after the Nazi era, rather than Germans’ special burden as perpetrators. He drew equivalences between the experiences of non-Jewish German expellees and of Jewish and political victims of Nazism.9 Like Laun, Kimminich applied a narrow juristic conception of individual culpability that left out the sort of responsibility about which thinkers such as Karl Jaspers or Hannah Arendt wrote.10 It is at these points in his writing when the tension between the historical context of West Germany’s Nazi past and the universalism of the language of human rights emerges most sharply for the reader. Otto Kimminich was born into a Catholic family in the eastern Sudetenland town of Niklasdorf in 1932. When he was seven, his father died; when he was thirteen, he was forced to leave his academically oriented high school (Gymnasium) due to Czechoslovak measures against ethnic Germans. He was a forced laborer and barely escaped death by shooting, then was expelled from Czechoslovakia. He arrived in Erlangen, Bavaria, as a child expellee and apart from brief periods he spent the rest of his life in Bavaria. He attended university in Erlangen, in Würzburg, and for a year at the University of Virginia, where he earned a master’s degree in economics in 1954 as one of the earliest Fulbright exchange students. Like many young expellees, he had no resources other than his intellectual gifts and industry; in the hierarchical and elitist West German academic system he was a self-made man. He completed

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his dissertation at Würzburg in 1957 and his bar exam in 1959, then worked briefly as a lawyer in the Bavarian civil service. In 1961 he completed his habilitation, also at Würzburg.11 Both the dissertation and habilitation concerned state power over individuals who crossed international borders. His dissertation discussed “hot pursuit” (Nacheile), that is, the question of the extent to which a state was entitled to pursue a person who had fled beyond its borders.12 His habilitation expanded on that topic to discuss the broader subject of the rights of refugees.13 Kimminich took his first real academic post in 1963 at the new Bochum University, in Rhineland-Westphalia. In 1967, however, he returned to Bavaria to join the law faculty at another newly founded university, in Regensburg. He remained there for the rest of his career. Kimminich’s social and professional context of Bavaria in the 1950s and 1960s was important to his formation. Bavaria had absorbed a high number of expellees, particularly from the Sudetenland. From his youth onward, Kimminich was surrounded by the strongest concentration of Sudeten German communities and academic and political institutions anywhere in West Germany. Regensburg University, where he spent most of his career, was one of these institutions: it was founded in 1962 to preserve the Germanophone traditions of Prague’s historic Charles University, now under communist rule.14 The new university was to be a sort of Charles University in exile. This context of the Bavarian expellee institutions and universities is important for understanding how Kimminich was formed in an atmosphere that was uncritical and even apologetic regarding the Nazi past. During the 1950s and into the 1960s, Sudeten Germans generally did not discuss their own instrumentalization by Nazism, much less their possible one-time support for it. As one historian summarizes the atmosphere, “it was the era in which biographies were rewritten, smoothed out, or quite simply concealed.”15 Expellee institutions and academia in Bavaria employed numerous politically compromised people, and even some who had held leading positions as convinced Nazis. This was a pattern throughout West Germany in the 1950s, yet even so, Bavaria stood out. Kimminich was too young to have any personal connection to Nazism. However, he never criticized that apologetic, uncritical atmosphere of Bavaria in the 1950s and 1960s. On the contrary, he actively participated in it. The best illustration of the politics of Kimminich’s intellectual environment is the career of his mentor at Würzburg University, Hermann Rasch­ hofer (1905-79).16 Raschhofer, an international lawyer and nationality policy expert, was a leading figure among völkisch nationalists concerned with

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Germans in the borderlands and Germans abroad (Grenz- und Auslandsdeutsche). During the Weimar Republic, Raschhofer worked at Karl Christian von Loesch’s and Max Hildebert Boehm’s Institute for the Study of Borderlands and Abroad (Institut für Grenz- und Auslandsstudien) in Berlin, which focused on ethnic Germans, then embarked on an academic career.17 Raschhofer joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1936, when it was still illegal to do so, and the German Nazi Party in 1938. In spite of his plaints after 1945 about being at odds with the party, he left abundant evidence of his commitment to the regime. He was a top functionary in the area of minority policy in Eastern Europe, especially as a member of the Academy for German Law (Akademie für Deutsches Recht), a key Nazi legal institution. After holding several posts in Germany as a professor of law, Raschhofer moved to the Charles University in Nazi-occupied Prague in 1940. He was a personal advisor to Karl Frank (who was second in command in occupied Bohemia and Moravia), Hanns Ludin (the ambassador to Slovakia), Konrad Henlein (leader of the Sudeten German Party [Sudetendeutsche Partei]), and Theodor Oberländer (a scholar of Eastern Europe active in the “Germanization” of occupied Poland).18 Raschhofer was an intellectual who placed himself fully in the service of the Nazi regime’s racial war and enjoyed high-level political contacts right up to 1945. After 1945, he took refuge in Milan, which was arranged for him by the Catholic Church. In 1952 he resumed his academic career, first at Kiel University, then Würzburg University.19 Kimminich never criticized or distanced himself from Raschhofer in any way. On the contrary, he supported and promoted his mentor’s ideas and publications, co-editing a Festschrift for Raschhofer and publishing a second edition of Raschhofer’s monograph The Sudeten Question after Raschhofer’s death.20 He also carried forward Raschhofer’s ideas in his own scholarship. Kimminich was not only a prolific author and admired teacher at Regensburg University but also an institution builder in the area of expellee politics and Volksgruppenrecht. He helped found the INTEREG, or the International Institute for Nationalities Law and Regionalism (Internationales Institut für Nationalitätenrecht und Regionalismus) in 1977 and belonged to its board. The INTEREG’s mission was to develop international law norms concerning nationalities and “space” (Raum), a concept associated with Naziera geopolitics, and to seek the integration of those norms into European legal practice.21 From 1978 onward, Kimminich belonged to the Collegium Carolinum, a scholarly institute devoted to “Bohemistik,” or all aspects of the Bohemian lands.22 In 1979 he helped found the Sudeten German Academy

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of Arts and Sciences (Sudetendeutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste), which sought to promote the achievements of Sudeten Germans.23 He belonged to the Ackermann Congregation (Ackermann-Gemeinde), the Catholic conservative branch of the Sudeten German Homeland Society (Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft), which was in turn the overarching, nonacademic Sudeten German organization to which any Sudeten German active in expellee politics would typically belong. Kimminich also had contacts with the Sudeten German Homeland Society’s völkisch-nationalist branch, the Witiko League (Witikobund).24 He also published in the magazine Mut (Courage).25 Like the Witiko League, Mut was at one time under official observation as an extremist organization, although that was not the case at the time of Kimminich’s publication. He also had contacts with Austria’s Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ), which has moved to the far right at various times.26 In general we can say that he was a Catholic conservative, very active in Sudeten German affairs, who had no fear of contact with the far right. This biographical sketch suggests several differences between Otto Kimminich and Rudolf Laun.27 Laun did not grow up in the Sudetenland, nor did he personally experience expulsion; Kimminich did. Laun developed his Social Democratic political principles in fin-de-siècle Vienna, the First World War, and the Weimar Republic, which he strongly supported. Kimminich, who was fifty years younger, had no political experience of the Weimar Republic, and he certainly did not praise it, as Laun had, as a high point of German political life. Laun’s emphasis on religious pluralism, including atheism, arose from his Social Democratic secularism. Kimminich, by contrast, emphasized Christian thought in his writings on international law. Laun helped create openings for exiled and critical scholars at Hamburg University, although he also frequently wrote recommendation letters for politically compromised scholars, thereby contributing to a postwar legal milieu in Hamburg that was uncritical about the Nazi past. Kimminich, in Bavaria, knew no other milieu. Kimminich’s political principles were formed within democratic West Germany, but amid politically compromised scholars. Like Laun, Kimminich idealized the Habsburg Empire as a federal, regional, multinational state that offered an alternative to the unitary, centralized nation-state.28 Both Laun and Kimminich engaged in the fallacy that how people had lived in the past was more natural than how they lived in the present, and both asserted that nationality was a natural quality, while states were artificial and political. They rightly pointed out that the nation-state was

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an ill-fitting imposition on actual ethnic diversity, but they ignored the fact that the significance of ethnic diversity had itself changed utterly since the advent of democratic political participation. Specifically, they presented Sudeten Germans as having been in their most natural state in the multinational Habsburg Empire, but they did not bother to grapple with how class and the imperial lingua franca of German produced de facto German dominance over other nationalities.29 Both sought to separate the history of Habsburg nationalities’ mobilizations from the history of democratization, although as historians of the Habsburg Empire have demonstrated, the two phenomena must be analyzed together.30 Both Laun and Kimminich believed that things had gone seriously wrong in German history well before 1933. For Laun, the turning point was 1918, with the Versailles settlement and its ban on the union (Anschluss) of the new republics of Germany and Austria. For Kimminich, it was the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, a sundering of Germandom that was confirmed with the unification of imperial Germany in 1871.31 It was not Bismarck’s authoritarianism that was objectionable to Kimminich, but rather his failure to include German speakers of the Habsburg Empire in his new state. Kimminich held that the unification of all Germans in one state was in any case impossible— there would always be other nationalities—and so he advocated regionalism as a fitting alternative. Kimminich wished to draw on the Habsburg past as a model for the supra-national organization of Europe. In this “Europe of regions,” various ethnic groups would maneuver for mutually agreeable coexistence.32 (Getting onto the list of authentic European ethnic groups was of course key.) Kimminich was a particular kind of postwar European conservative who supported the expansion of international law into ever more areas of life, affirmed the ban on aggressive war by the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the United Nations, and looked to the United Nations as a vital shaping force in world politics. The Habsburg model—and German military defeat—allowed both Laun and Kimminich to be conservative as nationalist thinkers yet progressive in terms of international law. Kimminich set about developing his Habsburg-inspired concept of international law and nationalities in a manner quite different than had Laun. Unlike Laun, Kimminich was not, or not always, a polemicist. Kimminich adjusted his message for his audience, and he did not mention expellees at all in many publications. His professional colleagues and the public did not necessarily perceive him as an advocate for expellees.33 Kimminich did not waste his energy running into political brick walls, as did Laun when he polemi-

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cized against the Nuremberg trials. (In fact, Kimminich held that the Nuremberg trials were a valuable safeguard against the concept of collective guilt.34) Rather than angrily denounce the Allies for violating existing international law norms, as Laun did, Kimminich argued that those norms needed to be developed—and he made that task into the basis for his successful career.

Countering the Strong State: Refugees, Asylum, Peace, and Human Rights Ever since 1945, human rights activists and some international lawyers have pointed to the ban on aggressive war (Gewaltverbot) in the United Nations Charter (Articles 2, 33, 39) as a turning point in the history of state sovereignty. The ban on the use of force represents, they have argued, a transition from classical international law to a new international law that relativizes the power of the sovereign state. Otto Kimminich was among them. He considered the Gewaltverbot to be absolutely central to postwar international law.35 He took the critique of the classically sovereign state as the point of departure for almost all of his scholarship. He was also interested in developing a greater status for the individual in international law.36 This section presents Kimminich’s criticism of the strong state and his emphasis on the status of the individual in international law in work he published between 1961 and 1977. This work concerned refugees and asylum, peace, humanitarian intervention, environmental protection, and human rights generally. Kimminich laid the basis for his career with work on refugees and asylum. He submitted a revised version of his habilitation to a prize competition commemorating World Refugee Year (1959-60), and won. His book, The International Legal Status of the Refugee (1962), was a comprehensive account of past practices that described the legal treatment of refugees in various receiving states and argued for strengthening the human rights of refugees.37 It included two sections that Kimminich updated and reused repeatedly in the decades to come: a history of asylum since antiquity, and an account of West Germany’s refugee and asylum regime. Like all his writing, it is clear and accessible. This book also showed his talent at weaving German perspectives, especially expellees’ perspectives, into a general treatment and “universal definition” of the refugee.38 Of course, the German expellees were not refugees according to international law, in spite of their colloquial description as such

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inside West Germany, and Kimminich explained that clearly. (They were not refugees because they automatically held citizenship in the Federal Republic of Germany.) But after that clarification, he permitted himself some editorializing, asserting for instance that expellees such as the Sudeten Germans had suffered greater coercion than refugees because the latter were at least able to make the decision to leave on their own.39 The most important role that the German expellees played in the book was as an example of people whose state no longer existed but who must nevertheless still possess human rights. This was important for Kimminich because he wished to develop the larger argument that human rights were not state-centered, but rather were, or ought to be, the rights that remain for a person whose state had ceased to exist.40 Against the classical scenario in which a person claims rights from a state that is the guarantor of those rights, Kimminich drew attention to the importance of persuading states to conform to international norms. Here, the individual person and international law norms were at the center of attention, and the state was decentered. In his 1962 book on refugees, Kimminich argued that international law was in flux, and that the trend was toward securing ever greater status for the individual in international law.41 It was human rights that was keeping international law in flux. Human rights were now sufficiently accepted, he claimed, such that “no decision can ignore the principles conditioned by the existence of human rights without leaving upon itself the stamp of injustice.”42 Yet, Kimminich cautioned, one should not fall back on human rights as a trump card, to fill in legal gaps when more traditional norms did not lead to the desired conclusion. Rather, human rights ought to be used to give new content to existing international law institutions.43 For example, granting asylum was no longer viewed solely as the receiving state’s prerogative; rather, it was coming to be viewed, to some extent, as the individual asylum seeker’s right.44 Kimminich pointed here to other international lawyers who made this argument, such as the famed Habsburg-born Briton Hersch Lauterpacht.45As we have seen in Chapter 2, this position on asylum was more innovative than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which in Article 14 named a right to seek asylum but avoided naming any right to be granted it. The idea of human rights as new content for old institutions together with emerging supra-state organizations such as that produced by the ongoing unification of Europe were bound to overwhelm traditional state sovereignty, Kimminich held.46 In 1968 Kimminich updated and expanded those arguments in a book on

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asylum aimed at a general audience, entitled The Law of Asylum (Asylrecht).47 He wrote here that asylum ought to be seen in two contexts: human rights, and the ongoing worldwide refugee crisis. For all those interested in human rights, the refugee posed the basic problem of whether rights derive from being human, or only from membership in a certain community. That was why refugees’ legal status, his own specialty, was “the touchstone of human rights.”48 The traditional view that the state was the only source of law meant that an individual was left without rights if he left one state and did not join another.49 Yet if refugees had human rights at all, those human rights required a clearly defined right of asylum, instead of the current situation in which a state might grant asylum as a merciful act—or not. The European Convention on Human Rights pointed the way, as it already recognized an individual right of asylum.50 The status of the individual as a subject of international law was inextricably linked to the realization of meaningful human rights. As for the other context, the world refugee crisis, its only possible solution lay in the right of asylum. The numbers of refugees had grown since 1945, and it was not realistic for receiving states to turn back refugees at their borders or, at the other policy extreme, to grant immediate naturalization. Therefore, very high numbers of refugees would continue to live inside receiving states. This unavoidable fact made asylum appear in a new light: asylum was the only way to regularize their presence there.51 It was obvious, Kimminich pointed out, that something was genuinely wrong in many states if so many people were fleeing them.52 To attempt to redefine the problem out of existence by speaking of “economic refugees” was unhelpful, and he disliked that term.53 Kimminich also discussed West Germany’s own provisions for asylum in his book The Law of Asylum. These reached further than general international law or the United Nations’ Refugee Convention of 1951. The Basic Law’s Article 16 granted an individual right of asylum as a basic right.54 Kimminich pointed to the Nazi past and the communist present as reasons why West Germany was properly obliged to uphold a strong right of asylum. As a state located adjacent to the East Bloc, West Germany was a country of first refuge for those fleeing communism. Moreover, West German courts and agencies had won respect from the international community with their application of the Basic Law’s right of asylum.55 Yet the 1960s saw domestic challenges to the Basic Law’s right of asylum, and these apparently motivated Kimminich to publish his Asylrecht in 1968. For example, in 1965 the new Law on Foreigners (Ausländergesetz) was passed. It included a clause that permitted the deportation of asylum holders

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who were a “danger to security.”56 This clause was probably unconstitutional because it permitted an administrative entity to decide on the limitation—actually, the destruction—of a basic right, and only the Constitutional Court was empowered to do that. Either the Basic Law had to be altered (this in fact happened in 1992), or the Constitutional Court needed to issue a decision.57 Kimminich pointed out that even if such persons really did pose a security threat to West Germany, they still could not be deported to countries where they would be in danger of renewed persecution. “Asylum,” he wrote, “is protection from political persecution. . . . One cannot solve the problem [of asylum holders who pose a security threat] by saying that whoever injures the interests of the state is no longer politically persecuted.”58 Those favoring the new Law on Foreigners clause claimed that there were “immanent limits” on asylum, but Kimminich pointed out that international law set minimal, not maximal, limits on states’ actions. Any state was free to be more generous than general international law.59 He feared that the theory of “immanent limits” that had been advanced in the context of the right of asylum could threaten other basic rights as well.60 Anyone observing this debate, Kimminich wrote, “must be horrified at the ease with which a basic right, one which appeared to the Parliamentary Council [which had written West Germany’s Basic Law] as firmly grounded and downright holy, can be completely altered and hollowed out.”61 Moreover, “it would be revealing if the first breach in the line of defense in this struggle were achieved at just that place where it ‘only’ affected a basic right that is held exclusively by non-Germans.”62 The 1980s saw another round of the debate on the right of asylum. Among other issues, the West German humanitarian organization Cap Anamur had caused controversy by continuing to rescue Vietnamese “boat people” in the South China Sea even after the West German state had instructed it to stop.63 The debate in the 1980s foregrounded fears that West Germany’s generous asylum policy would lead to Überfremdung, or the “over-alienization” of German society, and that too many asylum seekers were not genuine victims of political persecution. In his book Basic Problems of the Law of Asylum (1983), Kimminich responded to these arguments, pointing out that those seeking and those already holding asylum together were only a tiny percentage (2.4 percent) of all foreigners in West Germany, and that if foreign countries in the Nazi era had rejected membership in a persecuted group as grounds for asylum and had instead required proof of individual persecution, then many Jews fleeing Nazi Germany would not have been able to claim asylum.64 As before, he emphasized that individuals needed direct access to international

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courts; that administrative difficulties ought not to be pitted against basic rights; and that sovereignty ought no longer to be the central concept in international law.65 Such principled rigor was typical of his writings on refugees, and the topic preoccupied him right up until his death. In one of his last publications on the subject, he discussed the problem of refugees from civil wars and failed states, who were still rejected in the asylum policies of Germany and other states.66 In addition to publishing on refugees and asylum, Kimminich also worked in the new interdisciplinary field of peace studies. Here too, he emphasized that state sovereignty no longer had primacy, and that international law was now based on the preservation of peace. Like leading peace researchers in the 1960s and 1970s such as the Norwegian Johan Galtung and the West German Dieter Senghaas, Kimminich held that peace was not simply the absence of war, but rather a processual condition to be actively maintained.67 Kimminich pointed out that law itself was a mode of peaceful resolution of conflicts, through the enforcement of widely accepted norms. These legal norms were not identical to ethics, but ethics did stand behind law, and it was that ethical consensus that enabled peaceful resolution of conflicts.68 The earliest of his publications in peace research appeared in 1964, and concerned the extent to which a state’s arms policy necessarily led to political tensions.69 As a case study, he examined Germany and other European powers in the years leading up to the First World War, and concluded that it was not arming per se, but rather the relationship between a state’s foreign policy and its arms policy that was decisive. Germany’s mistake before the First World War was to subordinate its foreign policy to its arms policy, and the drive of arms manufacturers for profits had promoted that—a point he made with the help of a Weimar-era publication by Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt of the German League for Human Rights.70 In 1968 Kimminich was invited by the prominent political scientist Iring Fetscher to join the Working Group for Peace and Conflict Research, the West German chapter of the International Peace Research Association, and was elected its chairman.71 In 1969 Kimminich published International Law in the Atomic Age, a book on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968. He considered the treaty to be a step in the right direction if the nuclear powers moved toward disarmament, but not if the inequality that the treaty confirmed between the nuclear and non-nuclear states became entrenched over time.72 In 1974 he published a survey of international, European, and West German nuclear law to inform laypeople as well as jurists about a field he considered important for both

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peace research and environmentalism.73 Over the 1980s and into the 1990s, he was a frequent contributor to essay collections concerning peace research, typically producing overviews of how international law related to peace research, as in a collection of 1995 edited by Dieter Senghaas.74 Closely related to Kimminich’s work in peace research and refugees was his work on international humanitarian law and humanitarian intervention. This interested him as yet another arena in which the state could be decentered in international law. In his book International Humanitarian Law— Humanitarian Action (1972) he argued that international humanitarian law needed to develop beyond the Geneva Convention of 1949. Specifically, it needed to be reformulated to apply to cases where the classical inter-state war model did not apply, such as Biafra or East Pakistan. In such cases, he proposed that non-governmental organizations and other non-state actors be seen as partial subjects of international law.75 As his publications into the 1990s showed, Kimminich found the United Nations far preferable to unilateralism, even if the United Nations was little more than the sum of the states that voted in it.76 In 1980 he published a piece roundly rejecting the notion of “just war” in the age of the United Nations’ ban on aggressive war (Gewaltverbot).77 There he discussed the examples of various wars of national liberation and the Iranian Revolution. In the 1990s he used the same arguments to criticize the unilateralism of the United States during George H. W. Bush’s presidency. So-called humanitarian intervention was a “myth,” he claimed, because it was really war under another name, and was never permissible in international law. Only the United Nations could use military means to intervene for the sake of human rights.78 For Kimminich, threats to peace included not only the confrontation between the East and West blocs but also competition for scarce natural resources. Kimminich thus related peace research to his interest in environmental law, an area in which he published from 1972 on. One such publication, a book for a Christian lay audience, was Environmental Protection: Touchstone of the Rule of Law (1987).79 In it, he discussed how humans and their environment had reciprocal effects on each other that could be summed up as culture. One cultural product was law, and law in general rested on an underlying ethical consensus that he defined as religious (whether Christian or drawn from other religions). One specific legal cultural product, in turn, was the Rechtsstaat, or state based on the rule of law. The Rechtsstaat rested, he held, on a European and specifically German cultural consensus; indeed, like Laun, Kimminich saw the Rechtsstaat as above all a German cultural

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product.80 Its underlying ethical consensus needed to be strengthened, Kimminich contended in this book; a merely minimal cultural consensus was not adequate to the challenge of environmental protection. He therefore called for greater civic engagement.81 In the debate over environmental protection, the Rechtsstaat was caught between two sides: those who believed that environmentally damaging technology could solve everything, and so ought to override legal constraints, and those who believed that environmental protection was vital above all else, and so ought to override legal constraints. Kimminich’s position was that the environment’s fundamental importance to so many people meant that it had to be handled according to the rule of law. If the rule of law were breached there, the very Rechtsstaat itself would be fatally injured. Hence he called environmental protection the “touchstone of the rule of law.”82 “Human rights” was a frequent phrase in almost all of Kimminich’s writings, but in 1973 he placed human rights front and center in a book aimed at a general audience: Human Rights: Failure and Hope.83 In 1973 West Germany joined the United Nations simultaneously with East Germany.84 As with any diplomatic move that implied recognition of East Germany and therefore the acceptance of the loss of the Eastern Territories, the expellee lobby was nervous. Yet Kimminich chose not simply to bemoan this step in his human rights book. Rather, he attempted something both subtler and further reaching. His abstract and general remarks drew no explicit connection to the expellee issue, but the principles he discussed certainly did. He neither affirmed nor criticized West Germany’s accession to the United Nations and concomitant quasi-recognition of East Germany; instead, he posed a challenge to the state-like nature of the Germanies altogether, and looked to European unification as a way of overcoming the expellees’ fate. In this book, Kimminich offered the layperson a compact account of what human rights were and of the role that West Germany could play in Europe and the United Nations. He led the reader through a historical narrative in which asylum took pride of place as the first right that presumed nothing in return.85 Like Rudolf Laun, Kimminich emphasized continental and especially German contributions to the history of human rights. (However, where the Social Democrat Laun emphasized Martin Luther, the Catholic Kimminich emphasized South German constitutionalism in the early nineteenth century.) Kimminich’s historical narrative focused on the domestic importance of human rights. Human rights, he insisted, had to be embedded into every constitution (Verfassung, a term that, like the English word “constitu-

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tion,” carries the double meaning of legal form and society).86 Their importance was all too obvious given the recent experience of the Second World War.87 Right after the war, there had been an energetic optimism about innovations in international law to protect human rights, especially with regard to making the individual a fuller subject of international law.88 He called now for a revival of that idealism. Much remained to be done: the right of asylum, for example, was properly protected neither under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights nor under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.89 Kimminich stressed how incompletely human rights had been heretofore realized, not only in the world outside Europe but in Europe and in West Germany itself. He thereby pointed the reader to the importance of ongoing innovation. In the present day, Kimminich stressed, human rights were in danger worldwide, in every country, under every kind of regime. Like other human rights advocates of the 1960s and 1970s, such as members of West German Amnesty, he rejected the Cold War as a map to which states were violators of human rights. It was the state itself that was the threat.90 “It is undeniable that in East and West, in North and South, in industrialized countries and in developing countries, the gigantic machinery of the state apparatus, regardless of whether it works silently or with the clatter of machine guns, threatens human rights.”91 West Germany had a “model” system for protecting human rights, but human rights were endangered inside West Germany too.92 “Here [inside West Germany] . . . is where our task and our opportunity for the struggle for human rights at the global level begins.”93 No constitution could guarantee its own durability, and so everyone ought to be conscious of the “supra-positive validity” of human rights in the Basic Law. Only active citizens could sustain constitutionalism and democracy. The European Convention on Human Rights was the best human rights regime in the world, especially regarding the right of the individual to approach the European Court. But it was not enough—the next step ought to be inserting human rights into a European constitution.94 Like Laun, Kimminich saw human rights as the rights a person had when that person had no state or that person’s state had ceased to exist.95 Kimminich argued that persons who comprised only a portion of “a people” also held the right of self-determination, within, for example, a federal framework.96 And so Kimminich sought protection of human rights at another level than that of the state, and the process of European unification offered, to his mind, the greatest possibilities for innovation. Whether discussing refugees and asylum, peace, humanitarian intervention, environmental protection, or human rights generally in his various

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works, Kimminich kept the focus on the individual person or group left in the lurch, or even injured, by states. Such individuals or groups appeared in his texts without any context of politics or agency; rather, Kimminich depicted them as suffering individuals from whom the readers should not be emotionally distanced. Behind the legal term “refugee,” he reminded readers in The International Legal Status of the Refugee, was “a sea of misery, loneliness, and desperation, as well as some islands of bravery, determination, and hope.” The legal expert needed to know this, and “ought not to be ashamed of his knowledge and his sympathy.”97 Kimminich’s concluding sentences to his textbook on German constitutional history likewise spoke to readers’ emotions, this time with regard to the sufferings of Germans after the Second World War: “The pathos-filled cliché that this country bled from a thousand wounds should not allow us to forget that in reality blood can only flow out of human bodies. Pain, tears, and worries belong to the life of the individual. History is composed of individuals’ fates, even though these individual fates are embedded in institutions and norms. Precisely the collapse of 1945 and the years of want and misery that followed, during which the protective sheaths of numerous institutions were torn apart, allowed individual suffering to burst forth, clearly visible.”98 As this passage shows, it was important to Kimminich to step away from political or legal explanations and look through the eyes of the vulnerable, damaged person of the twentieth century. As this passage also shows, with its references to Germans in the years after 1945, the expellees’ suffering was foremost in his mind—something that emerges much more clearly in his other writings.

Volksgruppenrecht and the Right to a Homeland For Kimminich, the ethnic German expellee exemplified the vulnerable, damaged person of the twentieth century. This section takes up what Kimminich saw as his other main contributions to human rights law: the law of nationality groups (Volksgruppenrecht) and the right to a homeland (Recht auf die Heimat). It is this work that links him to völkisch and European politics of the far right. The term Volksgruppe requires comment. The terms “nationality” (Nationalität, Laun’s term) and “ethnic group” were of course available to Kimminich and other advocates of Volksgruppenrecht. Moreover, Kimminich’s usage of Volksgruppe was largely synonymous with Laun’s “nationality” in that both men sought to distinguish their term from “minority”

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(Minderheit), which they rejected.99 A nationality or Volksgruppe, they held, deserved its rights regardless of its numerical proportions, and it was not necessarily small if its members beyond a given state’s borders were taken into consideration. But by choosing the term Volksgruppe over nationality, Kimminich affiliated himself with the intellectual tradition of Max Hildebert Boehm, Hermann Raschhofer, and other interwar scholars of nationality politics who had supported völkisch and Nazi politics. The importance they placed on a distinction between the state, on the one hand, and the Volk (people) or Volksgruppe, on the other, was typical of Nazi social and legal thought.100 Kimminich and other post-1945 advocates of Volksgruppenrecht sought to rehabilitate that tradition and its terminology.101 This was not the tradition of Karl Renner, Otto Bauer, or even the early Laun. The basic arguments of Kimminich and other advocates of the Volksgruppenrecht project were as follows.102 First, the Volksgruppe was a natural entity, rather than a political or state-related one. Second, a given Volksgruppe had a particular, concrete tie to a particular territory. This tie perdured through time, could not be shared by others outside the Volksgruppe, and could not be shifted to a different territory. Third, the Volksgruppe was a rights-bearing subject in international law. As such, it and its members needed not only protection from discrimination as offered by documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also support through positive measures. Fourth, the Volksgruppe held a collective right to its homeland (Recht auf die Heimat), as did its members individually—an example of such a positive measure. Fifth, the Volksgruppe seeking to improve its condition while remaining inside a multinational state was to hold the right of self-determination, another example of a positive measure. Sixth, the right to the homeland entailed protection from the incursion of too many persons alien to the Volksgruppe into that territory (Überfremdung, or over-alienization).103 The Volksgruppenrecht project has seen some successes. For example, the Council of Europe passed the European Charter of Regional or Minority Languages (Europäische Charta der Regional- oder Minderheitensprachen) in 1992 that drew upon an older draft by Theodor Veiter, and it passed the Framework Agreement on the Protection of National Minorities (Rahmenübereinkommen zum Schutz nationaler Minderheiten) in 1995. Both have been in effect since 1998.104 For Kimminich, Volksgruppenrecht held the promise of developing a legal form for what he saw as the vital relationship between humans and space. A reformed international law, in addition to decentering the state as sole repre-

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sentative of the people within its borders and elevating the individual’s status at the international level, ought also to protect the individual “in his space, in the space that is appropriate to him, that belongs to him, that protects him, and that enables the full development of his humanity—in his homeland.”105 The new international law ought not to choose between a human who could speak only by letting the state of his citizenship speak for him (a state that might well also be his oppressor) and a human whose rights were internationally protected only as long as he was conceived of “as an individual without any relationships” (als bindungsloses Individuum).106 The individual in relation to specific space—the homeland—was the proper individual for the new international law. For Kimminich, of course, Sudeten Germans qualified fully as a Volksgruppe with an authentic homeland; were they to release that claim, they would stand on the “abyss of historical oblivion” (Abgrund der Geschichtslosigkeit).107 The individual person’s relationship to a specific territory was the subject of the book for which, outside of his asylum and refugee-related work, Kimminich is probably best known, The Right to a Homeland.108 As in the case of Rudolf Laun, a better translation would be “the right to one’s homeland,” because Kimminich emphasized that if this right were to be meaningful, it had to refer not to just any homeland (or state that would grant citizenship), but to the specific, unique homeland of a person or group.109 After all, the ethnic German expellees had automatic citizenship in West Germany, yet that did not change the fact that they had lost their homeland. Like all his major books, this one is clear, rich in detail, and mostly judicious. It has been widely cited and is considered the authoritative account of the concept by scholars both inside and outside expellee circles. In the book, Kimminich defined “homeland” as a “field of relationships” in which people interact with their environment and reciprocally affect and are affected by it, over time.110 “Homeland” had three components: a “people” (Volk), space, and time. He contrasted these with the three components considered to define a state: an ethnically non-specific “population” (Be­ völkerung), territory, and government. None of the latter, he stressed, were necessarily related to homeland.111 Like Laun, Kimminich emphasized that homeland was pre- or unpolitical—that is, not necessarily related to a state or to state power.112 And, like Laun, once Kimminich made the point that the homeland could be distinct from state power, he proceeded as if it were always distinct from state power. He was thereby able to ignore the power of the state to shape ethnic affiliation, one of his most tendentious moves.113

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Kimminich then examined the extent to which the right to a homeland already existed in international law. Over against Laun and others, he argued that it was not represented fully enough in existing documents to be considered valid now.114 Only bits and pieces were established: the right of option (Optionsrecht) provided in the Munich Agreement of 1938, which allowed inhabitants of a territory that became part of a different state to choose whether they wished to hold the old or new citizenship; the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals, which confirmed that forced resettlement was a violation of international law; the United Nations’ defense of Palestinians’ right to a homeland since 1948; the Refugee Convention of 1951; the Fourth Additional Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights of 1963, which forbade the expulsion of groups; and Article 13 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, which forbade expulsions of individuals.115 Not useful here, in Kimminich’s opinion, were the Genocide Convention of 1948, because it assumed an abstract individual unconnected to space, or refugee and asylum law in general, because it offered only a “juridical substitute for a homeland” (juristische Ersatzheimat).116 While the right to a homeland rested in important ways on individual rights that had been well articulated as norms since 1945, such as the individual’s right to affiliate with a group, the individual was still only a beneficiary rather than a bearer of positive rights in international law. Much, he noted, remained to be done.117 Yet the trend was positive, Kimminich claimed: jurists’ opinion, both in and out of Germany, was tending toward affirming the right to a homeland. Kimminich liked to emphasize non-German jurists’ support as he thought that would indicate the depoliticization and universalization of what was usually seen as the special pleading of the ethnic German expellees.118 Of special interest here was a questionnaire to jurists distributed by the Belgium-based Institut de droit international in 1950 on whether the forced expulsion provided for in the Potsdam Agreement was permissible in international law. In general, the results showed that as of 1950 forced resettlement was basically thought to be impermissible.119 However, the actual answers, even as Kimminich reported them, were ambivalent. The French jurist Georges Scelle was the only non-German to condemn outright expulsion in general and specifically the Potsdam Agreement, which permitted the expulsions of ethnic Germans.120 Even the author of the questionnaire, the Italian Giorgio Balledore Pallieri, answered that while forced resettlement was a violation of human rights, to ban it would impinge on states’ rights. He refused to answer the part about the Potsdam Agreement at all. For Balledore Pallieri, assimilation

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within the bounds set by the Genocide Convention had to be the answer.121 Kimminich was, of course, completely opposed to that interpretation. As with the right to a homeland, so also did Kimminich seek to show that Volksgruppenrecht in general had international, and not just German, support. Yet in fact the jurists promoting Volksgruppenrecht were almost entirely German and Austrian: Max Hildebert Boehm, Hermann Raschhofer, Theodor Veiter, Kurt Rabl, Fritz Münch, and Felix Ermacora, among others.122 For example, in an article in 1980 Kimminich claimed that interest in Volksgruppenrecht had “reawakened,” but his only evidence was a publication in 1977 by Theodor Veiter, an Austrian former Nazi who had been working more or less continuously on Volksgruppenrecht since 1945.123 Kimminich acknowledged that the very phrase “right to a homeland,” which was a well-known slogan of the expellee lobby, set off alarm bells for some West Germans. He was skillful at countering readers’ assumptions about what was völkisch. Sometimes he chose a rhetoric of distance from Nazism, proclaiming his deep revulsion for nationalism. Sometimes he claimed that a concept had become wrongly associated with Nazism in West Germans’ minds. Homeland (Heimat), for example, had not really been promoted by Nazis, he claimed; on the contrary, the Nazis had sought to destroy loyalties to homeland as part of their effort to atomize society. Indeed, Kimminich claimed, opposition to loyalties to the homeland was the hallmark of all totalitarian ideologies.124 At other times, he readily conceded the association of certain concepts, such as space (Raum), geopolitics (Geopolitik), or even “the law of ethnic groups” (Volksgruppenrecht) with Nazism, but then argued that the concepts were still valuable and should not be discarded because of those associations.125 Space, for example, deserved to be reclaimed from the “absurd blood-and-soil ideology” of the Nazis and from Carl Schmitt, its most prominent Nazi-era theorist. Kimminich argued that Schmitt’s “mythically exaggerated nomos [normative order] of the earth” ought to be replaced by a “nomos of humans” in a new international law that took seriously the relationships between space, time, and the person.126 Yet it was difficult for Kimminich to avoid citing West German scholars of space who had supported Nazism, such as Willy Hellpach or Hermann Raschhofer. They were arguably no better than Schmitt. One still did support Nazism: the jurist Fritz Münch ran for office in 1972 for the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, NPD).127 Kimminich apparently counted on his non-expellee readers’ ignorance of the background of such jurists. In his book Legal Problems of the Organization of Polyethnic

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States (1985), he mocked the notion that the term Volksgruppe carried any Nazi associations at all, then proceeded to cite Theodor Veiter repeatedly as he further discussed the term.128 Apparently he believed that readers outside his circle would not know Veiter’s history, and readers inside his circle would not consider that history any hindrance to valuing Veiter’s work. Kimminich’s book The Right to a Homeland focused on expulsion. Protection from expulsion was just one component of the larger framework of Volksgruppenrecht, which concerned the rights of ethnic groups whether they were threatened with forced migration or not. Kimminich laid out that larger framework in his book Legal Problems of the Organization of Polyethnic States (1985), which appeared in a series edited by a Catholic commission on development and peace.129 This book was his main effort to take Volksgruppenrecht into the mainstream. In it, he claimed that the terms “ethnic group” (which he now insisted was perfectly translatable with the term Volksgruppe) and “polyethnic” avoided the problems of terms such as “minority.” He then laid out his argument, familiar from elsewhere in his works, about the lack of fit between ethnic groups and the state in which they lived, the right of self-determination held by “peoples” and “ethnic groups” (Völker and Volksgruppen), and the stability promised by embedding polyethnic states within supra-strate structures such as the European Union. As for the politically electric issue of recent immigrants, Kimminich stated that either as resident foreigners they would enjoy human rights but no minority or ethnic group rights, or else they would gain citizenship and then constitute yet another ethnic group in the polyethnic state, with group rights. He pointed out that they might indeed endanger another group’s language or cultural environment, but then so might any other ethnic group. The polyethnic state would then have to intervene with legal measures to protect the cultural rights of an ethnic group that was seeing itself overwhelmed by outsiders who refused to assimilate.130 The reader can now see that the highly controversial issues of foreign immigration and asylum since the 1980s in West and unified Germany were to be tamed, on Kimminich’s model, by reliance on the de facto situation that few of these immigrants ever gained citizenship. And even if recent immigrants did gain citizenship, the more established groups could claim protection against their new fellow citizens’ cultural incursions. (To be accurate, an established group could claim protection against any other group’s incursion, whether that group consisted of other Germans, Europeans, or of non-Europeans.) That is apparently how he reconciled his strong support for asylum rights with

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his support for the Volksgruppenrecht project with its legal framework to prevent “over-alienization.” Kimminich makes clear in his works on Volksgruppenrecht that refugees holding the right of asylum could not lay the same claims to space as indigenous ethnic groups (Volksgruppen).131 The “right to a homeland” was simply not available to all people or groups where they now lived. The most disturbing element of Volksgruppenrecht is its privileging of certain groups of people—those who have, for Kimminich, an authentic homeland—over other people who also live or would like to live in the same area but cannot claim an authentic relationship to it. Kimminich and his colleagues naturalized the Volksgruppe, then valorized it to an extreme extent. That is, they made the Volksgruppe the basis for everything, or almost everything, about the social existence of its individual members. This made the Volksgruppe appear closed, or racialized, that is, imagined as a race. Given the great formal importance that they wished to grant the Volksgruppe in international law, it is problematic that they failed to explain, or even indicate the importance of, questions such as how one may enter a Volksgruppe, who the arbiters of membership may be, or how much assimilation or other change was acceptable. Such answers are inherently political, not natural. Bemoaning the loss of the idealism that had inspired postwar European unification in an article on Volksgruppenrecht in 1990, Kimminich exclaimed indignantly that “Europe is more than a free trade zone, an economic space, a playground for economic forces. It is the homeland of peoples and nationalities (Völker und Volksgruppen) whose historical actions created this Europe in the first place . . ., the genuine sources of strength for this continent.”132 Some people had priority over others. Some had a genuine homeland, while others merely lived somewhere in legal and economic terms—in space, yet not attached to it. For the historian of modern Germany and of anti-Semitism more generally, such passages contain coded language regarding Jews and their supposedly lesser authenticity as Germans or Europeans. How did Kimminich describe Jews, who had such a famous presence in the Bohemian lands, and who were so commonly depicted by anti-Semites as lacking a homeland or living purely through economic relations? In a speech to the Witiko League, we find one of his relatively rare mentions of Jews—though even here he does not use the word “Jew.” Before this audience he was not concerned about camouflaging any special pleading for the expellees. His narration of the relationship of Jews to the Sudeten German community was a classic piece of far-right innuendo. “One may not of course

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omit to mention,” he writes, “that there was also a small group of Germanspeaking intellectuals and artists living in Prague, who did not so much have ties to the fate of the Sudeten Germans, as embody, rather, the cosmopolitan type of old Austria.” So far he had certainly simplified the history of Bohemian Jews, who of course lived throughout the Bohemian lands, but not falsified it. And while “cosmopolitan” was certainly a code word for Jews, he had not so far maligned them. The next part of his narration, however, depicted Bohemian Jews as traitors to the Sudeten Germans: “The cultural achievements of this special group of Germans should not be underestimated. However, considering them to be part of Sudeten Germandom was always problematic, and not because many of them emigrated in March 1939. Many opponents of National Socialism also had to emigrate from the genuinely Sudeten German settlement areas, without for that reason leaving the community of fate of the Sudeten Germans.”133 The passage ends abruptly there. By suggesting that Bohemian Jews abandoned a community of fate, he was ignoring, and thereby distorting, basic facts such as the strong support for Nazism among Bohemian Germans, and the centrality of murderous anti-Semitism to Nazism. Here, he simply refused to grapple with basic facts and relationships in history. It was this very habit of expellee organizations that so enraged the International League for Human Rights, West German Amnesty, the Humanist Union, and other organizations that embraced political education about the Nazi past as a form of human rights advocacy. Kimminich was a sincere and deeply knowledgeable user of both the language of human rights and that of völkisch hierarchy. Yet he obviously knew well which language would offer the most convincing formulations. Speaking of the “furious reactions” elicited by the concept of the right to a homeland in recent years, he concluded The Right to a Homeland with an exhortation to his readers in the language of human rights: If it is unmistakably clear that expulsions violate international law and that even resettlement treaties may only be concluded if they correspond to the will of those affected, if the right of self-determination has been proven to be a genuine legal norm and no mere principle, if currently valid international law continues to uphold the instrument of minority and ethnic group protection, if deportations are banned even in wartime, why should one not be allowed to say that from the point of view of international law every human has the right to remain in his homeland? What would a world look like in which this right were not recognized?134

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Like human rights advocates and like the expellee lobby, Kimminich viewed law as a political strategy. As he put it, “The legalization of great political problems [makes possible] their solution.”135 At the same time, legalization need not dilute political commitment in his view: “knowledge and memory” remain, and “an author’s commitment to one or the other side has nothing to do with the truth content of his scholarly arguments.”136 Now that we have a detailed portrait of Kimminich both as an important and respected advocate of human rights, especially refugee and asylum rights, and as an advocate of Volksgruppenrecht and the “right to one’s homeland,” it is time to turn to that which makes him distinctive: the fact that he bridged those two arenas in West German human rights advocacy. Other figures close to the expellee lobby shared Kimminich’s ideas on Volksgruppenrecht, but Kimminich spoke to a much broader audience than they did. He brought ideas of “German human rights” into what became, over the 1970s, the most prominent usage of the language of human rights: work on behalf of foreigners, particularly those who were geographically and/or culturally distant from Germans and other Europeans. Kimminich belonged to a distinctively West German kind of human rights advocacy, strongly shaped by German circumstances.

Otto Kimminich in West German Human Rights Advocacy Otto Kimminich has been the indispensable expert on refugee and asylum rights, and a respected scholar in other areas, for human rights advocates in West and unified Germany. While the fact that his publications have ceased with his death in 1997 will no doubt mean fewer future citations, it is still true today that virtually any German-language book on refugee and asylum rights cites his work, and does so positively. This concluding section highlights some examples of his positive reception among people who were connected neither to the expellee lobby nor to Kimminich’s politics, but rather to West German Amnesty and Terre des Femmes, organizations that appear in this book as supposedly rival forums for elaborating human rights. As I describe these people, it is not my goal to put them or their organizations into ideological boxes. Organizations such as Amnesty International, the Humanist Union, and Terre des Femmes would be the first to insist on the diversity of opinion among their members. My goal is, rather, to show how Kimminich and his ideas fit into multiple human-rights-related contexts, and to show how fully

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integrated Kimminich was in human rights advocacy for non-Germans, the fourth usage of human rights. His work is deeply interwoven with human rights legal work in West and unified Germany, and it has been and will continue to be used by people with very different political goals than his own. In 1978, when West Germany’s liberal asylum law was once again the target of legislative reform aimed at reducing the number of persons to be granted asylum, West German Amnesty published a volume of essays on the theory and practice of asylum rights in West Germany. Kimminich was invited to supply a chapter on the history of asylum.137 It appeared alongside two essays by Reinhard Marx, an entirely different political individual who helped assemble the volume. Marx belonged at that time to West German Amnesty’s board and specialized in work with refugees. In the 1980s he wrote a dissertation on the politics of asylum rights with Erhard Denninger, a professor of public law who was a longtime board member of the Humanist Union. In 1983 Reinhard Marx opened a law practice devoted to asylum, citizenship, and residency issues, and the same year he also embarked on a four-year term as chairman of West German Amnesty. He has also held other high-level posts in Amnesty International.138 Marx is exemplary of leftist and liberal human rights activists. A second example comes from after the unification of Germany in 1990. Once again, asylum law was at the forefront of political debate, and once again, left, liberal, and anti-racist activists assembled texts intended to insert facts and alternatives into the often demagogic and xenophobic public debate. The backdrop to this public debate was racist violence. In 1991, for example, a murderous attack on a hostel for asylum applicants in Hoyerswerda horrified many Germans and cheered the far right. In 1992 Namo Aziz, a Kurdish journalist who had lived in West Germany since the early 1980s, edited a volume entitled Foreign in a Cold Country: Foreigners in Germany.139 Along with an essay by Kimminich on asylum law in Germany and the European Union, the volume included essays by the political scientist Bassam Tibi, Germany’s most noted expert on Islam in Europe; the journalist Heribert Prantl, one of the most principled and outspoken defenders of those targeted by racism and xenophobia in the German media (and later a board member of the Humanist Union); and the Turkish German journalist and feminist Ayşe Tekin. The same year, 1992, German asylum law was reformed to greatly restrict the possibility of successful application—very much against the wishes of all these contributors. A third example stems likewise from the early 1990s. The asylum debate

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had become thoroughly intertwined with a debate over whether and how Germany was to be a “land of immigration” (Einwanderungsland). Klaus J. Bade, a historian of migration and a public intellectual whose interventions have emphasized the de facto ethnic diversity of Germany’s population and the importance of migration in the German past as well as in its future, edited a book entitled The Manifesto of the 60.140 Its centerpiece was a brief manifesto calling for constructive discussion of migration policy and opposing xenophobia. It was signed by sixty public figures. Accompanying the manifesto were numerous brief essays. Kimminich not only signed the manifesto but had also helped write it and he contributed a two-part essay on minority and ethnic rights to the volume.141 A fourth example, from 1999, is typical of the numerous citations to Kimminich’s work in the literature on asylum. Such citations are so common— indeed, a German-speaking author would be remiss not to quote and use Kimminich—that it would be pointless to list them. I mention this one because it shows a link to another generally left-liberal human rights group, Terre des Femmes, that is also the subject of Chapter 5. Terre des Femmes was founded in part to seek the recognition of gender-specific grounds for asylum. In the wake of the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s, the German sociologist Barbara Laubenthal published a book on rape in wartime as grounds for asylum that made use of Kimminich’s scholarship. Terre des Femmes sponsored the book’s publication and Christa Stolle, the chairwoman of Terre des Femmes, added a foreword. In it, Laubenthal showed how the German asylum law held that the general effects of war (such as rape) did not constitute grounds for asylum, thereby ruling out wartime rape as gender-specific grounds for asylum; she called for reform.142 A final example returns to Kimminich’s own academic field of international law, and indicates how much had changed since the early 1950s, when the German Society for International Law was discreetly quashing Rudolf Laun’s polemics. During the intervening years, international law scholars close to the expellee lobby were active in writing much of the German-language international law literature on human rights.143 By the 1980s at the latest expulsion, asylum, and human rights had become important topics of international law by international consensus. In this context, the ideas of Kimminich and other advocates of the right to a homeland and Volksgruppenrecht were taken seriously by international lawyers of the top rank, such as Christian Tomuschat. Tomuschat is probably best known to human rights activists and scholars as the rapporteur to the U.N. Human Rights Commission on Guatemala, and

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then chairperson of Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification.144 The United Nations mandated this commission as part of peace negotiations to end Guatemala’s civil war in the mid-1990s. A longtime professor on one of West Germany’s best law faculties, at Bonn University, Tomuschat was one of just a few West Germans who held high-level posts in the United Nations. He was a member of the U.N. Human Rights Committee (which monitored compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) and the U.N. International Law Commission (which promoted the codification of international law).145 Membership in both of these bodies depended on the highest degree of internationally recognized legal work and integrity. In the former capacity especially, he became deeply acquainted with nonGerman cases of expulsion and the claim to a right of return (concerning for example Indians in the Americas, Palestinians, and Afghans). Tomuschat is a specialist in human rights and has worked on several topics reviewed in this chapter and Chapter 2, such as the right to self-determination.146 Like millions of other West Germans, Tomuschat (b. 1936) experienced flight westward as a child at the end of the Second World War—in his case, from Stettin in West Pomerania (today Szczecin, Poland). He was obviously familiar with the plight of the German refugees and expellees, but there was no discernible connection between him and the Volksgruppenrecht project; on the contrary, he has criticized it. Tomuschat was a supporter of the League of Expellees’ proposed Center against Forced Migration, but that is also true of numerous other public figures who are unconnected to the expellee lobby.147 Tomuschat was well positioned to articulate the international consensus regarding which topics were important in international law, and he clearly considered the right to a homeland to belong to that consensus. He examined group rights and the right to a homeland in several publications over the 1980s. In those publications, he did not agree with everything Kimminich wrote, but he took Kimminich’s arguments seriously.148 Over against Kimminich, Fritz Münch, Theodor Veiter, Felix Ermacora, and others who favored positive rights for linguistic and ethnic minorities, Tomuschat insisted that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights offered real and adequate protection for individuals and their groups. Its Article 27 effectively protected individuals from the pressures of assimilation to majority culture, he held, and so it was not necessary to grant positive rights to groups.149 Tomuschat also wrote about the right to a homeland, arguing that it was a human right currently valid in international law, and that the expulsions of the ethnic Germans had been illegal according to the law of war already in 1945. How-

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ever, he noted, today’s advocates of the right to a homeland wished to based that right on the right to self-determination, and the latter right had only solidified in the decades after 1945. “Events from the Second World War era or from the decade following the war’s end cannot be measured with the criteria that have developed only in the recent past, in the United Nations’ practice.”150 In 1995 he wrote a legal opinion (Rechtsgutachten) for the Alliance 90/Green Party on the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans that concluded that the expulsions and confiscations were illegal according to international law at the time, but that individuals were not entitled to make claims. Rather, their state, Germany, was the proper entity to make claims against the Czech Republic. The expellees were entitled to compensation from Germany, and no one’s rights would be violated by the Final Declaration (Schlussstricherklärung) between Germany and the Czech Republic that was then under negotiation.151 Right down the line, Tomuschat disagreed with Kimminich’s favored concepts and argumentation—yet Tomuschat seriously engaged them. In contrast to Laun’s last years, we see that these concepts and arguments were now part of the international law profession’s international consensus regarding which topics were important in West Germany and beyond. Tomuschat had to engage Kimminich and other Volksgruppenrecht scholars, given their prominence in the human rights subfield of international law in West Germany and given his own extensive expertise in expulsion and abuse of minorities in non-German contexts. Through the elaboration of asylum rights, Kimminich was part of laying the foundation for the fourth usage of the language of human rights in West Germany: human rights violations as the suffering of distant others. By the 1980s, refugee and asylum rights had come to be associated primarily with millions of people in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who had lived as refugees for decades, and whose numbers had only grown.152 These seemingly permanent refugees have become the most prominent victims of human rights violations and targets of international efforts at aid, and around them there took place a historically novel conflation of humanitarian concerns with human rights.153 Indeed, Germans’ expellee and refugee experience informed the emergence of West German humanitarianism and of commitment to cultural group rights in ways other than what this chapter has traced. For example, the early church-based agencies for humanitarianism abroad, the Catholic Misereor (founded in 1958) and the Protestant Bread for the World (Brot für die Welt, founded in 1959) made reference to Germans’ suffering as a source of understanding for distant sufferers, as well as to

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Germans’ duty to assist sufferers after the horrific destruction Germany unleashed in the Second World War.154 The earliest human rights organization to focus on the human rights of non-Germans and to be founded completely by West Germans (as Amnesty International was not) was the Society for Threatened Peoples. It originated in 1968 as the Aktion Biafra-Hilfe to call attention to Nigeria’s war in the breakaway region of Biafra as a case of genocide, to highlight the human right of self-determination for Biafrans, and to raise funds for emergency relief.155 In 1970 one of the founders of that group, Tilman Zülch, initiated a new organization, the Society for the Life and Future of Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für Leben und Zukunft bedrohter Völker), since 1975 shortened to the Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker), with the mission of defending oppressed minorities in general.156 Zülch has made reference to his own experience as a child expellee from the Sudetenland, something that entered into the awareness of the German public at the latest in 2003, when Zülch won the Human Rights Prize of the Sudeten German Homeland Society (Menschenrechtspreis der Sudeten­deutschen Landsmannschaft).157 The Society for Threatened Peoples supported cultural group rights and specifically the European Charter of Regional Minority Languages and the Framework Agreement on the Protection of National Minorities discussed above in the context of Volksgruppenrecht.158 The other major humanitarian organization to have originated inside West Germany, Cap Anamur, was founded in 1979 by Rupert Neudeck, a man who likewise invoked his own childhood suffering as a refugee from East Prussia fleeing the Red Army as an explanation for his activism.159 So important was that association for Neudeck that he expressed concern about how strong the German humanitarian impulse would remain after his generation, the last to have immediate experience of wartime hunger and flight, was gone.160 Zülch and Neudeck were politically very different from Otto Kimminich; they both, for instance, foregrounded their own intense consciousness of the Nazi past and the particular responsibility they derived from that consciousness to remain vigilant about genocides and other war-related suffering since 1945. There is, in short, nothing archaic about Otto Kimminich’s concerns; they have remained current in human rights circles in Germany up to the present day. The Yugoslavian wars in the 1990s re-posed the problem of minorities and the emergency of genocide, this time much closer to Germany. The Yugoslavian wars and the intensified discussion of Germany’s own minorities, especially Turkish and non-Turkish Muslims, converted some who had been skeptical to the cause of cultural group rights. This is reflected in, for instance,

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the memoirs of the journalist and Social Democratic politician Freimut Duve. Duve was a key figure in the history of Third World solidarity work in West and unified Germany, a longtime editor of the rororo aktuell series of the Rowohlt publishing house, and a supporter of the Society for Threatened Peoples. It was through the rororo aktuell series that many West Germans learned about apartheid, asylum, neo-colonialism, development, and human rights. Duve argued for the importance of recognizing minorities as a permanent feature of political life in Germany as well as elsewhere, and explored ideas of cultural group rights that the left, his own political home, had long downplayed or rejected.161 Even as he drew attention to the lasting importance of group rights, which he believed a multicultural Germany ought to respect, he also sought to preserve individual rights, including the individual’s right to exit a minority. To make this point, he invoked the figure of the Turkish girl in Germany, who was subject to one set of rules in her home and to another in her wider German society: “a young girl of eighteen years who wants to get rid of the strict rules of her Turkish family must stand under the protection of the state when she wishes to leave her group.”162 Through this highly particular gendered and raced figure, Duve and others explored the problem of how individual rights ought to relate to group rights. The Turkish or Muslim girl living in Germany, along with the African girl facing genital cutting, became objects of human rights advocacy in West and unified Germany because they were, for West and unified Germans, the limit cases for respect for cultural integrity. These figures were prominent among those engaged in human rights advocacy on behalf of foreigners. While this fourth usage may seem quite different from the usages that referred primarily to Germans—against Nazis, against communists, and on behalf of expellees—it too is best approached through human rights advocates’ preoccupations with themselves and their domestic contexts. This is a story taken up in the next chapter.

Chapter 5

Human Rights for Women across Cultural Lines: Terre des Femmes

The organization Terre des Femmes: Human Rights for Women (Terre des Femmes: Menschenrechte für die Frau) was founded by West German feminists in 1981 to “oppose any form of human rights violations committed against women” and to help victims of “mistreatment, persecution, and exploitation on the basis of belonging to the female sex.”1 In spite of this open-ended mission, the organization has always focused on wrongs suffered by non-German women, both in and out of Germany. Two of its major concerns controversially highlight cultural difference and can even sensationalize it: female genital cutting and honor violence.2 All of its areas of concern involve the crossing of either international borders or the crossing of cultural lines inside Germany, and its members consider the distinctiveness of Terre des Femmes to reside in that international scope. In addition to female genital cutting and honor violence, it has worked on forced marriage, sex tourism, trafficking in women, and exploitative labor conditions, among other issues. Terre des Femmes is probably best known today for its advocacy for women of immigrant, often Muslim Turkish or Kurdish, communities inside Germany. This chapter discusses the contexts from which Terre des Femmes emerged, the reasons why its members chose to use the language of human rights, how they came to focus their work on those two concerns, and their

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debates regarding ethnocentrism in their work. From the beginning, members sought to avoid ethnocentrism by linking the predicaments of African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Latin American women with those of German and European women, and they aimed some of their projects at German women. The organization therefore sought to defend the human rights of Germans and non-Germans simultaneously. It did not take on human rights violations suffered by Germans and non-Germans generally, however, but rather those affecting specifically women. That is, it defended the human rights of German women, but only as women, not as Germans. Moreover, unlike most of the other individuals or organizations discussed in this book, Terre des Femmes had very little to say about German history.3 The claim of a common predicament of women in a patriarchal world underpinned its activism. Continuing controversy over the social and political implications of Germany’s now considerable Muslim and other minorities has helped keep Terre des Femmes in the spotlight. Terre des Femmes embraces the de facto ethnic diversity of German society and defends immigrants’ rights. At the same time, it rejects notions of multiculturalism that relativize individual rights. Some prominent figures who have been associated with the organization, such as the Turkish German lawyer Seyran Ateş, are well known for the argument that excepting Turkish Germans from German legal expectations amounts to reverse racism. (Ateş also criticizes Germans for failing to develop a truly multicultural society, something that must be a two-way street, not the one-way assimilation many Germans have expected.4) Like Ateş, Terre des Femmes prizes what it sees as the universal values enshrined in the Basic Law and in international human rights documents. It has worked to make West and unified German constitutional rights accessible to all women living in Germany, regardless of their citizenship status or background. In this respect, it is similar to the Humanist Union, and indeed it seeks to function as a civil liberties organization for women who live in minority subcultures in Germany and/or without full German citizenship. To Terre des Femmes’s supporters, that means extending the best that Germany has produced to those who need it. To its critics, that means imposing an unreflected, specifically German set of notions on others and depicting other cultures as inherently violent and inferior. Its linkage of honor violence with Muslim families and communities tends, in these critics’ eyes, to describe Muslims as inherently violent.5 And it is controversial to label female genital cutting as violence at all.6 Terre des Femmes is located in the very midst of struggles in which feminism appears to be pitted against multiculturalism.7

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The feminist question of commonalities and differences among women has run like a red thread throughout Terre des Femmes’s history. Members of Terre des Femmes have had regularly to justify to themselves and to others their emphasis on female genital cutting and honor violence. They have discussed the extent to which those practices were related to forms of violence against women typical for Europe. Were honor violence and female genital cutting uniquely awful manifestations of patriarchy, and were the women suffering them unusually vulnerable? Or were those practices basically similar to other violent practices done to women in Europe, and their victims not so very different from European women regarding the potential to self-organize and resist patriarchy?8 If the latter were the case, then what justified European women’s imperial feminist interference in these easily sensationalized areas of Middle Eastern and African women’s lives? These were questions that members of Terre des Femmes debated from the organization’s inception, and struggles inside the organization over cultural relativism, ethnocentrism, and racism were sometimes bitter.9 This chapter situates Terre des Femmes among the four West German social movements that were its most important sources of inspiration and membership. These were postcolonial humanitarianism; second-wave feminism or “the new women’s movement” (die neue Frauenbewegung), as it is usually called in Germany; civil rights activism for foreigners and binational families; and the Third World solidarity movement. Each of these movements partook of transnational networks, but each also displayed specifically West German preoccupations. Postcolonial humanitarianism belongs to a history as yet barely written of Germany as a postcolonial society.10 Secondwave feminism in Germany entailed a discovery or rediscovery of the antifeminist policies of the Third Reich and therefore the positioning of German women among Nazism’s victims. The civil rights activism for biracial and binational families was closely related to the work that Erich Lüth had done in the 1950s regarding everyday prejudice in West Germany. The Third World solidarity movement was an important arena for the German left to define itself against French, British, and U.S. imperialism while distinguishing itself from Nazi-era sentiment against those countries. By the 1980s the movement was broadly accessible to West Germans through fair-trade “Third World stores” (Dritte-Welt-Läden) and coverage in the alternative newspaper die tageszeitung, founded in 1978, as well as its own periodicals. The emergence of Terre des Femmes should also be seen in the context of the Green Party, which first entered the West German parliament in 1983. Terre des Femmes

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shared many specific issues with these movements and the Green Party, and also shared basic principles such as nonviolence and grass-roots democracy (Basisdemokratie) inside organizations. Terre des Femmes cannot, however, be folded into any of those movements. Its use of the language of human rights has meant that it has remained politically open-ended, and like the Humanist Union its members display a wide range of political persuasions. For Terre des Femmes, “human rights” allowed it to do several things. Members wanted to confront the human rights establishment of the 1970s and 1980s with the issue of violations specific to women that did not fit the norm that was by default masculine. As their earliest publicity materials stated: “In contrast to the numerous human rights organizations already in existence, which deal not at all, or only marginally, with repressions directed at women qua women, Terre des Femmes takes precisely this as its task. The human and women’s rights set down in international agreements—above all in the U.N.’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women of 18 December 1979—must and can be secured only through action in solidarity by women themselves.”11 Reference to women’s human rights helped constitute women as a global group that had in common its specific rights violations. Members also referred to human rights to counter cultural relativism. Cultural relativism was the most prominent method of explaining away violations suffered by women as an expected, if regrettable, fact of life. Terre des Femmes’s members used human rights to confront the cultural relativism to be found in the New Left and in Third World solidarity movements, where national liberation movements and postcolonial regimes only slowly came to be criticized.12 They also wished to lend feminism the credibility of human rights, itself a widely received cause by the late 1970s—to help legitimize feminism in men’s and women’s eyes. Finally, members of Terre des Femmes used the language of human rights because they believed that it helped to defend them against accusations of ethnocentrism, racism, or neocolonialism as they pursued their work on the highly controversial issues of female genital cutting and honor violence. For them, human rights was a valuable language of anti-racism. To appreciate why they were so committed to opposing female genital cutting and honor violence, let us turn to the story of Terre des Femmes’s emergence, especially as its founder has narrated it. On various anniversary celebrations of its foundation in 1981, Terre des Femmes has invited its founder, the Hamburg journalist Ingrid Staehle, to speak about the group’s origins.13 The accounts that Staehle provided on these occasions resembled

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the foundation myths of other human rights and humanitarian organizations: a conscientious person comes across a media account of oppression and cannot rest until she has taken action.14 Speaking at those events, Staehle traced her motivation to found Terre des Femmes to three elements: her feminist convictions, female genital cutting, and honor violence.15 She pinpointed the moment when she went into action as early 1981, when she read an article in Brigitte, a popular West German women’s magazine. This article described Middle Eastern women subjected to honor violence, that is, abuse or murder at the hands of family members for having dishonored the family with a love affair, or even for having been the victim of incest.16 The article in Brigitte disturbed Staehle so much, she recalled, that she contacted an activist mentioned in the article, Edmond Kaiser. Kaiser was a French humanitarian living in Switzerland, and the work of his new organization, Sentinelles, was profiled in the article. Sentinelles arranged refuge with volunteer families in European countries for individual Middle Eastern women fleeing honor violence. Staehle was not the only reader who contacted Kaiser; numerous other women from West Germany, France, Belgium, and elsewhere did so in the wake of that and similar media items. Kaiser invited them to a meeting at his home in Lausanne, Switzerland in May 1981. At that meeting, Kaiser and these visitors discussed strategies for combating honor violence. At that point, he was intent on obtaining official refugee status for the women whom Sentinelles was sheltering in Europe. He had repeatedly, but fruitlessly, written to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and other officials. Ingrid Staehle suggested that it should be possible to seek political asylum on grounds of persecution related to one’s sex. That is, “sex” ought to be added to the grounds for political asylum already specified in the U.N. Refugee Convention of 1951, which were “race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” Kaiser, she recalled, enthusiastically agreed with her.17 The group in Lausanne also discussed strategies for combating female genital cutting, which was also on the agenda of Sentinelles. Kaiser had first learned of the practice from Ainsi soit-elle, a book by the French feminist Benoîte Groult that was published in 1975 that will be discussed below.18 He was infuriated by the reluctance of the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO) to take a stand against female genital cutting.19 In 1977 Kaiser and Groult joined forces to hold a press conference to publicize the issue and pressure the WHO to prioritize it.20 Ingrid Staehle, as it happened, had also first learned about female genital cutting from Groult’s book. She

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had first been alerted to Kaiser’s name and humanitarian work by the press coverage of Groult and Kaiser’s press conference of 1977.21 While the article in Brigitte in 1981 may have been the immediate spur to Staehle’s foundation of Terre des Femmes, then, her preoccupations with these issues obviously predated 1981. While in Lausanne, and at Kaiser’s urging, Staehle decided to found an organization in West Germany based on the Sentinelles model. She coined the name Terre des Femmes as a feminist version of the name of Kaiser’s old organization, Terre des Hommes, for which he was best known. (Kaiser had broken with Terre des Hommes, in part because of its reluctance to prioritize female genital cutting.) Her subtitle, Human Rights for Women, she recalled, seemed fitting for an organization that was planning to speak to the United Nations.22 Staehle returned to Hamburg, where she and twelve other women drew up statutes in July 1981. Other founding members included Barbara Hamaidia, an activist for foreigners’ rights and binational families, and Herta Haas, who had been independently researching female genital cutting since 1979, when she had read an article about it in one of West Germany’s daily newspapers and then read Groult’s book Ainsi soit-elle.23 Within a few months almost one hundred people had joined the new organization.24 Staehle and Hamaidia registered Terre des Femmes as a non-profit organization in October 1981 and accepted its first donation: one thousand marks from the television journalist Inge von Bönninghausen.25 Only six months had elapsed since Staehle had first read the Brigitte article about honor violence. Staehle was not the first to publicize female genital cutting in West Germany from a feminist point of view. Two feminist periodicals, Emma and Courage, had published articles on it in 1977 and 1978.26 Yet another early member of Terre des Femmes, Tobe Levin, an American scholar of literature living in Germany, first learned about female genital cutting from Emma.27 Levin formed a group in Munich that sought to channel the outrage those articles in Emma had elicited from readers. In 1979 she and another member of that Munich group, Ingrid Braun, produced the earliest West German feminist publication on female genital cutting.28 Levin’s contribution to that book relied heavily on Groult. Their group was not able to sustain itself, however. There were other similar efforts to start organizations, including an organization to be discussed below, Amnesty for Women, and there are more such organizations in Germany today. In the 1980s, however, only Terre des Femmes proved able to solve the tasks required for the perdurance of a human rights organization. It was not easy for it to do so.

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Staehle and the other early members of Terre des Femmes were able to capture the outrage of those who had read press items on female genital cutting and honor violence. Staehle worked ceaselessly to publicize her new organization, writing and placing articles on honor violence and female genital cutting in over one hundred national and regional West German newspapers during 1981.29 She also petitioned the European Parliament to sponsor a resolution that the Refugee Convention be revised to include “sex” and that European Community countries meanwhile interpret the convention such that women would be one kind of protected “social group.”30 Hamaidia and the other original members fielded inquiries from the public and disseminated Terre des Femmes’s aims. Anyone who wrote to Terre des Femmes after reading one of Staehle’s press articles received an information packet intended to be helpful in setting up a local chapter.31 These newly founded chapters were to develop their own particular themes for activism. Staehle relied on the independent initiative of new members for the organization’s growth. The tremendous energy of this new organization did not appear in a vacuum. Among its contexts were three contemporary forms of activism: postcolonial humanitarianism; second-wave feminism; and the civil rights activism of foreign residents and binational families. Terre des Femmes drew from all three at its inception, and when Terre des Femmes faltered in the mid-1980s a fourth context of feminist Third World solidarity work revived it. The following pages explore these contexts in some depth, as they help us reconstruct how early members of Terre des Femmes received the issues of female genital cutting and honor violence.

Postcolonial Humanitarianism, Second-Wave Feminism, and Binational Families’ Civil Rights Activism in the Foundation of Terre des Femmes With Edmond Kaiser, Staehle encountered a leading representative of a phenomenon that had become prominent in the 1970s: postcolonial humanitarianism. Modern humanitarianism is characterized by the invocation of religious ethics or analogous secular ethical imperative; an emphasis on spontaneity and immediacy; the rejection of geographical proximity, strategic politics, or cost-benefit calculus as decisive factors; and the valorization of the activist’s emotional response.32 Humanitarians, like human rights advocates, have been skeptical of states’ claims to sovereignty, posing their own counterclaims, such as morality, to authorize their interventions. Post-

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colonial humanitarians in general and Edmond Kaiser in particular shared these characteristics. Specific to postcolonial humanitarians was their work in countries that had recently become independent amid the Cold War. Over against the proliferation of new state sovereignties between the 1950s and the 1970s, postcolonial humanitarians challenged state sovereignty and even the legitimacy of the state altogether. Perhaps the best-known postcolonial humanitarians were the French anti-totalitarian “new philosophers” of the 1970s around Bernard Kouchner, a founder of Doctors without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières). They launched a vehement critique against Third Worldism (tiersmondisme), rejecting the justification of violence in the name of revolutionary or development projects and legitimizing their own interventions in the name of a self-consciously non-political humanitarian impulse. The cases of Biafra and later the Vietnamese “boat people” exemplified their critique. While parts of the left had denounced U.S. imperialism in Vietnam and supported the victory of the North Vietnamese, after the war media audiences were confronted with the “boat people,” tens of thousands of suffering and dying refugees seeking to escape communist Vietnam. Kouchner and others announced that they now chose non-ideological criteria for the expression of their solidarity.33 This was a maneuver that extended back to the existentialists, especially Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and as we have seen in the case of West German Amnesty, it was a powerfully convincing one in the context of the Cold War. Postcolonial humanitarianism as part of antitotalitarian and state critique took hold in West Germany as well. Exemplars include Tilman Zülch, the founder of the Society for Threatened Peoples in 1968-70, and Rupert Neudeck, the founder of Cap Anamur in 1979. Neudeck has written extensively about Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus as influences on his own humanitarianism.34 Edmond Kaiser was a practitioner of postcolonial humanitarianism years before Kouchner or Neudeck, having begun work in wartime Algeria in 1960. Kaiser (1914-2000) was strongly affected by his experiences of Nazism and the Second World War, decolonization, and the Cold War. Born in Paris to a Jewish family, he lived in Switzerland in his youth. In 1941 his young son died in a household accident, an event to which he ascribed his later humanitarian work for children. At the time, he returned to Paris to work in the Resistance, and was condemned to death by the Nazis. After the war was over, he was wrongly imprisoned as a collaborator. In 1948 he moved back to Switzerland permanently, working as a journalist and a salesman.35 Kaiser’s response to his personal tragedy, the Second World War, and the Cold War was an intense

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impatience with ideologies. Compassion was his self-consciously post-ideological commitment. For Kaiser, compassion was the very essence of being human. One expressed compassion not only for the sake of the sufferer but for one’s own sake as well. Here Kaiser drew upon the French author Antoine de St. Exupéry. The very names of Kaiser’s organizations, Terre des Hommes and Sentinelles, were references to St. Exupéry.36 St. Exupéry’s books Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) and Terre des Hommes (translated as Wind, Sand and Stars) presented empathy as the only way to remain human in a world of profound solitude. Kaiser was clearly taken with the perspective of the Little Prince, a visitor from another planet who perceived plainly the absurdities and injustices of human interaction on Earth. By rejecting politics and embracing the cause of the powerless, Kaiser opened up a space for taking seriously the problems of people who lacked respect or rights, such as impoverished women and children with their particular vulnerabilities. In the 1950s, he worked with the Emmaus movement, founded in 1949 by the Catholic Abbé Pierre, France’s famed advocate of refugees and the homeless.37 In 1960 the plight of ill and injured Algerian children in the settlement camps established by the French colonial state in the midst of the anticolonial war came to his attention.38 He founded Terre des Hommes to help them, and faced opposition from both the Algerian anticolonial forces and the French. Today Terre des Hommes is a major humanitarian organization active worldwide in aiding children affected by war, poverty, disease, and sexual exploitation.39 Kaiser was intensely impatient with states, the United Nations (where newly independent states had an ever louder voice), and even humanitarian organizations—including his own. He personally confronted numerous heads of state, especially in Africa and Asia, and delighted in using their attachment to ceremonial etiquette to force them to hear him out.40 When polite efforts to communicate proved fruitless, he could become scathing. In 1980 he vented his anger at a colleague of Theo van Boven, then the director of the Division of Human Rights at the United Nations, over that agency’s refusal to tackle female genital cutting: “We appeal to you, master over life and death together with Theo van Boven of the tied hands (as he says), we ask you to advise us immediately and in detail, what one can do about the terrorism, silence, incompetence, indifference, the laziness and stupidity of the higher levels of the United Nations Organization.”41 The WHO was another target for him. When the WHO announced its conference in 1979 in Khartoum, Sudan, where it addressed female genital cutting seriously for the first time, Kaiser described

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it as a horrible bird: “Brooding comfortably atop the facts of sexual mutilations inflicted on girls generation after generation, the World Health Organization has now been compelled to leave its rotten nest, which it has occupied for twenty years without saying a word.”42 As for humanitarian organizations, Kaiser believed that they all too easily became self-serving bureaucracies, and that their employees were too often more concerned with successful careers for themselves than with the people they were supposed to help. He believed that they used criteria for the selection of aid recipients that reflected the organization’s need to record successes more than actual human needs. In other words, he held that humanitarian bureaucracies helped not those who suffered the most, but rather those who were likeliest to recover and flourish.43 Kaiser wished to cut through social, political, and bureaucratic convention to reach the most ignored, despised, and helpless among the suffering. For Kaiser, girls affected by genital cutting were exactly the kind of sufferers who fell outside the criteria of humanitarian and human rights organizations. He noted sarcastically that Amnesty International did not consider female genital mutilation to be “la bonne torture.”44 Frustrated by the reluctance of states, the United Nations, and even NGOs, including his own Terre des Hommes, to give female genital mutilation highest priority, he severed all ties with Terre des Hommes and founded Sentinelles in 1980.45 For Kaiser, women and girls suffering from female genital cutting or honor violence were victims of a particularly abject sort, ignored by the world and its ideological and materialistic commitments, and that is why he, with his version of an anti-ideological postcolonial humanitarianism, wished to concentrate attention on them. Kaiser’s cooperation with Benoîte Groult brought the strands of postcolonial humanitarianism and the second-wave women’s movement together. West Germany’s “new women’s movement,” which drew a great deal upon French feminism, was a second important context for the emergence of Terre des Femmes. Women’s and girls’ suffering from female genital cutting and honor violence was just as intensely meaningful to second-wave feminists as it was to Edmond Kaiser, but for different reasons. We will turn first to the key relevant themes of second-wave feminism, and then look more closely at Groult, whom West German feminists soon read. West German second-wave feminism was in full swing in the 1970s.46 West German feminists brought forward demands for equality in the workplace and the household, and for sexual and erotic autonomy. They confronted themselves and the West German public with lesbianism as an

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authentic alternative to heterosexual marriage. It was important to them to link various forms of oppression. The West German feminist movement, like second-wave feminists elsewhere, emphasized identifying as a woman and identifying with other women. Positing sameness among women, as the common victims of a global patriarchy, was important to this moment of feminist sensibility. Two demands, while certainly not unique to West Germany, were especially prominent there: non-violence (Gewaltfreiheit),47 and sexual autonomy, or “sexual self-determination” (sexuelle Selbstbestimmung). Their prominence among West German feminists was clearly part of a wider pacifist and non-violent response of West Germans to the recent past of Nazism and war. Both were important for how West German feminists perceived female genital cutting and honor violence. During the 1970s, West German feminists glossed violence in various ways. They began to expose the frequency of violence in West German families and intimate relationships.48 Feminists also analyzed pornography as a form of violence.49 In 1976 West German feminists were prominent in planning and participating in an international landmark event on violence against women: the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women, held in Brussels, Belgium.50 West German women formed the largest single national delegation there (about three hundred Germans among a total of some two thousand in attendance). The Brussels tribunal was intended as an autonomous feminist riposte to the first Conference for Women in Mexico City (1975), sponsored by the United Nations, and that organization’s supposed aim of co-opting feminism with its Decade for Women (1975-85).51 The Brussels tribunal discussed violence using examples that ranged from male doctors’ rude comments to men’s physical coercion of women, and it cited as crimes against women the diverse phenomena of rape, compulsory heterosexuality, prostitution, medical practices regarding childbirth and birth control, and the economic exploitation of Third World and immigrant women. Female genital cutting and honor violence were mentioned, although not particularly prominently.52 Participants seem to have mentioned examples of violence from geographical contexts beyond their own countries in order to argue that the oppression of women was the result of a patriarchy that could not be confined to any one country. All these practices, worldwide, stemmed from patriarchy, they held, and non-violence was basic to women’s freedom. Non-violence was necessary for sexual self-determination; so was erotic pleasure. West German feminists shared with West German men on the left a post-Nazi analysis of sexual freedom as an important antidote to the develop-

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ment of authoritarian personalities. However, they also contested those men’s sexual libertarianism of the 1960s. Many men on the left saw sex as a realm that was, or should be, without rules.53 A libertarian sensibility supported the Humanist Union’s activism on sexual and reproductive rights. Feminists, by contrast, emphasized the problem of pleasure being defined by male partners and the frequency with which violence cropped up in sexual contexts. For West German feminists, freedom from violence was a precondition of erotic pleasure.54 Feminists seized upon the argument of the sex researchers Virginia Masters and William Johnson that the clitoris was the true center of sexual pleasure, and not the vagina as psychoanalysis and biomedicine held.55 Yet feminists were actually fighting one medicalized view of sexual pleasure with another. Rather than seeking ethnographic answers to the question of whence sexual pleasure came, they argued biologistically that the tissue and nerves of the clitoral area obviously qualified it as the privileged site of orgasm. This argument from biology did not remain strictly biological. As the sociologist Ilse Lenz and her colleagues have argued, feminist texts from the 1970s “elevated the form of sexual intercourse to a metaphor for domination, dependence, or autonomy: penetration stood for male domination and female passivity, the clitoris for her autonomy.”56 It is hard to overstate the importance of this interpretation of the clitoris for West German feminists.57 For them, the clitoris was necessary for sexual pleasure, sexual pleasure was necessary for individual autonomy and freedom, and individual autonomy and freedom were necessary for a full human existence. Everything depended on the clitoris. This was the context in which West German and other feminists learned about female genital cutting and honor violence. It certainly was an “overdetermined” encounter.58 The ultimate center of uniquely female pleasure, the clitoris, met with what West German feminists saw as the ultimate form of violence, female genital cutting. Honor violence represented the ultimate violation of women’s sexual self-determination. The feminist imperatives of identifying as a woman (here, advocating clitoral pleasure and sexual exploration), and of identifying with other women (here, seeing other women as essentially the same as oneself) guaranteed feminists’ intense response to these two issues. We now have a more detailed sense of why West German feminists’ convictions would lead them to react vehemently to female genital cutting and honor violence and even, as in the case of Terre des Femmes, to put them at the center of their activism. It would be helpful to have a more detailed ac-

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count of exactly how and why those issues came to their attention in the first place, but while much has been written about female genital cutting (especially the politics of opposing it), there is still no study of how female genital cutting and honor violence reached Western feminist and non-feminist audiences in the first place.59 There is very little scholarship on indigenous critics of those practices in their own domestic political and historical contexts. Clearly the early postcolonial era brought nationalist rearticulations of the meaning of women’s bodies that pointed toward a resurgence of female genital cutting, for instance (here, the Kenyan president Jomo Kenyatta’s memoir was a ubiquitous reference). But there was also a nationalist critique of female genital cutting and honor violence (such as by Daniel arap Moi or the Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba).60 Some indigenous activists had been seeking international attention since the time of their countries’ independence or even earlier, through media outlets in Europe and the United States.61 The publications on honor violence that I consulted in connection with the history of Terre des Femmes—the ones that activists at the time recommended to each other—suggested to me that indigenous activists who intervened against honor violence shunned publicity, preferring to work behind the scenes to protect affected individuals.62 Moreover, indigenous intellectuals who wrote about the issue placed it in the context of women’s lives in general.63 European media representations of honor violence that drew explicitly on those intellectuals’ books were therefore somewhat general. Coverage of female genital cutting was, by contrast, hyper-specific. The articles in Emma, for example, included photographs of a cutting in progress. Terre des Femmes’s members considered it vital to read the works of activists from the affected countries and to work with them. Its newsletter regularly included references to recommended reading. West Germans generally gained access to indigenous critics’ writings via British or French publications, which Germans either read in the original or in German translation.64 In the West German press, frequently cited critics of female genital cutting included the Egyptian doctor and writer Nawal El Saadawi,65 the Sudanese doctors Asma El Dareer66 and Ahmed Abu El-Futuh Shandall,67 the Senegalese sociologist Awa Thiam,68 the Egyptian novelist Youssef El Masry,69 the Nigerian doctor (living in Sierra Leone) Olayinka Koso-Thomas,70 and the Ghanaian nurse and activist Efua Dorkenoo.71 Authors discussing honor violence included the French-Jewish-Algerian journalist and former prostitute Germaine Aziz, the Algerian novelist Rachid Boudjedra, Awa Thiam, Youssef El Masry, and Nawal El Saadawi.72 For Europeans, another prominent point

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of reference regarding honor violence was the British television drama Death of a Princess in 1980. It presented a fictionalized version of the honor killing in 1977 of a young woman who belonged to the Saudi royal family, and was broadcast in West Germany and frequently cited in West German press items concerning honor violence.73 West German activists also cited American and European women as critics of female genital cutting and honor violence. With regard to female genital cutting, the earliest and probably most influential for the overall Western mobilization against the practice was the American feminist Fran Hosken, who coined the term “female genital mutilation.” Born Franziska Porges in 1920 to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, she immigrated to the United States in 1938 to escape Nazi rule. She learned about the practice while traveling in Africa as a designer and photographer in 1973, and started to write about it in 1975 in WIN News, a feminist clearinghouse periodical she founded.74 Her book The Hosken Report (1979) laid the foundation for Western critics’ work, especially in the United States. Hosken is often credited with putting the issue on the agenda of the United Nations. She spoke at the WHO’s conference in Khartoum in 1979 and at the NGO forum that took place alongside the Copenhagen conference on women in 1980 that was sponsored by the United Nations. In Copenhagen she elicited an angry response from the African women in attendance, themselves critics of the practice, for her simplistic analysis and rude dismissal of their comments. Some of these African women formally stated their complaints, which provoked much debate about the politics of working to end the practice.75 Another American feminist, Mary Daly, also gained attention in West Germany for her condemnation of female genital cutting in her book Gyn/Ecology (1978).76 Two other well-known American critics of female genital cutting, Hanny Lightfoot-Klein and Alice Walker, carried out their work concurrently or after the foundation of Terre des Femmes and so cannot be counted as influences on its emergence.77 Terre des Femmes certainly influenced Lightfoot-Klein, however: from 1980 on, Lightfoot-Klein was in close contact with the founding member Herta Haas. The single most influential figure in the European feminist mobilization against female genital cutting and honor violence was the French novelist Benoîte Groult. She gained wide attention with Ainsi soit-elle, her feminist manifesto of 1975.78 (Ainsi soit-elle is a play on the French phrase for “amen” or “so be it,” ainsi soit-il; the book title is translatable as A(wo)men.79) It was the first text on the subject of female genital cutting that many Europeans encountered, and it appeared four years before The Hosken Report, yet Groult

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is hardly ever mentioned in the English-language literature on female genital cutting.80 Awa Thiam, whose own book appeared in French in 1978 with a foreword by Groult, cited Groult as the first person to have “analyzed these customs politically.”81 Groult wrote the preface to the French edition of The Hosken Report (1983).82 It was apparently Groult who put female genital cutting on the agenda for the Tribunal on Violence against Women in 1976. And, of course, she gained publicity for the issue with her press conference with Edmond Kaiser in 1977. It is worth examining both how Groult located these issues in her own feminism, and how she handled the problem of ethnocentrism that was to drive many discussions in Terre des Femmes. The way in which Groult herself first learned about female genital cutting reinforces my sense that female genital cutting and honor violence served to sharpen European feminists’ perceptions of themselves, and not necessarily of African or Middle Eastern women. In the early 1970s Groult was a successful middle-aged novelist and freelance journalist in Paris, writing on “women’s” themes but neither seeing herself nor being seen by her readers as a feminist. She had the idea of writing her own nonfiction book about women, to appear in 1975, the U.N. Year of the Woman, as a way to leave more of a mark in nonfiction than would her many ephemeral magazine articles. Her idea drew such hostile reactions from men around her that she began to write the book. One cautioned her not to “do a MLF” (the acronym for “women’s liberation movement,” Mouvement de libération des femmes), and claimed that she risked “pissing off everyone” and damaging her successful writing career.83 She was appalled to read a male screenwriter she admired, Pascal Jardin, excoriating Kate Millett and the French feminists Annie Leclerc and Marie Cardinal as the “‘sinister descendants of Simone de Beauvoir’ and as ‘devourers of men with terrifying incisors, brandishing monstrous clitorises as they moralize. . . . They are nothing but nightmarish ovarians.’”84 As Groult later recalled, “All that excited me furiously . . . as it says in de Sade!”85 She recalled going to the Bibliothèque Nationale, looking up “Woman” in the card catalog, and finding by chance books by the novelist Youssef El Masry, the anthropologist Jacques Lantier, and the doctor and sexologist Gérard Zwang.86 “It was thanks to these works that I discovered ‘the best kept secret in the world.’”87 She located her final conversion to feminism at the moment she read about female genital cutting. “The discovery of that practice, unimaginable in the worst nightmares, served as an electroshock to me.” In fifteen days, she recalled, she passed from her former existence as a “bourgeoise resigned to sexual inequality” to a feminist

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who could not be silenced.88 In the years to come Groult, like Fran Hosken at Copenhagen, Ingrid Staehle, and other members of Terre des Femmes, were to encounter arguments that they should leave activism against female genital cutting to those women immediately affected by it. To the extent that female genital cutting was the foundation of their own feminism, however, it could not be easily extracted from that feminism. Groult’s text Ainsi soit-elle deserves our attention because it was the point of reference for so many European feminists concerned with female genital cutting, and also Groult posed the same questions to herself that Terre des Femmes was to face. How was female genital cutting related to other oppressions of women, especially of European women? And how could one criticize it without sliding into ethnocentrism or even racism? In Ainsi soit-elle, Groult surveyed a wide range of injustices against women, from career and educational inequity and the lack of voting rights to the denial of birth control and abortion. She pointed to men and patriarchy as the clear sources of oppression. Sexual self-determination—freedom from violence and freedom for pleasure—was a major theme of the book. Groult discussed sexual coercion in her own life in terms of, for example, male partners’ refusal to use birth control or the social expectation that one become a mother. These factors led to her five abortions as well as her three children.89 Motherhood ought to be freely chosen, not imposed: “Chosen motherhood is the foundation of our freedom, it is the precondition for everything else. That is why it is so vehemently opposed.”90 She insisted that the clitoris was the key to sexual pleasure in the fourth chapter of Ainsi soit-elle, “La haine du C . . .” (“Hatred of the C[unt]”). Here was where female genital cutting appeared in the text: Groult argued that it had never received the attention it deserved because it concerned the clitoris, whose function was to bring pleasure to women and did not serve men in any way.91 For Groult, patriarchy was a cross-cultural universal that denied both equality before the law and sexual pleasure, and both kinds of denial were political. Groult invited readers to understand female genital cutting in personal, immediately corporeal terms: “It hurts to read, doesn’t it? It hurts our sexual organs, it hurts our hearts, it injures our human dignity, and it hurts us in the name of all women who are like us and who are scorned, extinguished, and whose authentic selves are destroyed.”92 The phrase expressed a powerful identification with the women undergoing the practice, suggesting that their flesh was Groult’s own. Ingrid Staehle, recalling when she read Groult’s book, used a similar phrase of corporeal identification: female genital cutting was

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“a cut into my own flesh.”93 It is a vivid example of how feminist identification as a woman and with other women can serve to mobilize outrage. It also assumed that to undergo the operation was to reject it. That meant that the phrase contained a simultaneous statement of disidentification with women who had undergone it and sought it for their daughters. Groult’s invocation of her own body’s supposedly natural reaction to the practice established great distance between herself and such women, although she no doubt did not intend that.94 Groult interpreted female genital cutting as a violent act that men carried out against women. To the extent that Groult contextualized the practice, she linked it to other oppressions of women in Africa and the Middle East such as honor violence, forced marriage, child marriage, veiling, and the imperative to bear sons—and to Islam, which she saw as inherently and especially patriarchal.95 The power of female genital cutting for Groult seems to have been its twofold nature as an actual oppressive practice and as a metaphor or symbol for other kinds of women’s oppression. It reappeared in later chapters of Ainsi soit-elle to function as a limit case of women’s oppression. It seemed to make literal that which feminists discussed in more abstract terms as the denial of sexual self-determination. Certainly Staehle understood Groult in that way. Recalling the first time she read about female genital cutting in Ainsi soit-elle, Staehle noted that she had “read all the classics of feminism . . . Beauvoir of course and Germaine Greer and all of that. But that was all on the political and social level. Here it went deep into the flesh. It was the condition féminine brought to the razor’s edge.”96 Here Staehle, like Groult, was claiming that female genital cutting contained a pure form of feminist argument. Even as Groult drew attention to the exotic and violent, she did seek to relativize the extremity of female genital cutting for her readers. There seem to have been two reasons for this. First, she needed to connect female genital cutting with oppressions faced by European women. Otherwise, the point of including it in her book as a metaphor would have been lost. To do so, she asserted that the patriarchal forces behind sexism in Europe and female genital cutting in Africa were the one and the same.97 The European counterparts to female genital cutting and honor violence were, for Groult, corrective genital surgeries, the compulsion to marry and become a mother, and the sexual disciplining of women through fear of pregnancy.98 Second, she obviously believed that she had to demonstrate cultural relativism in order to avoid the accusation of ethnocentrism or racism. The concept of a patriarchy oppressing all women worldwide helped her to do that. After

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describing African women’s naïve faith in medicine men, Groult chided her European readers: We would do wrong if we were to look down from the high horse of our great Western knowledge at these stories and laugh. Our quacks claiming to cure us and heal our souls claimed in the nineteenth century that education or sport could make women infertile, and our cherished family doctors asserted until very recently that little girls who masturbated would become anemic, would fail to thrive, or would even become mentally ill—they all are reminiscent of African medicine men. Certainly, the methods of our medicine men have not been so bloody, but all these styles of thinking and these arguments are so similar, that we get a very unpleasant feeling about it all. It is as if all men were silent accomplices of each other. How else is it to be explained that none of them has become upset about the millions of human beings from whom all pleasure has been withheld?99 As countless activists would do after her in order to demonstrate their cultural relativism, Groult here transposed difference across space into difference across historical time. That left her with unresolved problems, such as why the European practices that were supposedly so similar belonged to the past or were “not quite so bloody.” On the few occasions where she tried to resolve such questions, she was less culturally relativistic than ever. She commented, for example, that if European women had been easier to control, they too would have been forced to undergo genital cutting, and she approvingly quoted Ernst Renan’s famous comment that Islam was the “‘greatest burden that had ever dragged down humankind.’”100 The analytical deficiencies we see in Groult were shared by virtually all Western feminist commentators on female genital cutting in the 1970s and 1980s, and they have been thoroughly discussed by scholars. For example, patriarchy, which Groult invoked in part to show that she was not racist, led her to present female genital cutting as something imposed by men on women, rather than something that was in fact supported—or opposed—by both sexes.101 By positing a cross-cultural patriarchal oppression of women by men, she pitted the categories of sex and culture (or race) against each other. Such an opposition appears, for example, in her claim that resistance to sexism was rarer than resistance to racism.102 That left little room for contextualizing herself as a product of white European society, or for depicting

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African women as equally authentic female subjects rather than women who, if their culture were stripped away, would be just like European women. Other common criticisms of outsiders’ reactions to female genital cutting have been that Europeans should avoid speaking for Africans in a colonial mode; that cultural relativism regarding the meaning of pain is necessary; that African women are agents, and not or not only victims, and that they themselves have led the most effective campaigns against cutting.103 Feminist critics of female genital cutting in the 1970s were absorbed in the excitement and ambition of theorizing women’s lives around the world in terms of patriarchy. Far from questioning the effects of their concepts (such as patriarchy or the role of the clitoris) on their thinking, they felt, rather, that they were the first to take this phenomenon seriously.104 They were infuriated at male anthropologists who knew more about female genital cutting than other Westerners yet did not protest against it, and they were unaware of anthropologists’ disciplinary concern in the postwar years to avoid sensationalizing sexual topics.105 Anti-racism and feminism were part of the third important activist context for the emergence of Terre des Femmes: West German activists’ efforts to secure and expand the rights of families of mixed nationality and of foreigners resident in West Germany. They counseled and gave legal aid to German women caught up in conflicts with their foreign male partners, and they also sought to counter the discrimination and exoticism directed at binational and biracial couples and families by the West German majority. Three women in Terre des Femmes’s founding group, including the co-chair Barbara Hamaidia, had already been active in this work.106 Gendered inequities characterized the legal status of male foreign residents and their families, whether the wives were German or not. Foreignborn wives of guest workers often lacked their own residency permits, making divorce difficult. German-born wives of male foreigners took on their husbands’ foreign citizenship, as did their children, and German-born wives were expected to follow their husbands abroad if the latter were deported. Politically active foreigners were vulnerable to deportation. In 1972 Rosi Wolf-Almanasreh founded the Alliance of German Women Married to Foreigners (Interessengemeinschaft der mit Ausländern verheirateten deutschen Frauen, IAF). Today it is named the Federation of Binational Partnerships “IAF” (Verband binationaler Partnerschaften “IAF”). She intended it as a grass-roots feminist and civil liberties organization very much in the mold of the “new social movements” of those years.107 Later on in 1972, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich

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Olympics and West Germany’s response rendered the legal situation of binational Palestinian German couples acute: about three hundred Palestinian men were deported without any due process. German wives and children were left in limbo; Wolf-Almanasreh was herself directly affected by the Olympics episode. The IAF sought the equal treatment of female and male marriage partners in terms of citizenship and residency requirements, and it has seen important successes. In 1974 the citizenship law regarding children of binational marriages was reformed, and after 1983 German-born wives of foreign men were no longer expected to leave West Germany with them. Terre des Femmes worked for the rights of immigrant and foreign women in West Germany, cooperating with the IAF and organizations similar to it.108 Terre des Femmes was part of the extensive discussion in the 1980s of racism and xenophobia (Fremdenfeindlichkeit) in West German society. Turkish German writers, who frequently highlighted those issues, began to gain the West German public’s attention in the 1970s. In 1985 the journalist Günter Wallraff confronted West Germans with his exposé of the discriminatory and cruel treatment meted out to him in his disguise as a Turkish guest worker.109 For West Germans anxious to prove that they had left Nazism far behind, the accusation of racism was an extremely sensitive matter. The recurring debate over whether to restrict West Germany’s asylum law fed into these discussions. West German feminists discussed the existence of racism in their own ranks and the problem of women’s capacity to act as oppressors.110 This last issue posed an important challenge because the second-wave feminist movement in West Germany developed in part through a feminist analysis of Nazism that depicted German women as victims of Nazism. The idea of German women being actual or potential oppressors of racialized women was a matter of great concern to Terre des Femmes. To respond to this problem, Terre des Femmes’s members were concerned to draw connections between German women and non-German women. Ingrid Staehle and other West German feminists in Terre des Femmes insisted on making connections between the predicaments of African and Asian women and those they themselves faced in Europe under a common patriarchy. Such analysis has been critiqued by feminists since then as excessively focused on a putative sameness among women. Some feminists of the 1970s and early 1980s were no doubt poorly informed about European colonial history and specifically the long history of imperial feminism (that is, the justification of colonial intervention in the name of saving native women). Again, we can see how West German feminists’ own preoccupations set them up to face yet other problems.

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Terre des Femmes and Amnesty for Women Compared Already before Terre des Femmes’s first year was out, Ingrid Staehle found herself compelled to distinguish Terre des Femmes from another feminist human rights organization that emerged parallel to it. In Vienna, two feminist sociologists, Cheryl Benard and Edit Schlaffer, founded Amnesty for Women (the name was in English) concurrently with Terre des Femmes. Their organization’s name was intended to point up the deficiencies of Amnesty International’s focus on traditionally political human rights: “Human rights should be valid for women too. . . . In many countries women are treated in a way similar to the situation of political prisoners: their civic rights are withheld from them, they are maltreated physically. Following the principles of Amnesty International, we want to document violations against human rights on grounds of sex.”111 By comparing Benard and Schlaffer’s rhetoric to Staehle’s, we can better appreciate the intended anti-racist effect of the concept of a global patriarchy. The aim in this section is to listen to how each organization related human rights violations against African, Middle Eastern, or Asian women to those affecting European women. Benard and Schlaffer did not assert that there was any link between the wrongs done to Third World women and those done to European women. Instead, they argued that Third World women were infinitely worse off than Western women such that the very terminology of European feminism could not capture their sufferings. They set aside the whole question of how Third World practices such as honor killing related to domestic violence or other oppressive practices suffered by European women, in the past or present. In 1981 Benard and Schlaffer announced the formation of Amnesty for Women in an article in Die Zeit.112 They recruited West Germans to their organization through articles and a lecture tour through West Germany, and they inspired a number of women to start local chapters. Staehle met Benard and Schlaffer, believed that the two organizations shared the same goals and strategies, and hoped to cooperate with Amnesty for Women.113 Both organizations wished to use the language of human rights, which they considered a heretofore male-dominated discourse of social justice, in the name of feminism to combat patriarchy. Yet the tasks that each hoped “human rights” would help them accomplish were different. Staehle, like Groult, hoped “human rights” would absolve Terre des Femmes of ethnocentrism or racism. Benard and Schlaffer, by contrast, fused feminism, human rights, and postcolonial humanitarianism into an impassioned and even pugnacious justifica-

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tion for intervention in Third World countries. They intentionally affronted Third Worldist sensibilities. “You thought this book was an earnest attempt to illuminate other cultures in a sympathetic and value-free manner?” they wrote in Amnesty for Women’s first book-length publication. “Then we have to excuse ourselves for the misunderstanding. Our position: sick is sick.”114 In their manifesto of 1981 Benard and Schlaffer positioned themselves as marginal voices confronting multiple hostile audiences: European feminists, who did not know how bad it could get for women; European men, who saw feminists as man-haters; Third World solidarity activists, who excused Third World flaws by referring to neo-colonialism; Third World men, who ruthlessly exploited women; and Third World women, who seemed not to care about their own sufferings. Benard and Schlaffer then called for intervention in the name of human rights. Pieties about Third World sovereignty and selfdetermination had to be cast aside.115 Benard and Schlaffer pointed to Third World men as the greatest danger to Third World women. It was the male postcolonial leadership of the Third World who, after claiming that “perfidious imperialists” had hobbled their cultures, were now abusers in their own right: “Then they stand up, these breathlessly testifying revolutionaries from the colonies, and summon up their culture and traditions in order to—liquidate minorities, torture opponents, arrange mass executions. To ensure that half of their people live their lives in darkness and isolation, bereft of opportunity and in humiliation. . . . Let’s say a sad farewell to the romanticism of revolution. Goodbye, Third World.”116 For Benard and Schlaffer, the colonial past should now be set aside as irrelevant, for what was going on now was far worse than what colonial rulers imposed: “the Third World, speaking in general and with a few exceptions, is a place of oppression for women that makes any imperialist exploitation appear clumsy and kindhearted.” Benard and Schlaffer compared Third World women to political prisoners: “One is tempted to write sentences that compare women’s fate in these countries to that of political prisoners and prisoners of war; of pariahs; of slaves. They must bow their heads and cover them; they must conceal themselves; they are not permitted to see the world, or if at all then only through the latticework of an absurd veiling; they are not permitted to study, to read, or to know anything, to say anything; they are to be silent and submissive and of course chaste, that is especially important.”117 The oppressed women they described were not really potential feminist subjects, however: “The revolutionary zeal of women in the Third World is slight.” Only European women brave enough to confront the myths

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were willing to intervene, and human rights was their post-ideological justification: “Is the West a know-it-all all over again, when it poses the question of their treatment? Is it neo-colonialism, ethnocentrism, disrespect for cultural values, when one intervenes in the family affairs of other countries? If we want to answer this question with ‘yes,’ then we must give up the belief in human rights and halt any dialogue about justice and change. Then we will not get beyond paying homage to the superstitions of our time.”118 Benard and Schlaffer’s rhetoric here closed off the possibilities and problems that Terre des Femmes and even Benard and Schlaffer elsewhere wrestled with, such as how partnerships with activist Third World women should be formed, and how Western activists could avoid enacting neo-colonial patterns. They polemically simplified the situation in order to mark out one supposedly obvious solution: the West must impose human rights. Amnesty for Women turned out to be a minor episode in Benard’s and Schlaffer’s careers. Several of its members, complaining of poor communication with Benard and Schlaffer, switched to Terre des Femmes.119 Amnesty for Women faltered, but Benard and Schlaffer went on to successful and prolific careers as authors and consultants with particular expertise on women in Muslim countries. They often wrote about European feminist issues as well; for example, the American feminist Robin Morgan anthologized them in her landmark volume Sisterhood Is Global (1984).120 Between 1978, when they published a pioneering book on domestic violence and marital rape in Europe, and today, they have co-authored some thirty books on feminism, youth, marriage, and families, with settings of Europe, the Middle East, and Afghanistan.121 Benard, alone and together with Schlaffer, has written on honor violence, female genital cutting, female infanticide, and forced veiling, as well as novels about women’s lives in Muslim countries. Benard had studied the Middle East as a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Vienna, and carried out her dissertation research on Arab nationalism at the American University of Beirut. From 1982 until 2005 she and Schlaffer directed a state-funded institute in Vienna, and carried out research there on Austrian women and youth. More recently, Schlaffer became the director of a new organization, Women without Borders (Frauen ohne Grenzen), which promotes communication between Western and Arab women and women’s political leadership.122 Benard now works in the United States as an analyst for the RAND Corporation, specializing in women and youth in the Middle East and Afghanistan. In 2003 RAND published her study on possible methods for the United States to use in combating “fundamentalists”

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and cultivating “modernists” among Muslims, and she continues to offer commentary on the Muslim world in the media.123 Both her own career and her longtime marriage to Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as the ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations in the administration of President George W. Bush, have offered her opportunities to influence U.S. policy.124 While Benard and Schlaffer have been successful as policy consultants close to state actors who seek to impose order on complex problems, Terre des Femmes has remained autonomous from state funding and has pursued an extended internal discussion of neo-colonialism. Back in 1981 Staehle responded to Benard and Schlaffer’s manifesto in Die Zeit.125 Even though she believed their two organizations shared the same goals, her response indicated her hesitations about the way Benard and Schlaffer had framed the task at hand. Like Benard and Schlaffer, Staehle connected feminism to human rights with a dash of sarcasm and a sweepingly dismal view of women in the Third World: “That the spectre of feminism has always basically stood for nothing other than the realization of the human rights for the female minority of a constant 51% of the world’s population is still too little known even by many women in the enlightened West. How much less in the Third World! There, it is females who cling the most tightly to the dull hopelessness from birth onward of their traditional women’s lives, and sustain into the future their own oppression and that of their daughters.”126 Unlike Benard and Schlaffer, however, Staehle then offered a more complex picture of the societies where these oppressive practices took place. She described a difficult struggle in which the sides were not clearly defined. Staehle particularly disagreed with Benard and Schlaffer’s characterization of Third World women as political prisoners. Men were not the only perpetrators; Third World women participated in these oppressive practices: Here is the crux of any commitment to matters of human rights for women in the name of solidarity: the perpetrators and victims of the affliction are not clearly separated—in fact they appear to be accomplices, or even one and the same. That is also the essential difference from work in organizations like Amnesty International, where the victims aided definitely know that they are victims, and the perpetrators know that they are perpetrators. Women kept like dependent children in closed, patriarchal cultures, however, cannot be anything other than “convinced” helpers in bringing about their own humiliations.127

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Here Staehle seemed to be denying the possibility of these women becoming feminist subjects. But she then relativized the divergence between the First and Third Worlds. Like Groult, Staehle argued that patriarchy meant that Western women were not in such different positions: And that is not at all true only of Africa, where mothers who were themselves circumcised under conditions of torment make sure that their daughters are also circumcised, or among the glowing female propagandists for full body veiling in Khomeini’s Iran, but also of us. Also in the enlightened West, with all of our subtle psychoanalytical knowledge and repetition compulsions and tragic-unconscious transmission of one’s sufferings to others, women allow themselves to be beaten as of old, and beat their children, especially the daughters. And in the children’s rooms of the middle class, well-meaning mothers make sure to raise their daughters as well-behaved girls who won’t speak up for themselves—just like them—and imperious “real boys”—like Daddy. And like their sisters in the bush they don’t know what they are wreaking.128 While Western women possessed “enlightenment” and sophisticated “psychoanalytical” knowledge, they too could be “‘convinced’ helpers.” The problem of intervention in the Third World, then, looked much like the problem of intervention inside Europe: a constant effort at feminist consciousness raising. Staehle concluded with the imperative of women’s identification with other women: “Little cause, then for Western self-righteousness. All the more reason to reflect upon the commonalities among the indignities we have suffered as women and passed on to our daughters in the northern and southern hemispheres and in the past and present. Cause for consciousness of the pathos of human rights and of female solidarity, but above all cause for concrete and discreet aid.”129 Staehle insisted on making the connections implied by a concept of global patriarchy. For her, human rights were the feminist response to patriarchy and also to neo-colonialism, rather than a license for intervention. It is true that overall, Terre des Femmes and Amnesty for Women shared much more than that which divided them. For example, key members of Terre des Femmes, such as Herta Haas and Tobe Levin, supported Amnesty for Women.130 In these early statements by their respective founders, however, we can see how Staehle insisted on asking the question of what connected the First and Third Worlds that Benard and Schlaffer had set aside as

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diversionary. Let us now turn to the story of how Terre des Femmes handled these questions of oppression, difference, and commonality in practice.

Terre des Femmes’s Feminist Third World Solidarity Work in the 1980s Debate over commonalities and differences among women directly affected the organizational stability of Terre des Femmes in its first decade. Members’ struggles over ethnocentrism and neo-colonialism inside and outside the organization led to crisis in the first half of the 1980s, and to a new, more centralized organizational structure. With the help of new members from West Germany’s Third World solidarity movement, it gained increased stability in the latter half of the 1980s. The Third World solidarity movement in West Germany was the fourth important context of activism shaping Terre des Femmes. In the first years, Staehle and the rest of the founding group in Hamburg ran Terre des Femmes as a decentralized, purely volunteer-run organization. Its earliest tasks included publicizing the sufferings of Third World women; petitioning the European Community regarding gender-specific grounds for asylum; arranging refuge for individual women fleeing forced marriage and honor violence; and responding to requests from projects by and for women located in Africa and Latin America.131 Among the first individual women to be aided by Terre des Femmes was an Arab woman who had been subjected to incest, rape, and forced marriage inside West Germany. (Her country of citizenship was unclear in the organizational records available to me.) Terre des Femmes sought to secure residency papers for her and her young daughter so that the woman could leave her husband without being deported from West Germany. Among the first overseas projects to which Terre des Femmes donated was Dr. Asma El Dareer’s ongoing work against female genital cutting in Sudan. Terre des Femmes emphasized in its newsletter to members that it sought not to impose its own ideas on the Third World, but rather to respond to requests for help from local women who were already active in their countries.132 Terre des Femmes’s early success was fragile. A decentralized organizational structure meant that new members were to act independently to define their own specific area of activism, gather background information, and make their own contacts. This was ambitious and probably unrealistic. Finding accurate information in various languages about a range of non-

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European countries and disseminating it to members was difficult, as Amnesty International’s own early experience showed.133 It was also hard to convey a consistent message to the public when politically sensitive agitation and fundraising work was left to assorted lay members. However, it is not surprising that Terre des Femmes used that model in its early years, for it fitted well with the rigorous feminism of the day. Women were to fight for women’s power by doing just that; activism on behalf of other women was activism on behalf of oneself. The point was not to write a check, but to do things one had never dared to do before: public speaking, writing, organizing, and traveling on fact-finding trips. Such intense identification and hard work proved to be a recipe for anger and frustration when disagreement among differently positioned women arose. Terre des Femmes’s decentralized structure led rapidly to the exhaustion and then the departure of each of its first pair of co-chairs. Barbara Hamaidia, irritated at the division of labor between her and Staehle, left in 1982.134 Staehle recalled feeling overwhelmed by the burdens of motivating new members, fact-finding, and publicity. Citing her hard work, Staehle reacted with brittleness to criticism.135 The internecine struggles and lack of initiative on the part of her fellow West German women exasperated her. And criticism from African women exasperated her even more: “I was irritated that one had to fight against power struggles, or deficient motivation, even inside the women’s solidarity front. And then came the content-related criticisms from the Third World women’s camp. One was really defrauded of one’s solidarity, because one had to justify, on top of everything else, why one was doing this work at all. At some point that really left a bad taste in my mouth.”136 African activists have singled out the motivations of European and American women for engaging in activism against female genital cutting as a key criterion for evaluating the potential for racism.137 Yet Staehle clearly felt insulted and silenced even for being asked about her own motivations: “That touched upon the root of my motivation. Edmond Kaiser always called that ‘le feu interieur,’ the fire within, which has to burn, has to be there continuously. So that one knows what one is fighting for. And that just became weaker at some point.”138 Staehle cited a specific moment of conflict with Awa Thiam, one of the best-known African campaigners against female genital cutting. Thiam attended Terre des Femmes’s annual meeting in Frankfurt in 1983. As Staehle recalled, “She was very impressive as a person. But there were conflicts over content, simply the accusation of racism. Already at that time, and it per-

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sisted. For me that just went too far, when the word was, ‘yes, please give us the money and the means of publication, but leave us alone otherwise.’ I am too political a person for that, to simply allow myself to be silenced.”139 For Staehle, female genital cutting had become a matter of her own right to speak out as a feminist political activist. At that same meeting in 1983, Staehle suddenly announced her resignation from Terre des Femmes. Not all members of Terre des Femmes reacted as Staehle did. Tobe Levin, who had arranged for Thiam to attend that meeting, was also there. Levin had already seen similar conflicts between European and African women when she had spoken at Thiam’s invitation at a conference in Dakar, Senegal. At that conference, a Belgian made-for-television film with footage of a clitoridectomy and infibulations was shown. It provoked a vehement discussion, one in which all the contradictions inexorably broke out between black and white women, between African women and European women. The European women saw in this film the courageous attempt to treat, finally from the woman’s point of view, a topic that male anthropologists had scorned and covered up. The African women, by contrast, saw it as a racist representation of primitive peoples, felt themselves to be humiliated and insulted, and were of the opinion that such a film would stimulate the racism of the average European more than bring about understanding.140 That discussion fits the broader pattern of feminist debate about the representation of female genital cutting: while African activists have been outraged by the public exposure of African girls’ and women’s bodies under circumstances beyond those girls’ and women’s control, European feminists have seen these images of cutting as instances of truth long denied them.141 European feminists understood female genital cutting as synecdoche for various wrongs done to all women under patriarchy, and they moreover wished to stoke observers’ outrage, not moderate it. Yet Levin did not feel insulted or exhausted by the African women’s criticisms at the meeting in Dakar. On the contrary, she worried that there was too much reluctance to risk the nascent feminist solidarity between African and European women, and that avoiding frank discussion now would only cause problems later: “this apparent inability to grasp the nettle of racism could become an even greater danger to our international solidarity than any discussion, however vehement. So, as soon as possible: the topic of racism!”142

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The problems of cultural relativism, ethnocentrism, and racism remained, whether Terre des Femmes’s members wanted to discuss them or not. Back in West Germany, members continued to publicize female genital cutting using explicit photographs and film footage. They were more concerned about countering their West German audiences’ “ever-recurring argument” about “interference in foreign cultures” than about countering African observers’ accusations of racism.143 When West Germans attending Terre des Femmes’s public events took a position of cultural relativism, members invoked the universality of human rights.144 But the constant criticism does seem to have caused them uncertainty about how to proceed with activism specifically on the issue of female genital cutting. Levin recalled that after Staehle’s departure her successors “left the topic to slumber” until the early 1990s.145 Only in the early 1990s did a new member of Terre des Femmes, Ines Laufer, bring the issue once more to the forefront. As it happened, she embraced an even more extreme position (for example, that Africans resident in Germany should be denied re-entry to Germany if they take their daughters to visit countries where cutting is practiced). Both Levin and Terre des Femmes have distanced themselves from Laufer, who no longer belongs to Terre des Femmes.146 The issue of female genital cutting remains powerful for Terre des Femmes—it mobilizes members and draws donations—but also difficult, as when some members call for infringing Africans’ rights and invite accusations of racism. After Staehle’s departure, Terre des Femmes struggled to regroup. Members’ uncertainty about the organization’s goals surfaced anew in discussions. The remaining members at the annual meeting in 1983 scrambled to assemble a new board and two college students in Hanover agreed to serve as an interim solution. Half a year later, they were registering pessimism, wondering if the “spirit and purpose” of the organization were being fulfilled.147A discussion of basic principles took place at the annual meeting in 1984. After some members stated their personal motivations for working with Terre des Femmes, the group produced a consensus statement. This statement began with the credo that sex was the primary category of social analysis: “TdF wants to show that women are the most severely disadvantaged people.”148 The very next sentence mentioned accusations of racism, which demonstrates its importance to members: “And so the problem came up that we are sometimes accused of racism when we report on certain human rights violations affecting women in the Third World, such as clitoridectomy—a human rights violation done by women to women and girls.”149 For the first time, the newsletter offered some guidelines to members for discussing female geni-

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tal cutting: “When TdF criticizes such practices, the question must be posed simultaneously: Why do women do that; what social, economic, and political reasons are behind it? What demands is TdF making when we report on certain situations of women in the Third World? What alternatives can there be? It must be emphasized that human rights—especially women’s rights— are violated all over the world. The problematic sketched out above was then explicated one more time, using the example of sex tourism.”150 The next item for discussion at the 1984 meeting also revealed internal debate over racism: to what extent should Terre des Femmes focus on Third World women? Should it even shift its primary focus to work with West German women inside West Germany? To do so would protect it from accusations of racism. In response to the question of whether TdF should work specifically for women in the Third World or only for women’s issues in the Federal Republic of Germany, there were various answers and opinions. TdF as a human rights organization for women makes the claim of protesting against human rights violations done to women everywhere in the world. Some women saw the danger of frittering away our effectiveness if TdF did not commit itself to a particular focus, given that the dimensions of human rights violations committed daily against women were too great. On the other hand, it was impossible to criticize too many human rights violations done to women.151 The members’ decision was to work on both the Third World and West Germany, and to draw explicit connections between the two.152 For example, Terre des Femmes highlighted the impact of West German foreign policy or corporations on women in the Third World, and it joined campaigns inside West Germany against rape and violence committed by German men against German women. “The main emphasis of our work is on women in the ‘Third World,’ but we do not see the crimes committed against them as separate from the situation of women here, for the basic evil of sexist oppression is in force in the whole world.”153 Looking back at those discussions, a member explained Terre des Femmes’s extension of goals to include domestic issues as an anti-racist effort: “It would be easy to criticize violence against women such as clitoridectomy, widow-burning, child marriage, etc., only in countries in the Third World, in neo-colonialist fashion—to attribute them to foreign culture and mentality. Rape, sexual abuse of girls, sexual harassment at work, marital violence, etc. show to a shocking degree that human rights for women

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are not yet general practice where we live either. Acting on this realization, some chapters have been working in recent years more and more on viola­ tions of women’s rights in our own society.”154 This position held that all women were oppressed by patriarchy and that it was racist and neo-colonialist to assume that Third World women were uniquely oppressed. If Third World women were not uniquely oppressed, there was no justification for working solely on their behalf. That meant, in turn, doing what one could to improve women’s lives in one’s own country as well. By 1985, the newsletter expressed the sense that Terre des Femmes’s crisis was over. The small core of committed members remained steady and now slowly grew.155 Those very years saw an influx of members from the West German Third World solidarity movement.156 This movement was undergoing its own self-questioning in the mid-1980s. The West German left was generally pacifist at home but often supported revolutionary violence in the Third World, which created dilemmas that had emerged with particular sharpness by the 1980s. Leftists concerned with Third World issues were frustrated and disillusioned by news of internecine violence within the left, as in El Salvador, and the harshness of victorious revolutionary regimes, as indicated by the Vietnamese “boat people.” Now critical members of West German solidarity organizations were embracing the same analysis as was Terre des Femmes: support for revolutionary change abroad was only justifiable if one also worked for change at home. One ought especially to be vigilant about one’s own state’s impact on Third World countries. Otherwise, a West German risked engaging in pure romanticism, or even the hypocrisy of asking distant others to take dangerous political action while one enjoyed security and passivity at home.157 The Third World solidarity movement also embraced the language of human rights in the 1980s in an effort to develop criteria for judging the actions of national liberation movements as well as counterrevolutionary dictatorships.158 Finally, in the early 1980s the West German Third World solidarity movement was facing a feminist challenge within its own ranks. Feminists critiqued male-dominated solidarity work that failed to focus on the needs and perspectives of Third World women. The umbrella organization Federal Congress of Development Policy Action Groups (Bundeskongress entwicklungspolitischer Aktionsgruppen, or BUKO), which formed in 1977, now set up a committee to increase the representation of West German women in its own ranks and to investigate the effects of its programs on Third World women.159 The women who came to the fore in Terre des Femmes in the mid-1980s

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wanted to unite their commitment to Third World causes with their feminism. These members of Terre des Femmes were inspired by—and at times included—such prominent feminist social scientists as Maria Mies, Ilse Lenz, and Christa Wichterich, who were (and still are) well known for their scholarship and activism related to the Third World.160 In 1984 Terre des Femmes gained a new board that supported the orientation toward Third World solidarity work, and in 1985 Terre des Femmes began to develop its ties to BUKO.161 Besides BUKO, Terre des Femmes’s most important partner in the 1980s was the Working Group against Sexual and Racist Exploitation (Arbeitsgemeinschaft gegen sexuelle und rassistische Ausbeutung, shortened to Agisra). Founded in 1983, Agisra worked with immigrant and refugee women and combated sex tourism and trafficking. The desire to cooperate with solidarity organizations such as BUKO or Action for World Solidarity (Aktion Solidarische Welt), and to improve fundraising, meant that Terre des Femmes’s own decentralized structure had to change, and its board called for greater centralization. In 1989 Terre des Femmes officially shifted its base to Freiburg. It had been based there in practice since 1987, when Susanne Reichinger, a student there, had joined the board.162 Freiburg was also the most important center of Third World solidarity work in West Germany, as the home base of Third World Action (Aktion Dritte Welt) and the Third World Information Center (Informationszentrum Dritte Welt), with its prominent publication Blätter des iz3w.163 During these years, articles about Terre des Femmes began to appear in solidarity movement publications.164 Terre des Femmes supported women’s local self-help projects in countries such as India, Chile, Zimbab­we, and Nicaragua. There was some internal debate about these projects, over whether they were distinctively feminist, and whether they ultimately promoted dependence on the West.165 Some advocated a shift away from a country-by-country approach (which fragmented expertise within Terre des Femmes) and toward a thematic approach. These discussions also paralleled those in the Third World solidarity movement.166 By 1990 the membership of Terre des Femmes had almost completely turned over: “unfortunately hardly any of the women from the first and second generations are still active in the organization.”167 Two campaigns by Terre des Femmes from the late 1980s illustrate its effort to highlight West Germans’ impact on women in the Third World. First, in response to information from a Korean women’s group in West Berlin, Terre des Femmes conducted a boycott in 1986 against Adler, a

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discount clothing chain that sold clothing made by South Korean women under exploitative conditions in a free trade zone.168 Terre des Femmes supported the Korean women workers’ demands for unionization, wage increases, and an end to night and Sunday shifts. The lead activist in that campaign, Christa Stolle, also wrote a book about Korean women recruited to work as nurses in West Germany, and their struggles for equal pay and working conditions there.169 The Terre des Femmes campaign was successful.170 A second example is Terre des Femmes’s exposure of a Freiburg area man’s putative matchmaking service. Terre des Femmes claimed it was a camouflaged operation for trafficking women. The man sued Terre des Femmes for defamation, but the case was decided in favor of Terre des Femmes’s freedom of speech.171 It was a suspenseful moment for the organization, for if the decision had gone the other way Terre des Femmes would have been bankrupted. Terre des Femmes remained focused on the issue of sex tourism, and particularly protested the fact that West German men were immune to prosecution for sexual relations with children abroad.172 That changed in 1998, when sex with children abroad became a punishable offense inside Germany. These two campaigns exemplified Terre des Femmes’s effort to counter racism or the perception of racism in their activism by confronting an injustice at two sites, at home and abroad. Terre des Femmes also attempted its “first domestic project” in the late 1980s: Villa Courage, a shelter near Freiburg to be run by and for refugee women seeking asylum.173 The idea for founding this shelter as a model for all of West Germany grew out of discussion at Terre des Femmes’s seminar in 1987 on foreign, immigrant, and refugee women (Ausländerinnen) in West Germany.174 It also grew out of debate inside Terre des Femmes about its own predominantly white or majority German (mehrheitsdeutsche) membership, and how black and foreign women could participate more actively in its work.175 Controversy over the Villa Courage project soon became overwhelming. Members debated whether it was a problem that no refugee women could be found to help establish and run it; whether its residents could be protected from racist violence; and whether establishing the shelter (which involved renovating an old building) was too great a financial commitment for the small organization.176 Finally, a separate nonprofit organization was established for the shelter to protect Terre des Femmes financially and also to resolve the internal conflict over the relative importance of the project. However, divisions persisted, as some members who had championed the shelter, including Susanne Reichinger, were irritated that the project had been

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so controversial and that Terre des Femmes had not committed itself as a whole to the project.177 Terre des Femmes’s original issues of female genital cutting, honor violence, and gender-specific grounds for asylum remained on its agenda during the latter half of the 1980s. A presentation on female genital cutting at the Bremen Women’s Week (Frauenwoche) in 1985 sparked the creation of a new local chapter that included Beninese and Filipina women who were also active in the IAF.178 In 1986 a member of Terre des Femmes traveled to Lausanne to revive the connection with Edmond Kaiser and Sentinelles. Her visit led to Terre des Femmes’s first book, a German translation of a Sentinelles publication on honor killing.179 In 1988 Susanne Reichinger and another member, Juliane von Krause, called for renewing activism on female genital cutting by using existing contacts in Egypt and Tanzania.180 In 1988 Terre des Femmes also followed the progress of the parliamentary inquiry (Grosse Anfrage) on the human rights of women initiated by Hildegard Hamm-Brücher, a Free Democratic Party member of parliament.181 Prominent there was the question of gender-specific grounds for asylum. A typical everyday intervention by Terre des Femmes was its exchange with a male journalist who had described a Syrian woman fleeing a threatened stoning and seeking asylum in West Germany. He wrote that she had not fled “on political grounds.” Member Antje Pähler wrote to the journalist: “Human rights violations done to women are constantly made to seem harmless and depoliticized. With reference to ‘traditional customs’ the injustice done to women is relegated to the private sphere—yet in the case of men, SOLIDARITY is demanded.” He responded that he accepted her argument and would foreground gender-specific grounds for asylum in his future articles.182 By 1989 Terre des Femmes had achieved stability, with about 150 members.183 It was still a purely volunteer organization. Only in 1990 did it establish its first paid position, a part-time post held by Christa Stolle, who had been an active member since 1984 and remains executive director (Geschäftsführerin) today.184 Stolle had been an anthropology student and previously active in the Society for Threatened Peoples but was frustrated at that organization’s reluctance to expose abuses of women in the ethnic groups it sought to protect.185 In 1991, Terre des Femmes’s tenth anniversary, it had active chapters based in eight West German cities.186 Today, having recently passed its thirtieth anniversary, it is flourishing.187 It has a centralized and professionalized staff of about eighteen and draws upon the energies of donors and volunteers throughout Germany. Its activism is centered on physical

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violence against women—including its oldest themes of honor violence and female genital cutting. In 1994, in the wake of the U.N. conference on human rights in Vienna, Terre des Femmes co-founded the Human Rights Forum (Forum Menschenrechte), a German consortium that plays a major role in human rights activism in Germany today. (The Humanist Union, the International League for Human Rights, German Amnesty, and the Society for Threatened Peoples are also members.) Terre des Femmes today is frequently cited in Germany’s media outlets. It identifies itself as a feminist organization, and celebrates its successes as signs of the vitality of feminism today. It has used the language of human rights to counter the argument of cultural relativism among those whom it seeks to mobilize, as well as to work through debates inside and outside the organization about neo-colonial intervention. Germans, like others around the world, have become accustomed to seeing feminism and human rights paired, and Terre des Femmes has been key in bringing that about.

Conclusion

In this book, I have offered the reader a set of stories. They are important stories, chosen with an eye to the four main usages of the language of human rights in West Germany, but they are far from the only stories. More could be added, like pages to a loose-leaf binder, from the West German era as well as from the years since unification of West and East Germany in 1990. The Society for Threatened Peoples suggests itself, with its combination of three of the usages highlighted in this book: it educated Germans about the Nazi past, especially with regard to the genocide of the Sinti and Roma; it invoked the suffering of the ethnic German expellees; and it continues to defend the human rights of non-German indigenous and minority groups worldwide. Just as West German Amnesty rejected anti-communism as a guide to what constituted a human rights violation, so did the Society for Threatened Peoples reject the left as a guide to who is revolutionary or reactionary, starting with the case of Biafra.1 Another candidate is the German Institute for Human Rights (Deutsches Institut für Menschenrechte). This organization was founded in 2001 in Berlin in response to the Paris Principles, a mandate by the United Nations in 1993 that each member country fund an agency from public monies to promote human rights domestically and in the member country’s foreign policy. Neither an NGO nor a government office, the German Institute for Human Rights offers a fascinating snapshot of the diverse constituencies who claim to represent Germany’s main areas of human rights engagement. Its staff and board members include people who work on issues from discrimination to development to the expellee cause. Yet a third candidate would be the German chapter of the FoodFirst Information and

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Action Network, better known as FIAN. This organization highlights food as a basic human right and thereby seeks to focus human rights advocacy on poverty. With FIAN’s leftist and radical pacifist activism, it complements the story of the International League for Human Rights. In such additional stories, there could emerge the presence and concerns of people who lived in East Germany or whose lives have been shaped by living in the eastern, “new” Länder of united Germany since 1990, excluded in this book. The loose-leaf binder could never be complete, however. This is not due to any logistical problem regarding the vast extent of human rights advocacy today, although it certainly is vast. It is because there are not and cannot be definitive criteria for determining who is in and who is out, who is genuine and who is cynical or false, and this book has steered away from doing so. There is no committee or panel anywhere that vets whether human rights activists are using norms correctly—nor could there ever be such a panel, as dispute is of the essence of human rights talk. Let me be more precise: sometimes we can know that someone is false. In the course of my research, I came across records of one man in Frankfurt who claimed to run an organization there named Human Rights International. He drew up a passport for an invented country named Koneuwe and tried to enter East Germany with it. It was just one episode in a creative lifetime of fraudulent activity.2 What is required of human rights advocates, if historians are to take them seriously at all, is that they enjoy some degree of credibility among some audience for their use of the language of human rights. The best way to navigate among these very numerous individuals and organizations is to analyze human rights as a strategic political language. Instead of adding more pages to the loose-leaf binder, then, let us summarize the basic approaches to the material this book has taken, and what its stories have shown. First, I have situated the protagonists in this book in their domestic political context, rather than in an international or non-national arena, or in an abstract realm of ethical motivation, although they may well belong there. In this book, they appear at various specific moments in West German society: the Allied occupation, the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the confrontation with Adenauer in the early 1960s, the détente of the late 1960s and 1970s, and feminism in the context of critique of the left and the larger political turn to the right of the 1980s. The domestic political context of human rights advocates is invaluable for understanding why and how they acted, and why human rights seemed to them a useful rhetoric. To analyze the language of human rights as a strategic political language is to move away from labeling

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it as an inherently good or nefarious project, and to focus on more specific questions of who has sought to use that language, why, and to what ends. The language of human rights has served the goals of both universal justice and specific politics. Both are irreducible—and irreducibly controversial— aspects of using the language of human rights. They leave us with our own political choices to make. Second, I have kept the focus on people, not on human rights norms. What most people think of when they think of the history of human rights are historical accounts organized around the production of landmark normsetting, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I certainly did when I began this project. Such accounts can untangle the sources and controversies that produced those written norms. But they cannot explain how and why people act in the wake of, and with reference to, those written norms. Documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights may inspire people, but they do not determine what people do with them. The history of human rights should not necessarily be organized primarily around timelines of landmark documents. Human rights norms do not unfold or evolve over time in any necessary way, and they do not represent increasing moral progress. This is because people, and not norms, are the true subjects of the history of human rights. West Germans who appropriated the language of human rights did not need to school themselves in the intellectual histories of the norms they referenced, nor in German or European legal traditions—even in a society as highly historically conscious as West Germany’s. If they had needed to do so, human rights advocacy would have never left international lawyers’ desks. For that matter, the international lawyers we have seen here were well schooled in those intellectual histories, yet their professional knowledge does not fully explain the arguments they made. Various historical moments offer various possibilities for what human rights advocates find feasible to say and enact, but that is not primarily because of the content of the norms; rather, we must look closer to home—to the domestic context of human rights advocates—to find the reasons for the array of possibilities at any given moment. This is why this book sets aside diachronic analysis of what path “human rights,” as some putatively singular phenomenon, took in the years 1945 to 1990, in favor of a series of synchronic analyses. Third, I have attended to human rights as a strategic political language that garners credibility. As we ask about the sources of human rights advocates’ credibility, we are led to the question of who their audiences are. Their

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audiences are usually to be found in the advocates’ own domestic contexts, regardless of where the intended beneficiaries of the activism may be. (An exception was the early German League for Human Rights, which Kurt Grossmann and other émigrés hoped would speak to an audience beyond Germany, to convince that audience that Germany had learned from its Nazi past.) The fact that credibility is linked to a specific audience means that universal credibility is unlikely. Rather, credibility is a local and historically specific issue. Human rights advocates find particular forms of credibility among particular audiences, at particular times. We thereby reach the basic question of this book, of why West Germany had the kinds of human rights advocates that it did. If we consider the stories presented in this book, it is clear that the political moment of a group’s emergence and flourishing is much more important than longer-running traditions. The German League for Human Rights was quite authentic—certainly Germans had no prewar rights organization to boast of that was more authentic—and yet it faced almost insurmountable barriers to reestablishing itself in Germany’s second democracy. In other words, human rights advocates might have had a tradition to build on, but that did not make things any easier for them. As in its Weimar days, the League pursued domestic civil liberties and international human rights from a distinctively leftist and pacifist standpoint. While the long-standing members felt secure in their convictions after 1945, they could not easily expand their organization without colliding with rights advocates focused on German sufferings or on fighting communism. Anti-communism as human rights was all the more difficult for the League to grapple with, as those long-standing League members were themselves composed of both those loyal to communism—which now meant loyalty to the Socialist Unity Party in East Germany—and those committed to an anti-totalitarian social democracy. The League’s story also indicates the power of militant anti-communism for the human rights scene in West Germany. True, the League presented itself as an anti-communist organization only in the 1950s, and without full internal consensus. This book did not focus on one of the other anti-communist organizations of the 1950s, such as the Free Jurists’ Investigative Committee, or on the most important anticommunist human rights organization of the 1970s, the International Society for Human Rights (Internationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte), which has been analyzed elsewhere.3 Yet the power of anti-communism emerges starkly in the League’s story. Like the expellee cause, anti-communism was an issue to which the West German state very publicly committed itself. And

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anti-communism could serve as the focus of an insurgent human rights advocacy because there was room, in the eyes of human rights advocates, for the state to do yet more—to recognize more of those who left East Germany as true political refugees, and to push harder for various forms of restitution for expellees. The years after 1989, beyond the scope of this book, have given renewed prominence to former East Germans’ interventions concerning communism as a human rights violation. The League was only able to establish itself over the long run by focusing squarely on that which its members found necessary to any credible enunciation of human rights by Germans: the crimes of the Nazi past. That is not all the re-founded International League for Human Rights did—it also foregrounded colonial powers’ human rights violations and the racism of the United States, for example—but education about the Nazi past has been its anchor. Germany’s rich left tradition, as well as its narrower but still important pacifist tradition, was why it had these human rights activists. Germany’s experience of dictatorship, war, and genocide left these people in their tiny but morally outstanding position after 1945. Then came the Cold War confrontation that forced intra-German struggles over communism into the forms pursued by the United States on the one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other, produced the struggles of the League. Along with the left and pacifist League, and along with anti-communism, there simultaneously emerged a third phenomenon in the Western zones of occupation after 1945: human rights claims on behalf of German expellees and refugees (those who fled the Red Army from the eastern provinces of Prussia). This was a new group, produced by the war that Nazi Germany had started. It used old rights discussions for support: Rudolf Laun’s progressive international law and Habsburg schemes for equity among nationalities in a decentralized state. Laun, himself an anti-Nazi, used the decontextualizing effects of law to highlight expellees as human rights victims in sharp polemics against all four Allies. This was highly persuasive to many people in occupied and West Germany, and not at all persuasive to others. Of the three usages of the language of human rights that we can hear in the early years of West Germany, the two concerning the expellees and anti-communism were by far the most prominent. Indeed, they reinforced each other, as the expelling countries soon established communist regimes. Throughout the years of West Germany and also since unification, Germans have continued to dispute the proper way to situate the sufferings of the expellees and refugees. While Laun himself may have become obsolete, the elaboration of the expellee cause as

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a human rights cause deepened and it continues today. It is ironic that Otto Kimminich was the one to connect the expellee cause as a human rights issue with other human rights discussions supported by liberals and the left, such as the right of asylum, given that his politics were far to the right of Laun’s and indeed of just the type so suspect to left and liberal critics of the expellee cause. Kimminich defended the rights of refugees in general, but that did not mean advocating refugees’ equality across the board in a West Germany of guest worker programs and of political refugees from Algeria, South Africa, Iran, and elsewhere. Rather, Kimminich articulated foreign refugees’ asylum rights as the upper limit of what ought to be granted to outsiders, who would otherwise pose a threat to hosts with a supposedly vulnerable culture of their own. Kimminich’s human rights formulations were legally rigorous but provincializing due to a rigid, limiting notion of culture. His notion of culture has by no means become obsolete; on the contrary, it holds great sway today in Germany and Europe, in the era of the “war on terror” and a widespread politics of Islamophobia. The last years of the 1950s and the early 1960s showed a novel development in human rights activism: the foundation of human rights organizations as a form of anti-anti-communism, and specifically as opposition to Konrad Adenauer’s continuing chancellorship. The International League for Human Rights now re-emerged with its emphasis on education about the Nazi past, and new organizations were founded: West German Amnesty and the Humanist Union. Again, continuity did not translate into strength. The Humanist Union was a novel creation, yet it flourished immediately. West German Amnesty was both novel and non-German in origin, and within seven or so years it also came to overshadow the League. More important than any tradition was the capability of offering new political choices in a sclerotic and even oppressive political environment. Terre des Femmes was founded in 1981, that is, a moment well after human rights work had come to be associated with work on behalf of distant others. I want to emphasize that the shift from preoccupations with Germans (whether as perpetrators or sufferers) to preoccupations with Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans as sufferers ought not to be viewed as some final, full realization of a genuine concept of international human rights. Activism on behalf of distant sufferers is not the sine qua non of international human rights. To the extent that we reflexively assume that it is, we are still formed by a specific moment in postcolonial European and neo-European consciousness starting in the late 1960s and the 1970s.4 The stories of West

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German Amnesty, Otto Kimminich, and Terre des Femmes show that this human rights advocacy directed abroad in fact had important domestic motivations. One reason why the model of international human rights advocacy of the 1970s has been hard to export elsewhere may well be that it entails expecting non-Europeans to do what West Germans and presumably other Europeans and neo-Europeans in fact never did: to act on behalf of distant others purely on the basis of abstract ideals, rather than political issues closer to home.5 Be that as it may, it is true that such advocacy suddenly enjoyed great credibility among the West German public in the 1970s, while it had been quite marginal in previous years. One answer is the West German state’s greatly increased political and economic power since the opening years of this book—power to which West German human rights advocates and Third World solidarity activists frequently alluded in the 1970s.6 Another answer was that critical citizens in West Germany in the 1970s had more respect for their own state, or at least less respect for the states that loomed so large on the West German horizon: the Soviet Union, France, and the United States. Stalinism, the Algerian War, and the Vietnam War all served to lessen those states’ credibility in West Germans’ eyes.7 Those moral disasters helped West Germans increase their own credibility as political actors responsible for drawing the consequences of the Nazi past but no longer necessarily under the tutelage of those states. The emergence of Terre des Femmes in the early 1980s likewise indicates how context and discontinuity mattered more than tradition. Although a product of West German feminism, Terre des Femmes did not have deep roots in older German feminist traditions; before the caesura of 1933 German feminists had not focused on anti-racism or non-European women.8 Just as West German Amnesty and the Humanist Union opposed anti-communism without relinquishing their own criticisms of communism, so did Terre des Femmes oppose the left while still situating itself on the left side of the political spectrum. The story of Terre des Femmes told here foregrounds the fact that West German feminists were capable of producing their others from within, as were the French feminists who were so influential for them. It was insults to French feminists that provoked Benoîte Groult’s discovery of female genital cutting, and her outrage directly fueled that of Ingrid Staehle and others. For Staehle and others in Terre des Femmes, Muslim and African women’s rights developed an “active social life” of their own, to follow Leila Ahmed’s analytical method.9 Muslim and African women’s rights lent these European feminists a focal point for their own multifaceted feminist

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struggles, and a trump card against men and women on the left who would discount feminism’s importance. Activism against honor killing and female genital cutting gave Terre des Femmes considerable credibility among members of the public in West and unified Germany. However, the same activism also veered toward an exoticization of African and Muslim women’s lives in extremis, which lessened the group’s credibility at times among some Germans and non-Germans, and hampered Terre des Femmes’s overarching goal: to enact an anti-racist conception of all women, German and not, as a unified political subject. The language of human rights is oppositional, but in an insubstantial, open-ended kind of way that other available forms of opposition cannot offer. The in-depth stories in this book suggest that the four usages of human advocacy outlined in the Introduction were the main ways in which that abstract opposition was fleshed out in the years of West Germany. In practice, however, the commitments of people and organizations could be complex. We have seen that the Allied occupation and expellee experience shaped not only Rudolf Laun and Otto Kimminich, but also ideas of German women’s victimhood in the occupation era held by members of Terre des Femmes. The Humanist Union, Otto Kimminich, and Terre des Femmes shared a serious interest in foreigners’ rights inside West Germany even as they probably agreed on little else. Otto Kimminich read Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt’s pacifist works, and figures from Kurt Grossmann to Carola Stern have acknowledged the horrors that expellees faced.10 Yet those four usages do help to organize this complex scene. In West German human rights activism, the Nazi past as a source of human rights lessons, the communist present, the sufferings of Germans, and the suffering of non-Germans mapped out the most frequently used options. Lines between these usages could be crossed, but only after many years, and with difficulty. Even Terre des Femmes did not fully combine Germans and non-Germans in its mandate, for it set aside German men to posit women as a transnational group. This book has told the stories of these organizations and individuals in a particular way—listening to their words, but not necessarily taking them at their word. The stories told here are largely new or little-known ones, but they are tightly connected to some of the best-known and most important aspects of West German history: democratization, the politics of the Nazi past, the confrontation with communism, the extra-parliamentary opposition, the quest for sexual equality, and the public reception of the

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pluralistic, multicultural nature of West and unified German society. These stories’ protagonists were key actors in that history. The strong connections between the stories in this book and the history of West Germany altogether are the best evidence of the diverse impacts of human rights advocacy there. West Germany, like unified Germany today, is unthinkable without them.

A Note on Sources

The most important place to begin research on the history of the organizations in this book was the archives of those organizations themselves, if they had any. The Humanist Union and Terre des Femmes did, in their main offices in Berlin and Tübingen respectively. (Terre des Femmes moved its main office and archive to Berlin after I visited it in Tübingen.) The staffs of both organizations were friendly, interested, and open, and I learned a great deal from them as well as from the well-kept records they offered me. The feminist archive Women’s Media Tower (Frauen Media Turm) in Cologne also holds publications and newsletters related to Terre des Femmes, as well as many standard and hard-to-find sources on German feminist history, and I worked there as well. The Hamburg District Court (Amtsgericht) provided a copy of the organization’s registration from its registry of associations (Vereinsregister). The German section of Amnesty International has an archive (it was in Bonn at the time I was doing my research, and is now in Berlin). It is my understanding that a couple of researchers have used it, although in general the German Amnesty International has no staff or space to accommodate outside researchers. Apparently the researchers did not get very far, probably because the materials are not processed or sorted. Linda Schmidt has offered the best history of the West German Amnesty International so far, and she depended on oral histories and a few documents from its founding that she located in the Cologne Vereinsregister. See Linda Schmidt, “Menschenrechte in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte—Die Gründung von

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amnesty international im Jahre 1961” (M.A. thesis, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 1999). Given this, I turned to the International Institute for Social History (IISH; formerly known as the IISG) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and to the papers of Carola Stern, held at the Archive of Social Democracy at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Archiv der Sozialen Demokratie, FriedrichEbert-Stiftung) in Bonn. I was also fortunate to be able to speak with two key members, Carola Stern at her home and Wolfgang Heinz at his place of work, the German Institute for Human Rights (Deutsches Institut für Menschenrechte) in Berlin, which has a useful library collection open to the public. The International League for Human Rights has no archive, at least of its early years, and Chapter 1 of this book explains why. I turned to state-created documents in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and to the Federal Commission for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic (Die Bundesbeauftragte für die Unter­lagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik). I also turned to the personal papers of individuals involved with it, which have been deposited at various archives. These included the papers of Kurt R. Grossmann, held in the Leo Baeck Institute, New York and in the Hoover Institution Library and Archives in Palo Alto, California; the papers of Veit Valentin, held in the Institute for City History (Institut für Stadtgeschichte) in Frankfurt; the papers of Ossip K. Flechtheim, Lili Faktor-Flecht­ heim, and Karl Retzlaw in the German Exile Archive (Deutsches Exilarchiv) at the German Library (Deutsche Bibliothek) in Frankfurt; and the papers of Roger Baldwin in the Princeton University Library in Princeton, New Jersey. Finally, the Swarthmore College Peace Collection in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, provided me with materials on the postwar German League for Human Rights—indeed, the ones that started me down my path. While there are archives relevant to the two international lawyers I researched here, I decided to center my research on their published works, as in general I sought to work with material that was or could be known to West Germans at the time. (The stories of the German League for Human Rights and to a lesser extent Terre des Femmes do veer into some material from behind the scenes, however.) I was glad to learn that parallel to my project, Rainer Biskup was executing a thorough, archivally based biography of Rudolf Laun, and he was kind enough to share portions of his manuscript with me. It has since been published: Rainer Biskup, Rudolf Laun: Staatsrechtslehr­er zwischen Republik und Diktatur (Hamburg: Conference Point, 2010). I consulted the following periodicals intensively: the League’s periodi-

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cal Die Menschenrechte, which I used at the Otto Suhr Institute library at the Free University of Berlin (unfortunately, many issues are in inaccessible storage there); the Humanist Union members’ newsletter, Mitteilungen der Humanistischen Union, which I used at its main office; the journal Vorgänge, which is associated with the Humanist Union and is widely available in research libraries; and the Terre des Femmes members’ newsletter, Rundbrief, which I used at its main office and also at the Frauen Media Turm. I also regularly drew upon Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and die tageszeitung. The secondary literature for this project is extensive, as each chapter covers quite different ground. Here, I provide a highly selective bibliography of those secondary works that most influenced my thinking during this project. Ackermann, Volker. Der “echte” Flüchtling: Deutsche Vertriebene und Flüchtlinge aus der DDR 1945-1961. Osnabrück: Rasch, 1995. Ahonen, Pertti. After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe 1945-1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Amireh, Amal. “Framing Nawal El Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World.” Signs 26, no. 1 (Autumn 2000): 215-49. Balsen, Werner, and Karl Rössel. Hoch die internationale Solidarität: Zur Geschichte der Dritte Welt-Bewegung in der Bundesrepublik. Cologne: Kölner Volksblatt, 1986. Berg, Nicolas. Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung. Göttingen, 2003. Boddy, Janice. Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. Buchanan, Tom. “‘The Truth Will Set You Free’: The Making of Amnesty International.” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 4 (2002): 575-97. Claudius, Thomas, and Franz Stepan. Amnesty International: Portrait einer Organisation. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1976. Cmiel, Kenneth. “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States.” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1231-50. Cornelissen, Christoph. “Nur noch ‘strenge Wissenschaftlichkeit.’ Das Collegium Carolinum im Gründungsjahrzehnt (1955-1965).” In Geschichtsschreibung zu den böhmischen Ländern im 20. Jahrhundert: Wissenschaftstraditionen—Institutionen— Diskurse, ed. Christiane Brenner, K. Erik Franzen, Peter Haslinger, and Robert Luft, 345-65. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2006. Denninger, Erhard. Menschenrechte und Grundgesetz. Weinheim: Beltz Athenäum, 1994. Eckel, Jan, and Samuel Moyn, eds. Moral für die Welt? Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er Jahren. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2012. Freimüller, Tobias. Alexander Mitscherlich: Gesellschaftsdiagnosen und Psychoanalyse nach Hitler. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007.

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Henne, Thomas, and Arne Riedlinger, eds. Das Lüth-Urteil aus (rechts-)historischer Sicht: Die Konflikte um Veit Harlan und die Grundrechtsjudikatur des Bundesverfassungsgerichts. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, 2005. Herzog, Dagmar. Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. Hochgeschwender, Michael. Freiheit in der Offensive? Der Kongress für kulturelle Freiheit und die Deutschen. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1998. Hodenberg, Christina von. Konsens und Krise: Eine Geschichte der westdeutschen Medienöffentlichkeit 1945-1973. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006. Hodgson, Dorothy L., ed. Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, ed. Moralpolitik: Geschichte der Menschenrechte im 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010. Hopgood, Stephen. Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006. Kahn, Paul. The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Kommers, Donald P. The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany. 2nd rev. and exp. ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. Koskenniemi, Martti. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Lampe, Gerhard. Panorama, Report und Monitor: Geschichte der politischen Fernseh­ magazine 1957-1990. Konstanz: UVK Medien, 2000. Lauren, Paul Gordon. The Evolution of International Human Rights. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Leggewie, Claus. Kofferträger: Das Algerien-Projekt der Linken im Adenauer-Deutschland. Berlin: Rotbuch, 1984. Lenz, Ilse, ed. Die neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland: Abschied vom kleinen Unterschied: Eine Quellensammlung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008. Lyons, Harriet. “Anthropologists, Moralities, and Relativities: The Problem of Genital Mutilations.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 18, no. 4 (1981): 499518. McAlister, Melani. “Suffering Sisters? American Feminists and the Problem of Female Genital Surgeries.” In Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal, ed. Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin, 242-62. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Mika, Bascha. Alice Schwarzer: Eine kritische Biographie. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1998. Moeller, Robert G. War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Möllers, Christoph. Der vermisste Leviathan: Staatstheorie in der Bundesrepublik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008.

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Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2010. Müller, Jan-Werner. A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-war European Thought. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. Nnaemeka, Obioma, ed. Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourse. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Prehn, Ulrich. “‘Volk’ und ‘Raum’ in zwei Nachkriegszeiten: Kontinuitäten und Wandlungen in der Arbeit des Volkstumsforschers Max Hildebert Boehm.” In Das Erbe der Provinz: Heimatkultur und Geschichtspolitik nach 1945, ed. Habbo Knoch, 5072. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001. Quataert, Jean H. Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Ross, Kristin. May ’68 and Its Afterlives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Salzborn, Samuel. Die Ethnisierung der Politik: Theorie und Geschichte des Volksgruppenrechts in Europa. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005. Schönwälder, Karen. “Minderheitenschutz: Anerkennung kultureller Pluralität oder Ausdruck ‘völkischen Denkens’?” In Antifaschismus, ed. Frank Deppe, Georg Fülberth, and Rainer Rilling, 453-67. Heibronn: Distel, 1996. Schulz, Kristina. Der lange Atem der Provokation: Die Frauenbewegung in der Bundesrepublik und in Frankreich, 1968-1976. Frankfurt: Campus, 2002. Simpson, A. W. Brian. Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Voss, Silke. Parlamentarische Menschenrechtspolitik: Die Behandlung internationaler Menschenrechtsfragen im Deutschen Bundestag unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Unterausschusses für Menschenrechte und humanitäre Hilfe (1972-1998). Düsseldorf: Droste, 2000. Wojak, Irmtrud. Fritz Bauer 1903-1968: Eine Biographie. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009. Wüst, Jürgen. Menschenrechtsarbeit im Zwielicht: Zwischen Staatssicherheit und Anti­ faschismus. Bonn: Bouvier, 1999.

Notes

Introduction 1. Moyn uses this phrase on a syllabus: “Historical Origins of Human Rights,” available on his Columbia University faculty webpage, www.columbia.edu/~sam2008 (accessed 17 August 2009). For his full formulation of this issue, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2010). 2. Kahn calls for a “cultural study of law,” for which “the issue is not whether law makes us better off, but what it is that the law makes us.” Paul Kahn, The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1, 6. 3. As the historian Kenneth Cmiel has pointed out, the abstract, universal language of human rights, linked to a shocking image or description, can be powerfully mobilizing even though such a brief or “‘thin’ cultural message” typically conveys very little “local history or context.” Kenneth Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1231-50, here 1233. 4. See Norbert Frei, Dirk van Laak, and Michael Stolleis, eds., Geschichte vor Gericht: Historiker, Richter und die Suche nach Gerechtigkeit (Munich: Beck, 2000); and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt, and Marilyn B. Young, eds., Human Rights and Revolutions (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). 5. Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” and Kenneth Cmiel, “Freedom of Information, Human Rights, and the Origins of Third World Solidarity,” in Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights, ed. Mark Philip Bradley and Patrice Petro (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 107-30. More recently, Samuel Moyn, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Jan Eckel, and others have applied similar approaches and fostered others’ work. See Samuel Moyn, “Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 85-106; Moyn,

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Notes to Pages 4–5

The Last Utopia; Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1-26; Jan Eckel, “Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht: Menschenrechte in der globalen Politik seit 1945,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009): 437-84; and Jan Eckel, “‘Under a Magnifying Glass’: The International Human Rights Campaign against Chile in the Seventies,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 321-41. 6. One example is Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), which tells a particular story of the cultivation of anti-cruelty sentiment in eighteenth-century Europe that is then grafted onto the much larger histories of rights and their globalization. Another example is Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). This book sacrifices particular contexts and motivations in order to present the reader with a dazzling portrait of the collective power of many globally diverse persons and their causes. Jean H. Quataert’s Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) offers in-depth discussion of key issues but does not seek to illuminate the domestic context of actors. 7. Examples include Ann Marie Clark’s valuable discussion of Amnesty International’s impact on human rights norms and Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink’s influential study of transnational activism; all are political scientists. See Ann Marie Clark, Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998). 8. E.g., Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Human Rights into Local Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), the second chapter of which analyzes the specific cultural space of United Nations meetings; Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol, eds., Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005); and Harri Englund, Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 9. On the concept of a “human rights movement,” see Philip Alston and Henry Steiner, International Human Rights in Context, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), v: “post-1945 governmental, intergovernmental and nongovernmental developments in both national and international contexts in the recognition and protection of human rights.” 10. A few other historians have also emphasized the importance of domestic political context in human rights activism; besides Kenneth Cmiel, see Tom Buchanan, “‘The Truth Will Set You Free’: The Making of Amnesty International,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 4 (2002): 575-97. For the German case, see Silke Voss, Parlamentarische Menschenrechtspolitik: Die Behandlung internationaler Menschenrechtsfragen im Deutschen Bundestag unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Unterausschusses für Menschenrechte und

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humanitäre Hilfe (1972-1998) (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2000); Jürgen Wüst, Menschenrechtsarbeit im Zwielicht: Zwischen Staatssicherheit und Antifaschismus (Bonn: Bouvier, 1999); and Holger Nehring, “Americanized Protests? The British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons and the Pacifist Roots of the West German New Left, 1957-64,” in Decentering America, ed. Jessica Gienow-Hecht (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 210-51. 11. Paul Betts, “Germany, International Justice and the Twentieth Century,” History and Memory 17, no. 1-2 (2005): 45-86. 12. As noted in Karl Josef Partsch, Hoffen auf Menschenrechte: Rückbesinnung auf eine internationale Entwicklung (Zurich: Edition Interfrom, 1994), 47-48. 13. Donald P. Kommers, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany, 2nd rev. and exp. ed. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 10, 157-58 on international law as domestic law (Article 25 of the Basic Law). The Weimar constitution also integrated international law into domestic law. I am indebted to Linda Schmidt’s discussion in her thesis: “Menschenrechte in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte—Die Gründung von amnesty international im Jahre 1961” (M.A. thesis, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 1999), 37-49. 14. On the right of individual petition, see A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 7 and 1077 as well as the broader discussion on 649-753. On Germany and the European Convention, see the discussion and references in Andreas Zimmermann, “Germany,” in Fundamental Rights in Europe: The European Convention on Human Rights and Its Member States, 1950-2000, ed. Robert Blackburn and Jörg Polakiewicz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 335-54. Elisabeth Lambert Abdelgawad and Anne Weber stress West Germany’s eagerness to commit itself to the right of individual petition and compulsory jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights in 1955 in “The Reception Process in France and Germany,” in A Europe of Rights: The Impact of the ECHR on National Legal Systems, ed. Helen Keller and Alec Stone Sweet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 107-64, esp. 111-12. On the increasing overlap between the European right of individual petition to the European Court of Human Rights and the German right to lodge a constitutional complaint with the Federal Constitutional Court, see Georg Ress, “The Effects of Judgments and Decisions in Domestic Law,” in The European System for the Protection of Human Rights, ed. Ronald St. J. Macdonald, Franz Matscher, and Herbert Petzold (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1993), 834-35. 15. See Heinz Dröge, Fritz Münch, and Ellinor von Puttkamer, Die Bundesrepublik und die Vereinten Nationen (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1966); Deutsche Gesellschaft für die Vereinten Nationen, ed., 10 Jahre Vereinte Nationen: Von 1945 bis 1955: Deutschland und die Vereinten Nationen (Frankfurt: Continentale Verlagsgesellschaft, 1956); and Deutsche UNESCO-Kommission, ed., Lernziel Weltoffenheit: Fünfzig Jahre Mitarbeit in der UNESCO (Bonn: Deutsche UNESCO-Kommission, 2001). 16. Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., Tamed Power: Germany in Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). 17. By the 1960s, West German jurists had broken with their own legal tradition

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regarding state sovereignty. See Frieder Günther, Denken vom Staat her: Die bundesdeutsche Staatsrechtslehre zwischen Dezision und Integration 1949-1970 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2004). On West German jurists’ discussions of the concept of the state, see Christoph Möllers, Der vermisste Leviathan: Staatstheorie in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008), 10. A historical account of West German ideas of “Europe” is offered in Vanessa Conze, Das Europa der Deutschen: Ideen von Europa in Deutschland zwischen Reichstradition und Westorientierung (1920-1970) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005). 18. Article 1 of the Basic Law, reprinted in Kommers, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany, 507. 19. See Kommers, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany, 14-15 and 27-28 on constitutional complaints and 31-34 and 364 on direct applicability of basic rights. 20. This has been a contentious issue in the historiography of the post-1945 era. Advocates of the “success story” argument include, e.g., Axel Schildt, Ankunft im Westen: Ein Essay zur Erfolgsgeschichte der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999), and Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Its critics include, e.g., Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration, trans. Joel Golb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), and Stephan Alexander Glienke, Volker Paulmann, and Joachim Perels, eds., Erfolgsgeschichte Bundesrepublik? Die Nachkriegsgesellschaft im langen Schatten des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008). Numerous scholars associated with organizations discussed in this book, such as the International League for Human Rights, West German Amnesty, and the Humanist Union, have contributed to this literature, including Joachim Perels and Christoph Klessmann. 21. Precisely because the East German case was so utterly different, in this respect and in respect of its far sharper restrictions on expression and association, this book does not develop any arguments about human rights advocacy in the German Democratic Republic. Interested readers should consult the work of the historian Ned Richardson-Little, including his doctoral dissertation to be completed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “The Exploitation of Man by Man Has Been Abolished: Dictatorship, Dissent and Human Rights in East Germany” and his contribution to the following volume: Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, eds., Moral für die Welt? Menschenrechts­politik in den 1970er Jahren  (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, forthcoming 2012). 22. Hermann-Josef Rupieper, Die Wurzeln der westdeutschen Nachkriegsdemokratie: Der amerikanische Beitrag 1945-1952 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993). 23. The historiography on expellees and expellee organizations has grown recently, but so far little of it examines the important question of the relationship between the large demographic group of the expellees and the expellee lobby claiming to represent that group. Most historians analyze the organizations; important recent contributions include Pertti Ahonen, After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe 1945-

Notes to Pages 9–12

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1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Matthias Stickler, “Ostdeutsch heisst Gesamtdeutsch”: Organisation, Selbstverständnis und heimatpolitische Zielsetzungen der deutschen Vertriebenenverbände, 1949-1972 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004); and Tobias Weger, “Volkstumskampf ” ohne Ende? Sudetendeutsche Organisationen, 1945-1955 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008). Andreas Kossert seeks to turn attention to the large demographic group but avoids the hard and interesting questions regarding its relationship to the lobby. Andreas Kossert, Kalte Heimat: Die Geschichte der deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945 (Munich: Siedler, 2008). It is clear from all of these historians’ works, however, that the majority of expellees did not belong to the lobby organizations. In this book I attempt to be clear about whether a statement applies to the organizations or to the expellees, a large group holding diverse political opinions. 24. The legal scholar Alexandra Xanthaki notes that from the mid-1970s on, the international discussion of self-determination shifted emphasis from the external meaning (state independence) toward the internal meaning (recognition and autonomy within a state). She cites Principle VII of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 as an example. Examinations of when and to what extent European and non-European discussions of minority and indigenous rights converged should take that decade as a starting point. See Alexandra Xanthaki, “The Right to Self-Determination: Meaning and Scope,” in Minorities, Peoples, and Self-Determination: Essays in Honour of Patrick Thornberry, ed. Nazila Ghanea-Hercock and Alexandra Xanthaki (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2005), 1533, here 17-18. 25. On the emergence of indigenous rights advocacy in the 1970s in the context of earlier discussions and institutions regarding minority rights, see Karen Engle, The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 17-66. 26. The center’s website is www.z-g-v.de (accessed 21 June 2010). Some historians’ contributions to the German debate are Jürgen Danyel and Christoph Klessmann, “Unterwegs wie die Flüchtlinge und Vertriebenen: Zur Debatte über ein europäisches Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 51, no. 1 (2003): 31-35; and Bernd Faulenbach and Andreas Helle, eds., Zwangsmigration in Europa: Zur wissenschaftlichen und politischen Auseinandersetzung um die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten (Essen: Klartext, 2005). 27. A rich historical account of anti-communism as an important inspiration for post-1945 human rights is Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire. 28. Statutes cited from Wüst, Menschenrechtsarbeit im Zwielicht, 238-39. 29. Werner Balsen and Karl Rössel, Hoch die internationale Solidarität: Zur Geschichte der Dritte Welt-Bewegung in der Bundesrepublik (Cologne: Kölner Volksblatt, 1986), 119, 142-45. 30. Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). 31. Tilman Zülch, “Neurechts bis völkisch? Wo steht die GfbV? Tilman Zülch über das Selbstverständnis der Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker,” at www.gfbv.it (accessed

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10 August 2010). For that matter, numerous West Germans have invoked their experience as expellees or refugees during the era of the Second World War as a spur to their humanitarian work, including Rupert Neudeck of Cap Anamur. See Lora Wildenthal, “Humanitarianism in Postcolonial Contexts: Some West European Examples from the 1960s to the 1980s,” in Colonialism and Beyond: Race and Migration from a Postcolonial Perspective, ed. Elisabeth Engel and Eva Bischoff (Hamburg: LIT, forthcoming 2012). On the Society for Threatened Peoples, see Wüst, Menschenrechtsarbeit im Zwielicht, 237-71. Among Zülch’s many publications, see Soll Biafra überleben? Dokumente—Be­ richte—Analysen—Kommentare, ed. Tilman Zülch and Klaus Guercke, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Lettner-Verlag, 1969); Tilman Zülch, ed., Von denen keiner spricht: Unterdrückte Minderheiten—von der Friedenspolitik vergessen (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1975); and Johannes Vollmer and Tilman Zülch, eds., Aufstand der Opfer: Verratene Völker zwischen Hitler und Stalin (Göttingen: Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker, 1989). 32. Tilman Zülch, ed., In Auschwitz vergast, bis heute verfolgt: Zur Situation der Roma (Zigeuner) in Deutschland und Europa (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1979). 33. Zülch won the Human Rights Prize of one of the most important expellee lobby organizations, the Sudeten German Homeland Association (Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft), in 2003. In 2000, he signed the Magna Charta Gentium et Regionum, a milestone for advocates of Volksgruppenrecht (see Chapter 4). See Samuel Salzborn, Die Ethnisierung der Politik: Theorie und Geschichte des Volksgruppenrechts in Europa (Frankfurt: Campus, 2005), 277. On his support for the Center against Forced Migration, see its website, www.z-g-v.de, “Menschen an unserer Seite” (accessed 30 May 2011). 34. Christa Stolle (chairwoman of Terre des Femmes), personal communication, 28 May 2009. There was also tension between the Society of Threatened Peoples and the umbrella organization Federal Congress of Development Policy Action Groups (Bundeskongress entwicklungspolitischer Aktionsgruppen, BUKO), to which Terre des Femmes belonged. The Society of Threatened Peoples resigned from BUKO in 1991. Wüst, Menschenrechtsarbeit im Zwielicht, 249-50. 35. The closest thing we have to a historical overview of international law as practiced in West Germany is one essay: Ingo J. Hueck, “Völkerrechtsgeschichte: Hauptrichtungen, Tendenzen, Perspektiven,” in Internationale Geschichte: Themen—Ergebnisse—Aussichten, ed. Wilfried Loth and Jürgen Osterhammel (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2000), 267-85. 36. See the Forum’s website, which lists member organizations: www.forummenschenrechte.de (accessed 9 September 2011), as well as Werner Lottje, “Das ‘Forum Menschenrechte’: Chancen und Grenzen der Kooperation nichtstaatlicher Menschenrechtsorganisationen in Deutschland,” in Menschenrechte im Umbruch: 50 Jahre Allgemeine Erklärung der Menschenrechte, ed. Amnesty International [Heike Alefsen et al.] (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1998), 189-206; and Ingeborg Rürup, “Vom lästigen Mahner zum gefragten Partner: Das Forum Menschenrechte—eine Erfolgsgeschichte?” in 40 Jahre Bürgerrechtsbewegung, a special issue of Vorgänge 155, no. 3 (September 2001): 233-36.

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37. See its website, www.gbmev.de, “Über uns,” then “Satzung” (accessed 22 June 2011). 38. See, e.g., Katharina Kunter, Erfüllte Hoffnungen und zerbrochene Träume: Evan­ gelische Kirchen in Deutschland im Spannungsfeld von Demokratie und Sozialismus (1980-1993) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2006); and Klaus Fitschen et al., eds., Die Politisierung des Protestantismus: Entwicklungen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland während der 1960er und 70er Jahre (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2011). 39. Niklas Luhmann, Gibt es in unserer Gesellschaft noch unverzichtbare Normen? (Heidelberg: C. F. Müller, 1993), 5. Chapter 1 1. On ex-Nazis’ rights talk, see, e.g., Eugen Kogon, “Der Kampf um Gerechtigkeit,” Frankfurter Hefte 2, no. 4 (April 1947): 373-83. See also the remarks on law and rights by Ernst von Salomon (to be precise, a conservative revolutionary, not an ex-Nazi) in his Fragebogen (The Questionnaire), trans. Constantine FitzGibbon (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 3. 2. On the American-inspired and funded efforts, see Hermann-Josef Rupieper, Die Wurzeln der westdeutschen Nachkriegsdemokratie: Der amerikanische Beitrag 1945-1952 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993), 69-70 and 286-333. 3. On Crystal Eastman and the ACLU, see John Fabian Witt, Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 157-208. 4. Erwin Gülzow, “Bund Neues Vaterland,” in Lexikon zur Parteiengeschichte: Die bürgerlichen und kleinbürgerlichen Parteien und Verbände in Deutschland (1789-1945) (Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut, 1968), 1: 179-83. The League before 1933 has been well researched. See Richard A. Cohen, “The German League for Human Rights in the Weimar Republic” (Ph.D. diss., SUNY Buffalo, 1989); Werner Fritsch, “Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (DLfM) 1922-1933,” in Lexikon zur Parteiengeschichte: Die bürgerlichen und kleinbürgerlichen Parteien und Verbände in Deutschland (1789-1945) (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1983), 1: 749-59; Arthur D. Brenner, Emil J. Gumbel: Weimar German Pacifist and Professor (Boston: Humanities Press, 2001); Lothar Mertens, Unermüdlicher Kämpfer für Frieden und Menschenrechte: Leben und Wirken von Kurt R. Grossmann (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1997); and Istvan Deak, Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 5. On the LDH, see William D. Irvine, Between Justice and Politics: The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, 1898-1945 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007) and references cited there. 6. On the German Peace Society, see Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892-1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975); and Stefan Appelius, Pazifismus in Westdeutschland: Die Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft 1945-1968 (Aachen: G. Mainz, 1991). On the

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Notes to Pages 20–23

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, see Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 7. Fritsch, “Deutsche Liga,” 749. 8. Robert M. W. Kempner, with Jörg Friedrich, Ankläger einer Epoche: Lebenserinnerungen (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1983), 72, 90. 9. Elke Suhr, Carl von Ossietzky: Eine Biographie (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1988). 10. Charmian Brinson, “‘Im politischen Niemandsland der Heimatlosen, Staatenlosen, Konfessionslosen, Portemonnaielosen . . .’: Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt in British Exile,” in German-Speaking Exiles 1 (1999): 134-35. 11. Jörg Später, “Die Kritik des ‘anderen Deutschland’: Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt, Karl Retzlaw, und Hans Jaeger im Londoner Exil,” in Fluchtlinien des Exils, ed. jour fixe initiative berlin (Münster: Unrast, 2003), 89-112. 12. Institut für Stadtgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main, Nachlass Veit Valentin (hereafter IfS NLV), S 1/1 309, Katharina Kupsch to Kurt R. Grossmann, 7 January 1947. 13. IfS NLV S 1/1 309, Kudrnofsky to Lehmann-Russbueldt, 25 December 1947. Examples of early impostor human rights organizations that drew upon the League’s legacy are in IfS Kulturamt 753, Bl. 8, IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Kudrnofsky to Elias, 17 February 1948, and S 1/1 309, Freie Deutsche Liga—Kassel flier, 16 October 1947. 14. Ann Marie Clark, Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5. 15. Helge Heidemeyer, Flucht und Zuwanderung aus der SBZ/DDR 1945/1949-1961: Die Flüchtlingspolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland bis zum Bau der Berliner Mauer (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1994), 57. 16. There were attempts to found local Leagues in the French and Soviet zones, but they failed. See, e.g., Deutsches Exilarchiv, Nachlass Karl Retzlaw (hereafter DEA NLR), Lehmann-Russbueldt to Retzlaw, 30 June 1947 (French zone), and IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Kudrnofsky to Scherr, 3 February 1948; Andreas Hilger, “Der Spion, der sich liebte: Wolfram von Hanstein,” in Sowjetische Militärtribunale, Bd. 2: Die Verurteilung deutscher Zivilisten 1945-1955, ed. Andreas Hilger, Mike Schmeitzner, and Ute Schmidt (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 401 (Soviet zone). 17. Appelius, Pazifismus, 720. 18. In practice, von Wedel was too preoccupied with his civil service post as the Hessian representative on the U. S. occupation zone’s Länderrat (Council of Länder) to offer much more than the prestige of his name. On von Wedel (1886-1970), see Appelius, Pazifismus, 760-61. 19. See the Weimar-era League program in Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt, Der Kampf der deutschen Liga für Menschenrechte, vormals Bund Neues Vaterland, für den Welt­ frieden 1914-1927 (Berlin: Hensel, 1927), 92-93, 129-31. 20. At the time of these statutes, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights had not yet appeared, but when it was presented in 1948 it became a

Notes to Pages 23–25

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major point of reference for the League. The early Leagues saw the International League for the Rights of Man (ILRM) in New York City as their link to the United Nations. See Swarthmore Peace Collection, Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (hereafter SPC DLM), Bielefeld League, Rundschreiben Nr. 7 (March 1947): 1. The ILRM had formed in 1942 as an exile organization of the Paris-based International Federation for the Rights of Man (Fédération Internationale des Droits de l’Homme, FIDH), which had itself been founded in 1922 as an outgrowth of the LDH and then had to fold in 1940 when Nazi Germany invaded France. After the Second World War, the FIDH did not recognize the legitimacy of the New York group, and the two were apparently rivals for years. The Weimar-era League members active after 1945, whether émigrés or not, preferred affiliation with the ILRM, while several of the newcomers mentioned in this article preferred the FIDH. Both organizations still exist today. 21. IfS NLV S 1/1 307, “Programm,” 14 June 1947. 22. Leo Baeck Institute, New York (hereafter LBI KGC), Kurt Grossmann Collection, AR 25032, Kudrnofsky to Grossmann, 18 July 1948. 23. IfS NLV S 1/1 307, “Satzung,” 14 June 1947. 24. On Welter, see IfS NLV S 1/1 307 Grossmann to Dietz, 16 July 1947 and Welter to Grossmann, 17 March 1947. On the Bielefeld statutes, see SPC DLM, Bielefeld League, Rundschreiben Nr. 7 (March 1947): 1-2. On Herrmann, see IfS NLV S 1/1 307 Herrmann to Dietz, 8 March 1948. 25. Kurt R. Grossmann, “Die Brücke über den Abgrund,” in Ich lebe nicht in der Bundesrepublik, ed. Hermann Kesten (Munich: List, 1964), 63. 26. IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Dietz to Saenger, 10 March 1948, and Grossmann to Dietz, 6 March 1948. 27. IfS NLV S 1/1 310, Saenger to Grossmann, 17 October 1947. After 1945, Stöcker published books on democratic values aimed at a popular audience, including an impassioned defense of the first Nuremberg trial: Vor dem Tribunal des Weltgerichts: Streif­lic­hter zum Nürnberger Prozess (Hanover: Verlag “Das Andere Deutschland,” 1946). 28. Grossmann, “Die Brücke,” 63-68. See also Mertens, Unermüdlicher Kämpfer, 87. 29. IfS NLV S 1/1 304, Grossmann to ILRM, 1 October 1946 and S 1/1 307 Herr­ mann to Dietz, March 1948. 30. IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Herrmann to Oelze, 16 December 1947. 31. On members’ pasts: IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Dietz to Grossmann, 16 July 1947 and S 1/1 309, Kudrnofsky to Grossmann, 3 December 1947. On rejecting mass membership: IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Grossmann, newsletter (May 1948). On vouching for new members: IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Grossmann to Dietz, 6 March 1948. 32. IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Herrmann to Dietz, 20 January 1948; Kudrnofsky to Dietz, 30 January 1948; and Wuppertal League, “Öffentlicher Rechenschaftsbericht,” November 1947; S 1/1 309 Dietz to Baldwin, 14 August 1947; and S 1/1 310 Welter to LehmannRussbueldt, 30 August 1947 and Herrmann to Oelze, 16 December 1947. 33. SPC DLM “Forderung auf Freigabe unserer Kriegsgefangenen,” n.d. [8 February 1948] and “Betr: Völkerrechtsfragen,” 1 May 1948.

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34. On repatriation of POWs “as quickly as possible” or “as soon as possible after the conclusion of peace” (Article 20 of the Hague Convention of 1907 and Article 29 of the 1929 Geneva Convention, respectively) and the application of this principle after World War II, see Geoffrey Best, War and Law since 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 140-42. In the summer of 1945, forced population transfers were approved at the Potsdam Conference yet almost simultaneously defined as a “crime against humanity” in Article 6 (c) of the Nuremberg Charter. 35. See Pertti Ahonen, After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe 19451990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Robert G. Moeller, “Germans as Victims? Thoughts on a Post– Cold War History of World War II’s Legacies,” History and Memory 17, no. 1/2 (2005): 147-94. 36. SPC DLM, Bielefeld League, Rundschreiben Nr. 11a (November 1947); IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Herrmann to Oelze, 16 December 1947. 37. IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Herrmann to Dietz, 20 January 1948. Kudrnofsky considered the League’s involvement in expellee issues unnecessary because major organizations had already formed on the expellees’ behalf. IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Kudrnofsky to Oehlschläger, 30 January 1948. 38. IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Grossmann to Welter, 4 May 1947. 39. IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Kudrnofsky to Oehlschläger, 10 January 1948. 40. IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Dietz to Balley, National Peace Council, London, 16 June 1947. 41. IfS NLV S 1/1 309, Kny to Grossmann, 10 December 1947. 42. The most common statistics on the expulsions estimate twelve million displaced into East and West Germany and two million dead as a result of the expulsions. See, e.g., Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees from the First World War through the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 330. More recently, the mortality figures for civilian ethnic Germans have been revised downward, to half a million. See Ahonen, After the Expulsion, 21; and Rüdiger Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999), 298-99. 43. The post-1945 sufferings alluded to here were, for example, economic hardship, food shortages inside Germany, industrial dismantling by the Allies, and expulsions of ethnic Germans. SPC DLM, Bielefeld League, Rundschreiben Nr. 11a (November 1947): 1. 44. SPC DLM, Bielefeld League, Rundschreiben Nr. 6 (February 1947): 1; Rundschreiben Nr. 7 (March 1947): 2; Rundschreiben Nr. 8 (March 1947): 1. The Frankfurter Hefte was a left-Catholic political and cultural journal co-founded by Eugen Kogon that sought to fuse Christian and socialist ideas and to promote European unification and disarmament. Kogon (1903-87) was an active anti-Nazi and a survivor of Buchenwald, and later a political science professor. His book, Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager (Munich: Alber, 1946), was based on his experience in Buchenwald.

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The most recent edition in English is The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System behind Them, rev. ed., trans. Heinz Norden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). 45. SPC DLM, Bielefeld League, Rundschreiben Nr. 11a (November 1947): 2. This quote is from the unnamed old League member, probably Grossmann, who was drawing in turn on an unnamed article in the Frankfurter Hefte, probably Kogon, “Der Kampf um Gerechtigkeit.” 46. IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Anlage 1. This document was signed by several Weimar-era members, including Lehmann-Russbueldt, von Wedel, and Kudrnofsky. 47. IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Anlage 1. See also S 1/1 310, Stierwaldt to Grossmann, 6 November 1946 and S 1/1 309, Grossmann to Kupsch, 22 February 1947. 48. E.g., IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Herrmann to Oelze, 16 December 1947; SPC DLM, Bielefeld League, Rundschreiben Nr. 7 (March 1947): 1. 49. IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Anlage 1. 50. IfS NLV S 1/1 308, “Über die Selbstkenntnis.” 51. LBI KGC, Kupsch to Grossmann, 25 April 1947. 52. The experience of another postwar West German organization, the Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation (Gesellschaften für Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit), conceptualized and funded by the U.S. occupation authority, suggests that Grossmann’s approach would have been ineffective. The historian Josef Foschepoth has shown how the Societies were harmed in their early development by the desire to prove that Germans had overcome anti-Semitism and to improve Germany’s international reputation. The problem here was that insisting that anti-Semitism belonged to the past in fact served to shut down discussion of its nature and presence in postwar Germany, and even inside the organization itself. The Societies in their early years devoted far more attention to, for instance, U.S. racism against black people than to anti-Semitism in Germany (very little) or the Holocaust (none). Josef Foschepoth, Im Schatten der Vergangenheit: Die Anfänge der Gesellschaften für Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1993), esp. 70, 91, 93-99, 184-85, 203. See also Frank Stern, Im Anfang war Auschwitz: Antisemitismus und Philosemitismus im deutschen Nachkrieg (Geringen: Bleicher, 1991), 280-98. 53. See IfS NLV S 1/1 309, Dietz to Grossmann, 29 November 1946; S 1/1 307, Frankfurt League, “Resolution,” n.d. [1947]; “Programm” and “Satzung” of the “Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte,” 14 June 1947; Dietz to Herrmann, 3 March 1948; Herrmann to Dietz, 8 March 1948; Kudrnofsky to Grossmann, 24 March 1948; and Herrmann to Kudrnofsky, n.d. [March 1948]. 54. IfS NLV S 1/1 310, Welter to Lehmann-Russbueldt, 31 December 1947 and S 1/1 307, Ernst to Kudrnofsky, 10 February 1948. 55. The records of that entity indicate that this delay may have been due to denunciations from a far-right group close to Otto Strasser as well as to cumbersome bureaucracy. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (hereafter NARA), RG 260, Office of Military Government (hereafter OMGUS), Hesse,

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Notes to Pages 28–30

Civil Administration Division, General Records, 1945-49, Box 952 (hereafter RG 260 Hesse Box 952), “Investigation Report,” 19 July 1949 and OMGUS, Hesse to Kudrnofsky, 25 September 1947. 56. DEA NLR, Lehmann-Russbueldt to Retzlaw, 3 May 1950. However, as late as 1954, Dietz was still listed as the head of the Wuppertal chapter: Die Menschenrechte 29 (N.F. 2), no. 7 (October 1954): 10. 57. NARA RG 260, Berlin Sector, Civil Administration and Political Affairs Branch, Allied Kommandatura’s Records, 1945-49, Box 77 (hereafter NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77), notarized record of a League meeting on 23 November 1945 and Kiendl to Allied Kommandatura, Berlin, 23 November 1945. On “International” in name, see in same box, Kiendl to Allied Kommandatura, 20 March 1947. 58. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Persicaner to U.S. Commandant, Berlin, 8 February 1946 and Persicaner to U.S. Civil Administration Branch, Berlin, 8 May 1946. 59. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Internationale Liga für Menschenrechte to Allied Kommandatura Berlin, 10 August 1947. On Kiendl’s claim to have been a Weimarera member, see LBI KGC, Grossmann to Oehlschläger, 7 July 1947. 60. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Kiendl to Biel, 10 August 1947 and Kiendl to U.N. Division of Human Rights, 5 August 1947. 61. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Kiendl to Biel, 7 August 1947. The flier is also there: “Liga-Erklärung: Wesen und Bedeutung der Menschenrechte.” Kiendl applied for four-power permission in November 1945, June and September 1946, and March 1947. 62. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Mathews to Butterwick, 16 March 1949. Lehmann-Russbueldt’s daughter, Ingeborg, distrusted Kiendl’s “personality and work.” IfS, NLV S 1/1 309, Lehmann to Kudrnofsky, 23 December 1947. 63. On Reger (1893-1954) in these years, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945-1948, trans. Kelly Barry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 158-65. Reger withdrew by 1947 because Kiendl’s League seemed too amenable to the Soviets. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Kiendl to Biel, 30 July 1947. A similarly vocal anti-communist on Kiendl’s early board was the art historian Edwin Redslob (1884-1973), another licensee of Der Tagesspiegel and cofounder of the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin), which was created in opposition to Soviet interference at the historic Berlin University. 64. On Ernst Oehlschläger (1897-1970), see Appelius, Pazifismus, 735. Oehlschläger channeled German Peace Society members into the League. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Kiendl et al. to Schützinger, 24 August 1948. See also IfS NLV S 1/1 304, Griese to Grossmann, 29 October 1947; S 1/1 307, Kraschutzki to Lehmann-Russbueldt, 4 January 1948; S 1/1 309, Persicaner to Welter, 21 November 1947; S 1/1 310, Oehlschläger to Grossmann, 6 December 1947 and 5 January 1948. On the education reformer Paul Oestreich (1878-1959), who was an SED member, see Wolfgang Ellerbrock, Paul Oestreich: Porträt eines politischen Pädagogen (Weinheim: Juventa, 1992), 99, 327. On Heinz Kraschutzki (1891-1982), see Appelius, Pazifismus, 193, 719.

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65. NARA RG 260 Records of Executive Office, Subject Files re: Berlin Sector 194549, Box 562, memo of Allied Kommandatura meeting, 13 February 1948. 66. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Kiendl to Clay, 22 March 1948. 67. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Kiendl to Biel and Kellen, 13 July 1947. 68. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Mathews to Butterwick, 16 March 1949 (on Oestreich, Oehlschläger, and another member, the author Bernhard Kellermann, being too far to the left). The British and French authorities continued to be willing to license the League. 69. On connections between the League and Berlin SPD, see IfS NLV S 1/1 309, Kudrnofsky to Lehmann-Russbueldt, 23 August 1947; and NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, confidential memo of SPD meeting, 15 July 1947 and Kiendl to Allied Military Government, 20 March 1947. A related story of the instrumentalization of voluntary organizations in the interparty struggles of Berlin politics appears in Elke Reuter and Detlef Hansel, Das kurze Leben der VVN von 1947 bis 1953: Die Geschichte der Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes in der sowjetischen Besatzungszone und in der DDR (Berlin: Edition Ost, 1997), 183-88. 70. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Henschel to Butterwick, 17 March 1949. 71. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, confidential memo of SPD meeting, 16 July 1947. The contact person at that meeting, Frau Heitmann, was Neumann’s press secretary; also Hellmut Lehmann, Ernst Siegfried, and Alfred Götze (of whom more below) were close to Neumann. See in same box, Kiendl to Biel and Kellen, 13 July 1947. 72. LBI KGC, Ernst to Grossmann, 21 October 1948 (quotation by Lehmann-Russbueldt’s assistant, Alois Ernst). See also NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77 (LehmannRussbueldt). 73. IfS NLV S 1/1 309, Kudrnofsky to Lehmann-Russbueldt, 25 December 1947. See also IfS NLV S 1/1 307, Ernst to Grossmann, 13 February 1948 and DEA NLR, Senzig to von Wedel and Retzlaw, 3 February 1953. 74. Mertens, Unermüdlicher Kämpfer, 89-90. 75. Lehmann-Russbueldt’s allies in Berlin included Hermann Schützinger and Erwin Berger. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Kiendl et al. to Schützinger, 24 August 1948 and Kiendl to Biel, 1 October 1948; LBI KGC, Berger to Grossmann, 7 April 1949 and 14 June 1949. 76. LBI KGC, Lehmann-Russbueldt and Ernst, “Concerning: German League for the Rights of Man,” n.d. [ca. October 1948]. See also DEA NLR, Lehmann-Russbueldt to Retzlaw, 2 November 1953. 77. LBI KGC, Oehlschläger to Grossmann, 23 July 1948 and Kupsch to Grossmann, 25 April 1947, and LBI KGC, Lehmann-Russbueldt and Ernst, “Concerning: German League for the Rights of Man,” n.d. [ca. October 1948]. 78. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Kiendl et al. to Schützinger, 24 August 1948 and Taylor to Reuter, 4 May 1949. 79. Jochen Klaus Schaefer, “Zum 15. November,” Die Menschenrechte 29 (N.F. 2), no. 8 (November 1954): 8.

196

Notes to Pages 31–33

80. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Deutsche Liga to HICOG in Berlin, 28 January 1950. See also DEA NLR, Lehmann-Russbueldt to Retzlaw, 3 May 1950. The most recent biography of Jeanette Wolff is Birgit Seemann’s Jeanette Wolff: Politikerin und engagierte Demokratin (1888-1976) (Frankfurt: Campus, 2000). Kressmann (1901-86), an émigré in the Nazi years due to his political activity, had returned to Berlin in 1947 and served as an immensely popular mayor of Berlin’s Kreuzberg district between 1949 and 1962. Known for his advocacy of a de-escalation of tensions between East and West and his irreverence, he was a Social Democrat but hardly in the strict anti-communist mold of Franz Neumann. In fact, the SPD rebuked him and deprived him of his mayoral post in 1962 for his statements blaming the West as well as the East for the Berlin Wall and condemning force whether used by East or West. Kressmann joined the board of the German League in 1949 but was inactive, presumably due to his mayoral duties. See the Berlin SPD’s biographical sketch at www.berlin.spd.de, “Geschichte,” “Personen” (accessed 29 June 2007). Oehlschläger was the only one of the old Kiendl group to remain on the board. 81. Schaefer, “Zum 15. November.” 82. Reuter had belonged to the New Fatherland League in the First World War era, and joined this League in 1950. DEA NLR, Lehmann-Russbueldt to Retzlaw, 3 May 1950. 83. Brinson, “‘Im politischen Niemandsland,’” 136-37. 84. IfS NLV S 1/1 310, Persicaner to Welter, 21 November 1947; Oehlschläger to Grossmann, 5 January 1948; Grossmann to Oehlschläger, 31 January 1948; DEA NLR I.A.082, Lehmann-Russbueldt, “Erklärung,” 5 April 1951. 85. Baldwin knew several Weimar-era League members who lived as émigrés in New York, because he belonged to their International League for the Rights of Man (ILRM). 86. LBI KGC, Kudrnofsky to Lehmann-Russbueldt, 8 October 1948; Kudrnofsky to Welter, 8 October 1948; and Kudrnofsky to Baldwin, 11 October 1948. 87. LBI KGC, Kudrnofsky to Baldwin, 11 October 1948. See also Kudrnofsky to Lehmann-Russbueldt, 8 October 1948. Lehmann-Russbueldt conceded communist infiltration in the context of past anti-fascist struggle, but he made it clear that he saw communism as the League’s new opponent. Lehmann-Russbueldt and Ernst, “Concerning: German League for the Rights of Man,” n.d. [ca. October 1948]. 88. Princeton University Library, Roger Baldwin papers (hereafter PUL RBP), “Reminiscences,” 565. 89. These included the irascible Erik Reger, Annedore Leber (both in Berlin), and Toni Sender in New York. See Rupieper, Die Wurzeln, 304-8; and LBI KGC, Kudrnofsky to Lehmann-Russbueldt, 31 October 1948. Yet the Frankfurt League does not seem to have been in such bad shape as Baldwin’s interviewees suggested. See NARA RG 260 Hesse Box 952 “Investigation Report,” 19 July 1949 (noting 30 members); “Bürgenliste,” 28 January 1948 (listing 102 persons vouching for the League); and a handwritten internal note on results of a poll, n.d. (in which a majority of public figures voted for Baldwin

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adopting the League as his new civil rights organization); and see LBI KGC, Baldwin to Kudrnofsky, 27 October 1948 (enclosure) and Kudrnofsky to von Wedel, 18 November 1948; and IfS NLV S 1/1 310, von Wedel to Kempner, 30 May 1949. 90. PUL RBP, “Reminiscences,” 565. On Baldwin’s own ambivalence about communists’ civil liberties in the United States and inside the ACLU, see Robert C. Cottrell, Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 310-42. Baldwin’s objections to the League are summarized in LBI KGC, Baldwin to Kudrnofsky, 27 October 1948, enclosure “Memorandum on German Activities for the Protection of Citizens’ Rights,” 27 October 1948. 91. LBI KGC, Grossmann to Kudrnofsky, 6 January 1949. 92. This was the strategy that the Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation and also Baldwin’s later favorite, the League for Civil Liberties, used. Rupieper, Die Wurzeln, 316-17. A broader discussion of this strategy is in Rebecca Boehling, A Question of Priorities: Democratic Reforms and Economic Recovery in Postwar Germany; Frankfurt, Munich, and Stuttgart under U.S. Occupation 1945-1949 (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996), esp. pp. 63-71 and 116-55. 93. LBI KGC, Kudrnofsky to Welter, 8 October 1948. See also LBI KGC, Leh­mannRussbueldt to Grossmann, 14 October 1948. The Frankfurt faculty had rejected the permanent academic appointment of the jurist Hermann Brill, an anti-Nazi, early outspoken opponent of Soviet rule in occupied Germany, and a supporter of the League. LBI KGC, Lehmann-Russbueldt to Grossmann, 14 October 1948. Brill’s human-rightsrelated priorities are set out in Hermann Brill, “Menschenrechte,” Das sozialistische Jahr­ hundert 1 (1946): 6-8. 94. Baldwin was especially critical of the non-fraternization policy, which in a poor analogy he called “Hans Crow.” Rupieper, Die Wurzeln, 296-97. 95. LBI KGC, Lehmann-Russbueldt to Grossmann, 14 October 1948. See also LBI KGC, Gumbel to Grossmann, n.d. (ca. 14 December 1948). 96. NARA RG 260 OMGUS, Civil Administration Division, Civil Liberties and Democratization Branch, Box 201, “The Protection of Civil Rights in the American Zone,” minutes of meeting held on 27 May 1949; and IfS NLV S 1/1 310, von Wedel to Kempner, 30 May 1949. 97. Rupieper, Die Wurzeln, 301-30. 98. IfS NLV S 1/1 309, Kudrnofsky to Baldwin, 1 July 1950. These impostors were using Kiendl’s old name, International League, and insisted that their group was the old League’s true successor. Kudrnofsky won, but fraudulent use of the League name continued. See, e.g., DEA NLR I.A.082, Deutsche Liga Arbeitsbereich Hessen to Internationale Liga Frankfurt, 3 September 1951. 99. He may have reached that decision when he learned that Baldwin would not invite him to Frankfurt (see LBI KGC, Kudrnofsky to Lehmann-Russbueldt, 31 October 1948), or when it became apparent that no one in Frankfurt would be able to take up Kudrnofsky’s work after his death.

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Notes to Pages 34–36

100. On the DGB, see Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, ed., 40 Jahre Kampf um Menschenrechte 1913-1953 (Berlin, 1953), 10. On HICOG, see NARA RG 466 HICOG, Security-Segregated General Records, 1949-52, 572. Box 134, Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte to McCloy, 15 May 1950 and Baldwin to Gration, 9 June 1950. 101. By 1954 it had fifteen chapters. Die Menschenrechte 29 (N.F. 2), no. 7 (October 1954): 9-12. 102. See Michael Heinze-Mansfeld, “Kriegsverbrecher und Kollektivschuld,” Die Menschenrechte 29 (N.F. 2), no. 9 (December 1954): 2-3, and also these items: Die Mensch­enrechte 29 (N.F. 2), no. 1 (January 1954): 3; no. 4 (May-June 1954): 1-2, 3, 7; and 30 (N.F. 3), no. 4 (October-December 1955): 27-28. This was the same periodical title that the League had used in the Weimar era, and the high volume numbers were intended to suggest continuity. 103. K. K. [Karl Kasper], “Friedenskampf und ‘Friedenskampf,’” Die Menschenrechte 29 (N.F. 2), no. 1 (January 1954): 4-5. 104. DEA NLR, Lehmann-Russbueldt to Retzlaw, 2 November 1953, and Senzig to von Wedel and Retzlaw, 3 February 1953. 105. 40 Jahre, 11. See on this pamphlet, DEA NLR I.A. 082, Götze to Frankfurt League, 17 December 1952, and von Wedel to Retzlaw, 27 December 1952. The European Defense Community was a plan that France proposed and then scuttled in 1954, after it had undergone many changes. In 1955 the Federal Republic both gained sovereignty and joined NATO. David Clay Large, Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 106. An example of that anti-communism was League chairman Schaefer’s assertion that the Soviet Union had been seeking to dominate the entire world ever since the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. LBI KGC, Jochen Klaus Schaefer, “Verteidigungsbeitrag—Ja oder Nein?” December 1952. 107. Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, 40 Jahre, 12. 108. E.g., Die Menschenrechte 29 (N.F. 2), no. 5 (July-August 1954): 8; 30 (N.F. 3), no. 4 (October-December 1955): 23-25. 109. See Die Menschenrechte 30 (N.F. 3), no. 1 (January-February 1955): 8-9 and issues thereafter. 110. Heidemeyer, Flucht und Zuwanderung, 338-39. 111. For example, in late 1954, there were fifty-five camps in West Berlin for fleeing East Germans. Senator für Arbeit und Sozialwesen, ed., Deutsche flüchten zu Deutschen: Der Flüchtlingsstrom aus dem sowjetisch besetzten Gebiet nach Berlin (Berlin: Senator für Arbeit und Sozialwesen, 1956), table 12 (unpaged). 112. These were Hellmut-von-Gerlach-Heim, Cuvrystr. 34, in Kreuzberg (founded 1952, capacity of 1,000); Carl-von-Ossietzky-Heim, Quantzstr., Zehlendorf (founded 1953, capacity of 600); the Walther-Rathenau-Heim in Wannsee for victims of anti-Jewish persecutions in East Germany (founded 1953, capacity of 200); and the Hildegard-

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Wegscheider-Heim for children (founded in 1953 or 1954, capacity of 120). DEA NLR, Götze to Retzlaw, 24 September 1953. 113. DEA NLR, Retzlaw to Götze, 6 October 1953; see also Retzlaw to LehmannRussbueldt, 10 March 1954. Karl Retzlaw (1896-1979) broke with the SPD in the 1920s as a Trotskyist, emigrated in 1933, and returned to Germany in 1945. He was a journalist for the Frankfurter Rundschau. He is best known today for his memoir, Spartakus: Aufstieg und Niedergang: Erinnerungen eines Parteiarbeiters (Frankfurt: Neue Kritik, 1971). See also Später, “Die Kritik des ‘anderen Deutschland.’” 114. Volker Ackermann, Der “echte” Flüchtling: Deutsche Vertriebene und Flüchtlinge aus der DDR 1945-1961 (Osnabrück: Rasch, 1995), 109. 115. DEA NLR, Retzlaw to Götze, 6 October 1953; see also Retzlaw to LehmannRussbueldt, 26 April 1950. 116. Die Menschenrechte 29 (N.F. 2), no. 7 (October 1954): 10; Rainer Hildebrandt, “Der Umsturz im politischen Denken,” Die Menschenrechte 29 (N.F. 2), no. 8 (November 1954): 2-3. Rainer Hildebrandt (1914-2004) is best known for his work in the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit and his later Museum at Checkpoint Charlie. He apparently became a member of the League in 1949 or soon afterward. 117. Jeffrey Herf, “East German Communists and the Jewish Question: The Case of Paul Merker,” Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 4 (October 1994): 627-61. Merker was not Jewish, but Jewish East Germans were also targeted. 118. League members interviewed them together with Suzanne Collette-Kahn of the Paris-based FIDH for a petition to the United Nations. Die Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (hereafter BStU), MfS AS 168/56 Bd. 3, Bl. 34-41. 119. Klaus Bade, Homo migrans: Wanderungen aus und nach Deutschland: Erfahrungen und Fragen (Essen: Klartext, 1994), 48; Heidemeyer, Flucht und Zuwanderung, 120; and David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 329. 120. Yet other militant anti-communist organizations were the Union of Victims of Stalinism (Verein der Opfer des Stalinismus) and the Committee for an Indivisible Germany (Kuratorium Unteilbares Deutschland). The June 17th Committee (Komitee 17. Juni) was renamed the June 17th League (Vereinigung 17. Juni) in 1957. On their espionage-like activities, see Heidemeyer, Flucht und Zuwanderung, 317 n. 11; and Bernd Eisenfeld, Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, and Ehrhart Neubert, Die verdrängte Revolution: Der Platz des 17. Juni 1953 in der deutschen Geschichte (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 2004), 501, 511. 121. Jochen Klaus Schaefer, “Dank an Alfred Götze,” Die Menschenrechte, 30 (N.F. 3), no. 3 (July-September 1955): 14. I have been unable to find biographical information on Schaefer. In 1951 he was elected vice president of FIDH. 40 Jahre, 9. 122. Otto Bach (1899-1981) was a journalist and a Social Democratic politician in Berlin, including Senator for Social Affairs there (1951-53), and later a member of Ber-

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lin’s Abgeordnetenhaus. The friendship between the Bach and Götze families was noted to me in a personal communication from Gerd Goetze, 16 June 2006. 123. For example, the June 17th Committee (Komitee 17. Juni), was founded at a meeting in one of the League’s hostels. Eisenfeld, Kowalczuk, and Neubert, Die ver­d­rängte Revolution, 505, 511, 512. 124. 40 Jahre, 9. Götze was especially close to Émile Kahn and Suzanne ColletteKahn of the FIDH. The latter defended him and his faction of the League into the early 1960s, for reasons I have not been able to discover. 125. The LDH was officially refounded in 1947. Éric Agrikoliansky, La Ligue Française des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen depuis 1945: Sociologie d’un engagement civique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 12, 33. The LDH’s website indicates only very weak activity in the second half of the 1940s: http://www.ldh-france.org/connaitre_histoire. htm (accessed 26 June 2006). Wendy Perry, a historian of the LDH, concurs with my judgment that Götze’s description of these cooperative undertakings mentioned below sounds unrealistic. Personal communication, 7 July 2006. 126. DEA NLR, Lehmann-Russbueldt to Retzlaw, 22 February 1949. 127. Götze also claimed credit, along with the LDH, for preventing the application of the “Lex Oradour” in French trials of Germans accused of war crimes. The Lex Oradour, named for the destroyed village and residents of Oradour-sur-Glane, held that it was only necessary to prove a person’s membership in a unit that committed war crimes, not individual participation, to find the person guilty. 40 Jahre, 9-10. 128. DEA NLR, Götze to Retzlaw, 24 September 1953 and Retzlaw to Götze, 6 October 1953. 129. DEA NLR, unlabeled newspaper clipping with von Wedel’s signature dated 13 October 1953. The Frankfurt members only learned of the West Berlin League’s vote in favor of German rearmament from the pamphlet 40 Jahre. DEA NLR, von Wedel to Retzlaw, 13 October 1953. 130. DEA NLR I.A. 082, Akten-Vermerk, 2 November 1953, and Senzig to von Wedel, 7 November 1953. 131. The available sources suggest two possible occasions for the exposure of Götze’s past in the League. First, he applied to join another organization, and someone there linked him to an article in the Nazi newspaper Der Angriff (3 November 1934) that stated that he had belonged to the SA, the Nazi Party, and the SS, and wrote to Götze to reject his application for membership. See NARA RG 242 A3340-PK-D104 (Nazi party correspondence). This file contains a long letter from Götze dated 28 October 1953 seeking to exonerate himself, and he notes that a carbon copy was sent to Ernst Carlbergh, who was one of Götze’s opponents on the League board. Second, he apparently applied in the fall of 1953 for compensation for wartime losses under the 1952 Equalization of Burdens Law (Lastenausgleichsgesetz), after which he was found to have falsified his de-Nazification questionnaire. See BStU MfS HA IX Nr. 3897, report dated 30 July 1954, Bl. 146. 132. Die Menschenrechte 29 (N.F.) 2, no. 5 (July-August 1954): 7. Götze’s wife, An-

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neliese, lost her post as overseer of the hostels, but Schaefer gave no reason for her dismissal. 133. NARA RG 242 BDC A3343 SSO-021A (SS officer’s dossier) and NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Kiendl to Biel and Kellen, 13 July 1947. 134. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Kiendl to Biel, 13 August 1947 and Mathews to Butterwick, 16 March 1949. 135. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Kiendl to Biel, 13 August 1947. Since the 1920s, Götze had been alleged by his colleagues in the Freikorps Rossbach of having betrayed the early Nazi hero Leo Schlageter to the French occupiers in the Ruhr in the “Schlageter Affair.” While Götze was guilty of other things, this accusation was, in the judgment of the historian Manfred Franke, false. Manfred Franke, Albert Leo Schlageter: Der erste Soldat des 3. Reiches: Die Entmythologisierung eines Helden (Cologne: Prometh, 1980), 51-53, 116-27, 134. 136. NARA RG 260 Berlin AK Box 77, Mathews to Butterwick, 16 March 1949; Local Government Committee Meeting, 22 March 1949; Local Government Committee Meeting, 19 April 1949. 137. I have no direct documentary evidence that Götze was a French spy. Instead, I have two sources that suggest it, and that I find reasonably reliable. One is an interview with his wife and a family friend: Helga Hirsch, “Salz war die Währung in Galizien—Das Leben der Elfriede G. [Anneliese Götze],” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (27 April 2002). More background is in an interview by the historian Thomas Sandkühler on which Hirsch’s article was partially based: “Judenrettung zwischen Lemberg und Kiew—die Rolle von Berthold Beitz,” 18 July 1992, supplied to me by Gerd Goetze. See also the following report held in the Stasi archive: BStU MfS HA IX Nr. 3897, report dated 30 July 1954, Bl. 145. 138. See Hirsch, “Salz”; and LBI KGC, Lehmann-Russbueldt to Grossmann, 30 September 1955. Lehmann-Russbueldt was astounded to learn that Anneliese Götze’s salary for administering the hostels was DM 900 per month, which was indeed a very high amount. 139. See BStU, MfS HA IX Nr. 3897, report dated 30 July 1954, Bl. 145-146, 148, 151-152, and two additional internal Stasi documents that may be less reliable: BStU MfS AIM 6463/57 Teil I, Bl. 28-32 (a report by a former hostel resident who was an unofficial agent of the Stasi) and AS 168/56 Bd. 3, Bl. 317-22 (a collection of internal Stasi notes). Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, a historian at the Stasi archive who has wider access than is permitted to outside historians, used the files of the Stasi agent Harry Schlesing to uncover espionage and corruption in the June 17th Committee that appear similar to what I have found for the League. Schlesing also wrote reports on the League, but they were not made available to me. See Eisenfeld, Kowalczuk, and Neubert, Die verdrängte Revolution, 501-54. 140. BStU MfS AIM 6463/57 Teil I, Bl. 32. 141. BStU MfS AS 168/56 Bd. 3, Bl. 174, 313, 322, 556-558. On the idea of “Day X,” see Karl Wilhelm Fricke and Roger Engelmann, Der “Tag X” und die Staatssicherheit:

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Notes to Pages 41–43

17. Juni 1953: Reaktionen und Konsequenzen im DDR-Machtapparat (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 2003), 19-31. 142. Fricke and Engelmann, Der “Tag X,” 76, 227. 143. Fricke and Engelmann, Der “Tag X,” 146, 224-30. His arrest was noted in Die Menschenrechte 29 (N.F. 2), no. 4 (May-June 1954): 2. He had worked for a number of anti-communist organizations, including the U.S. sector radio station RIAS, the FDP’s Research Council for Reunification Matters (Forschungsbeirat für Fragen der Wiedervereinigung), and the Eastern Bureaus (Ostbüros) of the Christian Democratic Party (Christlich-Demokratische Partei, CDU) and FDP. The Eastern Bureaus were agencies of West German political parties that sought to sustain independent party activity inside East Germany. 144. It is unclear whether Schaefer was intentionally cooperating with Götze, or had been deceived by him. The report held in the Stasi archive mentions that Schaefer was a close friend of Götze but was very concerned with respectability and therefore unlikely to know of Götze’s espionage and fraudulent activities. BStU, MfS HA IX Nr. 3897, Bl. 144. It is also unclear why Götze’s critics did not also take aim at Schaefer, Götze’s main protector. It is possible that Lehmann-Russbueldt felt dependent on Schaefer: Schaefer served as Lehmann-Russbueldt’s lawyer and had secured a pension for the widow of Lehmann-Russbueldt’s friend, the murdered pacifist Berthold Jacob. DEA NLR, Lehmann-Russbueldt to Retzlaw, 24 November 1952. 145. Die Menschenrechte 29 (N.F. 2), no. 5 (July-August 1954): 6. 146. However, he remained on the League’s board and on the board of the League Aid Works (Liga-Hilfswerk), an affiliated agency created to keep the hostels’ finances separate from the League. Schaefer, “Dank an Alfred Götze”; on continued presence on boards, see Die Menschenrechte 31 (N.F. 4), no. 2 (April-June 1956): 30. 147. Hirsch, “Salz.” 148. DEA NLR I.A. 272, quoting from Deutsche Rundschau (June 1956). 149. DEA NLR, Lehmann-Russbueldt to Retzlaw, 8 June 1956; Retzlaw to LehmannRussbueldt et al., 16 August 1956; Lehmann-Russbueldt to Retzlaw, 28 August 1956; I.A.082, Entwurf: “Programmatische Erklärung der ‘Westdeutschen Liga für Menschenrechte e.V.,’” n.d. [ca. 1953]. 150. DEA NLR, von Wedel to Grossmann, 31 May 1956. 151. Grossmann greeted him in the 1950s as an old friend from the League: LBI KGC, Grossmann to Hanstein, 26 November 1957. See also Hilger, “Der Spion,” 397415 (on his longtime membership in the League, see 399); and “Wolfram von Hanstein,” Münzinger Archiv, obtained as a fax on 16 November 2001. 152. Hilger, “Der Spion,” 410. The anti-communist organizations affected included the Union of Victims of Stalinism, the Committee for an Indivisible Germany, and the Save Freedom Committee (Komitee “Rettet die Freiheit”). 153. Hilger, “Der Spion,” 399. 154. Internationale Liga für Menschenrechte, Berlin, ed., Warum Internationale

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Liga für Menschenrechte? [ca. 1962], 3-4. They chose the same name as the defunct neutralist group, but there was no apparent connection. 155. The man who had been elected vice president in the deceptive Hamburg election, one Friedrich Haugg of Munich, sought to retain the arrangements created by Hanstein. Oddly, the FIDH leader Suzanne Collette-Kahn supported Schaefer and Haugg. Warum, 3-4. A Munich-based League and the Hamburg branch exist today, using the old name German League for Human Rights and claiming to be the authentic successors of the Weimar-era League. See the Wikipedia entry for “Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte” and links there (accessed 9 June 2006). See also Deutsches Exilarchiv, Nachlass Ossip K. Flechtheim (hereafter DEA NLF), Liga files, “Vereinbarung” (September 1965); “Protokoll der Vorstandssitzung” (1 February 1966); League chronology, n.d. [ca. 1984]. 156. Many historians have recently written works related to this issue; an initial orientation is Bill Niven, ed., Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Chapter 2 1. Josef Foschepoth, “German Reaction to Defeat and Occupation,” in West Germany under Construction, ed. Robert G. Moeller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 73-89; and Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 2. Petitions to the U.N. Human Rights Commission regarding German POWs detained in the Soviet Union show this use of human rights language. See Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 237 n. 12. The United Nations Archive in Geneva also has petitions regarding expellees. 3. Pertti Ahonen, After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe 1945-1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25-28. 4. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chap. 3. 5. On these topics, see Christian Tomuschat, Human Rights: Between Idealism and Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 305-9 (on the individual as a subject of international law); Catherine Brölmann, René Lefeber, and Marjoleine Zieck, eds., Peoples and Minorities in International Law (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1993) (on ethnic groups); and Christian Tomuschat, ed., Modern Law of Self-Determination (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1993) (on self-determination). 6. See, e.g., Knut Ipsen, Völkerrecht, 5th ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2004), 95, 389, 395; and Georg Dahm, Jost Delbrück, and Rüdiger Wolfrum, Völkerrecht: Der Staat und andere Völkerrechtssubjekte: Räume unter internationaler Verwaltung, 2nd rev. ed., vol. 1/2 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 259, 268-69. 7. Egmont Zechlin, “Die ‘Zentralorganisation für einen dauernden Frieden’ und die Mittelmächte: Ein Beitrag zur politischen Tätigkeit Rudolf Launs im ersten Weltkrieg,”

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Festschrift für Rudolf Laun zu seinem achtzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Forschungsstelle für Völkerrecht und ausländisches öffentliches Recht der Universität Hamburg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1962), 448-515. 8. Gustaf C. Hernmarck, “Rudolf Laun: Sein Leben und Werk,” Festschrift zu Ehren von Prof. Dr. jur. Rudolf Laun, Rektor der Universität Hamburg, anlässlich der Vollendung seines 65. Lebensjahres am 1. Januar 1947, ed. Gustaf C. Hernmarck (Hamburg: Toth, 1948), 8-18; Norman Paech and Ulrich Krampe, “Die Rechts- und Staatswissenschaftliche Fakultät,” in Hochschulalltag im “Dritten Reich”: Die Hamburger Universität 19331945, ed. Eckart Krause et al. (Berlin: Reimer, 1991), 3: 867-912; and Rainer Biskup, Rudolf Laun: Staatsrechtslehrer zwischen Republik und Diktatur (Hamburg: Conference Point, 2010). 9. Biskup, Rudolf Laun, 112. 10. Barbara Vogel, “Der Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland (VDA) an der Hamburger Universität in der Weimarer Republik,” Zeitgeschichte 16, no. 1 (1988): 12-21. 11. Rudolf Laun, Das freie Ermessen und seine Grenzen (Leipzig: F. Deuticke, 1910), argued for the judicial review of administrative acts. See Biskup, Rudolf Laun, 39-44. Rudolf Laun, Recht und Sittlichkeit: Antrittsrede, gehalten anlässlich seiner Inauguration zum Rektor der Universität Hamburg am 10. November 1924 (Hamburg: Boysen, 1925) was his major statement against legal positivism and for the autonomy of law. 12. Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, 14-16, 41-42, 51, and chaps. 1 and 3 passim. Laun’s emphasis on national self-determination was not typical of all progressive international lawyers, but some did share it, including Pasquale Mancini, one of the founders of the Revue de droit international et de législation comparée and much admired by Laun. See ibid., 14, 63. 13. Laun, Recht und Sittlichkeit (1925), 25. 14. Ibid., 27. 15. His book La Démocratie of 1933 was an exposition of this concept, which he at that point called the conscience collective. See Rudolf Laun, La Démocratie: Essai sociologique, juridique et de politique morale (Paris: Delagrave, 1933), 47, and passim. In other writings, he sometimes translated the term into German as Rechtsgefühl der Völker (peoples’ legal sensibility), which has an explicitly international element that the term conscience publique lacks. See Rudolf Laun, “Allgemeine Rechtsgrundsätze,” in Beiträge zur Kultur- und Rechtsphilosophie, ed. Erdmuthe Falkenberg (Heidelberg: Adolf Rausch, 1948), 117-38. 16. Rudolf Laun, Der Wandel der Ideen Staat und Volk als Äusserung des Weltgewissens (Barcelona: Cassirer, 1933), 335-37. See also Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, 24. 17. Laun, La Démocratie, 78. 18. Ibid., 214. 19. Ibid., 209; see also 57. 20. Ibid., 215-17.

Notes to Pages 49–52

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21. Ibid., 221. Laun had completed the manuscript in 1932, before Hitler became chancellor, but it was not published until mid-1933, in France. Ibid., 5 and 217. 22. Laun, Der Wandel der Ideen Staat und Volk. Like La Démocratie, this book was completed before the Nazis seized power and published after it, in this case in Spain. 23. The Austrian Social Democrat Karl Renner sought to combine individual rights with group rights of self-determination in a multinational constitutional state. See Rudolf Springer [Karl Renner], Der Kampf der österreichischen Nationen um den Staat (Vienna: Deuticke, 1902). Laun had already departed from Renner in one important respect by the time of the First World War’s peace settlement: while Renner and his colleague Otto Bauer advocated the “personality principle” (Personalitätsprinzip), which allowed scattered individuals to administer their national affairs collectively, Laun favored a “territorial principle” (Territorialprinzip) that granted regional autonomy over a homogeneous enclave of a multinational state. See Rudolf Laun and I. Lange, CzechoSlovak Claims on German Territory, 3rd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1919), 22. 24. Laun, Der Wandel der Ideen Staat und Volk, 326. 25. He appealed his dismissal on those grounds. See Paech and Krampe, “Die Rechts- und Staatswissenschaftliche Fakultät,” 905 n. 5 and 867; and Barbara Vogel, “Anpassung und Widerstand: Das Verhältnis Hamburger Hochschullehrer zum Staat 1919 bis 1945,” in Hochschulalltag im “Dritten Reich,” ed. Krause et al., 22. On his anti-Nazi reputation, see Vogel, “Anpassung und Widerstand,” 18-19, 22, 34, 36. 26. Rudolf Laun, Recht und Sittlichkeit, 3rd exp. ed. (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1935). It contained the unchanged text from 1924 as well as new essays. In the new essays, he reiterated that racial or economic categories could not serve as sources of law, and that only the “autonomous conscience and legal sensibility of individuals” was the source of law. Laun, Recht und Sittlichkeit (1935), 98. 27. Rudolf Laun, Der Satz vom Grunde: Ein System der Erkenntnistheorie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1942), 18. On this book, see Paech and Krampe, “Die Rechts- und Staatswissenschaftliche Fakultät,” 898. 28. Vogel, “Anpassung und Widerstand,” 49. 29. On Schücking and Wehberg, see Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, 215-22. 30. Rudolf Laun, Studienbehelf zur Vorlesung über Allgemeine Staatslehre, 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Selbstverlag der Universität Hamburg, 1946), 7. 31. Rudolf Laun, Die Menschenrechte (Hamburg: Rechts- und Staatswissenschaft­ licher Verlag, 1948), 16; Rudolf Laun, Die Haager Landkriegsordnung: Das Übereinkommen über die Gesetze und Gebräuche des Landkriegs: Textausgabe mit einer Einführung, 4th ed. (Wolfenbüttel: Wolfenbütteler Verlagsanstalt, 1948), 49, 50, 53. This book first appeared in 1946. 32. Rudolf Laun, Das Grundgesetz Westdeutschlands: Ansprache, gehalten im Auftrag der Universität Hamburg an die Studenten der Universität Hamburg am 24. Mai 1949 (Hamburg: Selbstverlag der Universität, 1949), 16. For other examples of a Germanyfocused narrative of a human rights tradition, see Samuel Moyn, “The First Historian

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of Human Rights,” American Historical Review 116 , no. 1 (February 2011): 58-79; and Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 24. 33. Laun, Das Grundgesetz Westdeutschlands, 12 (quote) and 13. 34. Rudolf Laun, “Gegenwärtiges Völkerrecht,” in Laun, Reden und Aufsätze zum Völkerrecht und Staatsrecht (Hamburg: Hansischer Gildenverlag, 1947), 10. 35. Laun, Die Menschenrechte, 5, 6, 8, 14, 26. 36. E.g., Ernst J. Cohn, “German Legal Science Today,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 2 (April 1953): 191. 37. Rudolf Laun, “Zweierlei Völkerrecht,” Jahrbuch für internationales und ausländ­ isches öffentliches Recht 2 (1949): 636. 38. Hans Kelsen, “The International Legal Status of Germany to Be Established Immediately upon Termination of the War,” American Journal of International Law 38 (October 1944): 689-94; and Hans Kelsen, “The Legal Status of Germany according to the Declaration of Berlin,” American Journal of International Law 39 (July 1945): 51826. Laun’s furious response was “Eine Lehre des Hasses,” in Laun, Reden und Aufsätze, 21-24. On the debate, see Bernhard Diestelkamp, Rechtsgeschichte als Zeitgeschichte: Beiträge zur Rechtsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2001), 32-49 and references cited there. 39. Laun, “Zweierlei Völkerrecht”; and Josef L. Kunz, “The Status of Occupied Germany under International Law: A Legal Dilemma,” Western Political Quarterly 3 (December 1950): 538-65, here 555. 40. Laun, Die Haager Landkriegsordnung, 26-34, 53-55. 41. Ibid., 22; see also Laun, “Allgemeine Rechtsgrundsätze,” 132-33. 42. Rudolf Laun, “Die Menschenrechte der Heimatvertriebenen,” Der Weg/El Sendero 4 (October 1950): 919-20. This was a Nazi-apologetic periodical published in Argentina. The convention referred to here was eventually passed by the United Nations General Assembly as two documents in 1966: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. 43. A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 649-753, esp. 707-10. 44. Laun, Die Menschenrechte; see also Laun, “Die Menschenrechte der Heimatvertriebenen.” 45. Laun, Die Menschenrechte, 8. 46. Ibid., 18. 47. Ibid., 16, 18, 20-21. 48. Rudolf Laun, “Das Recht der Völker auf die Heimat ihrer Vorfahren,” Interna­ tionales Recht und Diplomatie 3, no. 2 (1958): 152-53. 49. Ahonen, After the Expulsion, 42-44. The major text is Otto Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 3rd rev. and exp. ed. (Bonn: Kulturstiftung der Deutschen Vertrieb­enen, 1989), which is discussed in Chapter 4.

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50. Christian Tomuschat, “Das Recht auf die Heimat: Neue rechtliche Aspekte,” in Des Menschen Recht zwischen Freiheit und Verantwortung: Festschrift für Karl Josef Partsch zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Jürgen Jekewitz et al. (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1989), 183-212. 51. Ahonen, After the Expulsion, 16. 52. Some Germans fled the area of post–World War II Poland as refugees from the Red Army, then returned, then were expelled by the postwar Polish government. See Stanislaw Jankowiak, “‘Cleansing’ Poland of Germans: The Province of Pomerania, 1945-1949,” in Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944-1948, ed. Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 88 and passim. 53. Eagle Glassheim, “The Mechanics of Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia, 1945-1947,” in Redrawing Nations, ed. Ther and Siljak, 209. It is hard to be precise about who held which citizenship in early 1945 because under Nazi occupation some were pressured to take on German citizenship, and then changed back after the war. See Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 244-49. 54. Gerhard Reichling, Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahle. Teil 1, Umsiedler, Verschleppte, Vertriebene, Aussiedler 1940-1985 (Bonn: Kulturstiftung der Deutschen Vertriebenen, 1986), 26. 55. Laun uses the figure of two million deaths, which West German scholarship of the 1950s generally did. More recently, Rüdiger Overmans has revised the mortality figures for civilian ethnic Germans downward to half a million. Rüdiger Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999), 298-99. I am using Ahonen’s estimate: Ahonen, After the Expulsion, 21. 56. Ahonen, After the Expulsion, 20-21. On the relatively few expellees in Austria, see Tara Zahra, “‘Prisoners of the Postwar’: Expellees, Refugees, and Jews in Postwar Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook 41 (2010): 191-215. 57. The term “Sudeten German” (Sudetendeutsche/r) is both inaccurate (since some of the expellees were from Prague or other places definitely outside of the Sudetenland region) and a relatively recent and politicized coinage, stemming from the nationality politics of the 1920s. See Hans Lemberg, “Von den Deutschböhmen zu den Sudetendeutschen: Der Beitrag von Geschichtswissenschaften und Geschichtspolitik,” in Geschichtsschreibung zu den böhmischen Ländern im 20. Jahrhundert: Wissenschaftstraditionen—Institutionen—Diskurse, ed. Christiane Brenner, K. Erik Franzen, Peter Haslinger, and Robert Luft (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2006), 95-107; and Tobias Weger, “Volkstumskampf ” ohne Ende? Sudetendeutsche Organisationen, 1945-1955 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008), 30-51. The more generic and accurate term is “Bohemian German.” However, I have retained “Sudeten German” here and in Chapter 4 as it was overwhelmingly used in my sources and in wide use in West Germany during the years under discussion. While inappropriate for describing the Bohemian German population at large over long periods, it does fit the scope of these

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Notes to Pages 56–58

chapters. Inside West Germany, the breakdown of refugees and expellees by place of origin was about five and a half million from Poland and the Soviet Union, two million from Czechoslovakia, and half a million from southeastern Europe. Ahonen, After the Expulsion, 21. 58. That is why the expellee lobby argued for the continued validity of the Munich Agreement. So did Laun in Rudolf Laun, Das Recht auf die Heimat (Hanover: H. Schroedel, 1951), 22-23, 25. 59. Apart from the political infeasibility of bringing a case, the U.N. Charter’s Article 107 (enemy states clause) precluded it. See Georg Ress, “Article 107,” in The Charter of the United Nations: A Commentary, ed. Bruno Simma (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1152-62. On Adenauer’s attitude toward the expellee cause, see Ahonen, After the Expulsion, 95-96, 110-15. The most notable non-German international lawyer to have discussed it in terms of a legal case is Alfred-Maurice de Zayas. See, e.g., Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, “International Law and Mass Population Transfers,” Harvard International Law Journal 16 (1975): 207–58; and Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans from the East, 3rd rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). See also Timothy Waters, “Remembering Sudetenland: On the Legal Construction of Ethnic Cleansing,” Virginia Journal of International Law 47, no. 63 (2006): 63-146. 60. The first international document to prohibit it was concluded by the Council of Europe in 1963. See Jean-Marie Henckaerts, Mass Expulsion in Modern International Law and Practice (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1995), 9-10. 61. Laun, Die Menschenrechte, 17. 62. Laun, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 27, 29-30. 63. Laun, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 20. 64. Laun, “Das Recht der Völker auf die Heimat ihrer Vorfahren,” 157. 65. Kurt H. Nadelmann, “Mancini’s Nationality Rule and Non-Unified Legal Systems: Nationality versus Domicile,” American Journal of Comparative Law 17, no. 3 (1969): 418-51. 66. Laun, “Das Recht der Völker auf die Heimat ihrer Vorfahren,” 159-63. No doubt he relished this part of his argument as a way to trap his Czech nationalist opponents in their own logic. 67. Laun, “Das Recht der Völker auf die Heimat ihrer Vorfahren,” 152-53, 165. 68. Laun, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 24. 69. Ibid., 35. 70. Ibid. On Laun’s anti-Slav tirades, see Arnold Sywottek, “Kontinuität im Neubeginn: Über die Anfänge der ‘Universität Hamburg,’” in Hochschulalltag im “Dritten Reich,” ed. Krause et al., 1399-1400. Karl Renner recounted the legend of the Mongol invasion of the Bohemian lands in his memoirs, An der Wende zweier Zeiten: Lebenserinnerungen (Vienna: Danubia, 1946), 28-29. 71. Laun, “Das Recht der Völker auf die Heimat ihrer Vorfahren,” 149, 151. 72. Laun and Lange, Czecho-Slovak Claims on German Territory, 18.

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73. Rudolf Laun, Die Lehren des Westfälischen Friedens (Hamburg: Robert Mölich, 1949), 34. 74. See Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), 21, 33-34, 48. She places this ethnic indeterminacy at the center of her brilliant analysis. 75. Laun, “Das Recht der Völker auf die Heimat ihrer Vorfahren,” 153. 76. Ibid. 77. Laun, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 31. See also Laun, Die Lehren des Westfälischen Friedens, 46 and passim. 78. See, e.g., Laun, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 6. 79. Laun, “Das Recht der Völker auf die Heimat ihrer Vorfahren,” 156. He used the term génocide as well as Völkermord to make that point. 80. Laun wrote many Persilscheine, the letters of reference from opponents and victims of Nazism that supported the postwar careers of colleagues who had been close to Nazism. See Paech and Krampe, “Die Rechts- und Staatswissenschaftliche Fakultät,” 890-97; and Vogel, “Anpassung und Widerstand,” 49. 81. In addition to these activities, Laun also founded and directed the Forsch­ ungsstelle für Völkerrecht und ausländisches öffentliches Recht at the University of Hamburg in 1946, and co-founded and co-edited a new journal, the Jahrbuch für internationales und ausländisches öffentliches Recht, which today appears under the title German Yearbook of International Law/Jahrbuch für internationales Recht. 82. The DGVR shut itself down in 1934 to avoid coordination (Gleichschaltung) by the Nazi state. By 1945 all its pre-1933 board members had died, either in Germany or in exile. This discussion of the DGVR is based on “Die erste Hamburger Tagung der deutschen Völkerrechtslehrer 1947,” Jahrbuch für internationales und ausländisches öffentliches Recht 1, no. 1 (1948): 239-42; “Die zweite Hamburger Tagung der deutschen Völkerrechtslehrer 1948,” Jahrbuch für internationales und ausländisches öffentliches Recht 1, no. 1 (1948): 243-55; and Hermann Mosler, “Die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerrecht: Ihr Beitrag zum Internationalen Recht seit der Wiedergründung im Jahre 1949,” a speech for its fortieth anniversary in 1989, located at www.dgvr.de (accessed 27 August 2007). I was not granted access to the DGVR archives. 83. While the Hamburg contingent (Hans-Peter Ipsen, Eberhard Menzel, and Rolf Stödter) did hew closely to Laun’s arguments, others (such as Erich Kaufmann) differed openly, and yet others (such as Gerhard Leibholz and Hermann Jahrreiss) simply launched into their own topics without referring to Laun. The strongest dissents from Laun’s arguments at these meetings came from Wolfgang Abendroth (apparently the only one who held that the German state had ceased to exist) and from Adolf Arndt, who eloquently pointed out that the German state was hardly free of deformation before 1945. “Die zweite Hamburger Tagung der deutschen Völkerrechtslehrer 1948,” 251-52. In fact, however, Arndt did agree with Laun’s criticisms of the Allied occupation. Dieter Gosewinkel, Adolf Arndt: Die Wiederbegründung des Rechtsstaats aus dem Geist der Soz­ ialdemokratie (1945-1961) (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1991), 144-47.

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Notes to Pages 60–62

84. “Entschliessungen der Deutschen Völkerrechtslehrer auf der ersten Hamburger Tagung vom 16.-17. April 1947,” Jahrbuch für internationales und ausländisches öffent­ liches Recht 1, no. 1 (1948): 6. 85. “Entschliessung der Deutschen Völkerrechtslehrer auf der zweiten Hamburger Tagung vom 14.-16. April 1948,” Jahrbuch für internationales und ausländisches öffent­ liches Recht 1, no. 1 (1948): 8. 86. Mosler, “Die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerrecht,” 3. From then on, it passed resolutions only on such unpolitical topics as increasing the prominence of international law in the curriculum. There were two exceptions: a resolution in 1970 on the U.N. Charter’s enemy state clauses, and a resolution in 1973 on the right of self-determination. 87. Mosler, “Die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerrecht,” 2-4. 88. Moyn, The Last Utopia, 176-211. 89. Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, ed., Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, 5 vols. (Bonn: Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte, 1954-61). Three supplementary volumes (Beihefte) were also published 1955-60. 90. Mathias Beer, “Im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Zeitgeschichte: Das Grossforsch­ ungsprojekt ‘Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus OstMitteleuropa,’” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 46 (1998): 357-58, 368-69. 91. Personal communication with Mathias Beer, 14 February 2008, confirmed Laun’s inactive role. 92. Beer, “Im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Zeitgeschichte,” 378-85. 93. Cited in Thomas Claudius and Franz Stepan, Amnesty International: Portrait einer Organisation (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1976), 217. Chapter 3 1. In this book, I refer to Amnesty International–German Section as West German Amnesty for short. I must concede, however, that this term of convenience is not historically appropriate. The modifier “West” (“Westdeutschland,” “Westberlin”) was typical of East German, not West German, discourse, as it implied that the Federal Republic of Germany represented no more than the territory it actually controlled, and that the East German state, the German Democratic Republic, was fully legitimate. West Germans, by contrast, referred to their country as simply “Germany.” After unification in 1990, the modifier “West” has become more common, in order to distinguish the pre-1990 Federal Republic from the unified Federal Republic after 1990. 2. In addition to the passages from Donald Kommers’s book cited in the Introduction, see the accessible essays by the prominent jurist and longtime Humanist Union board member Erhard Denninger, Menschenrechte und Grundgesetz (Weinheim: Beltz Athenäum, 1994). 3. Kenneth Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of American History (December 1999): 1231-50.

Notes to Pages 65–68

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4. Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration, trans. Joel Golb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 5. Christoph Klessmann, Zwei Staaten, eine Nation: Deutsche Geschichte 1955-1970, 2nd rev. and exp. ed. (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1997), 139-41; and Axel Schildt, Zwischen Abendland und Amerika: Studien zur westdeutschen Ideenlandschaft der 50er Jahre (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1999). 6. Carola Stern, “Verteidiger in Ost und West: Die ‘Amnesty International’ tritt für politische Gefangene ein,” Die Zeit (22 October 1965). 7. Carola Stern, “Gefangen und vergessen: Amnesty International versucht seit zehn Jahren, politischen Häftlingen zu helfen,” Die Zeit (30 April 1971). 8. Claus Leggewie makes similar arguments regarding the de-provincializing effect of West Germans’ activism on behalf of the Algerian revolutionaries, the politicizing effect of rejecting West German self-pity regarding national division, and West Germans’ coming to consciousness of the constrained nature of their own basic rights when they protested French violations of Algerians’ human rights. This activism was certainly carried out in the language of human rights; for example, the SDS asked its local chapters to demonstrate against French colonialism on 10 December 1960, the day for commemorating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Claus Leggewie, Kofferträger: Das Algerien-Projekt der Linken im Adenauer-Deutschland (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1984), 29, 32, 68, 72. 9. See this invaluable volume: Thomas Henne and Arne Riedlinger, eds., Das Lüth-Urteil aus (rechts-) historischer Sicht: Die Konflikte um Veit Harlan und die Grundrechtsjud­ikatur des Bundesverfassungsgerichts (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, 2005). 10. Carsten Kretschmann, “Schuld und Sühne: Annäherungen an Erich Lüth,” in Das Lüth-Urteil, ed. Henne and Riedlinger, 47-64; and Josef Foschepoth, Im Schatten der Vergangenheit: Die Anfänge der Gesellschaften für Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1993). 11. Donald P. Kommers, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany, 2nd rev. and exp. ed. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 360-69, quote on 363. 12. Cited from www.ilmr.de, “Die Carl-von Ossietzky-Medaille” (accessed 24 January 2011). On Lüth’s selection, see Deutsches Exilarchiv, Nachlass Flechtheim (hereafter DEA NLF), Mappe “Liga ca. 1965-1975,” Flechtheim to Kuratorium, 16 October 1965. 13. Carola Stern, Strategien für die Menschenrechte, exp. ed. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1983), 47. 14. Patrick Major, The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 15. The key source is Alexander von Brünneck, Politische Justiz gegen Kommun­ isten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949-1968: Vorwort von Erhard Denninger (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 236-43, esp. 242. On the impact on restitution for victims of Nazism, see Gotthard Jasper, “Die disqualifizierten Opfer: Der Kalte Krieg und

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die Entschädigung für Kommunisten,” in Wiedergutmachung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed. Ludolf Herbst and Constantin Goschler (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1989), 361-84. Diether Posser, a lawyer and member of the Humanist Union, defended many of the accused; for numerous examples of cases, see his memoir Anwalt im Kalten Krieg: Ein Stück deutscher Geschichte in politischen Prozessen 1951-1968 (Munich: C. Bertelsmann, 1991). Some especially absurd examples of persecution are in DEA NLF, Liga ca. 1965-75, Petersen to Liga, 2 April 1962; Brücken-Verlag, 17 April 1962; and Köhler to Flechtheim, 4 July 1962. This last concerned an accusation against the writer Reimar Lenz that his satirical rewriting of the national anthem violated the Basic Law. Lenz was an early champion of West German Amnesty, having profiled it in the youth magazine Twen in 1963. See Stern, “Gefangen und vergessen.” 16. Rob Burns and Wilfried van der Will, Protest and Democracy in West Germany: Extra-Parliamentary Opposition and the Democratic Agenda (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988); and Alice Holmes Cooper, Paradoxes of Peace: German Peace Movements since 1945 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 25-81. See also Holger Nehring, “Americanized Protests? The British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons and the Pacifist Roots of the West German New Left, 1957-1964,” in Decentering America, ed. Jessica Gienow-Hecht (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 210-51. 17. On the FDP, see Heino Kaack, Zur Geschichte und Programmatik der Freien Dem­okratischen Partei: Grundriss und Materialien (Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1976), esp. 15-36. More informative but less scholarly is the journalist’s account in Udo Leuschner, Die Geschichte der FDP: Metamorphosen einer Partei zwischen rechts, sozialliberal und neokonservativ (Münster: Edition Octopus, 2005), esp. 20-68. Gerhard Szczesny, a founder of the Humanist Union, summed up the FDP as having a liberal wing and nationalist tendencies, while being controlled by economic interests. Jürgen Hofmann, “Die Humanistische Union: Eine Untersuchung über Struktur und Funktion einer neuen kulturpolitischen Vereinigung” (Ph.D. diss., University of Munich, 1967), 6. 18. See Tilman Fichter, SDS und SPD: Parteilichkeit jenseits der Partei (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1988), 344-68. 19. See Linda Schmidt, “Menschenrechte in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte—Die Gründung von amnesty international im Jahre 1961” (M.A. thesis, RuhrUniversität Bochum, 1999), 17, 111. 20. See DEA NLF, Mappe “Protokolle, Rundschreiben, Briefe, Jahresberichte u.a. ca. ab 1981,” item “1914 bis 1984. 70 Jahre Kampf für die Menschenrechte in Deutschland,” Bl. 2. In its first year, it gained 131 members in the Berlin area, many from the old League. Two board members from pre-1959 days stayed on: Joachim G. Leithäuser and Willy Kressmann. Leithäuser, a journalist who wrote for Melvin Lasky’s Der Monat and was a prolific author on political and technological topics, had joined the board of the German League in 1956; he served as president until his death in 1965. 21. Three Weimar-era members—Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt, Kurt R. Grossmann, and Emil Gumbel—all confirmed that it was the authentic successor to the Weimar-era

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League. Internationale Liga für Menschenrechte, Berlin, ed., Warum Internationale Liga für Menschenrechte?, 5. See its website at www.ilmr.org. It is now affiliated with both the International League for Human Rights (ILHR) (formerly the ILRM) and the FIDH. 22. Warum Internationale Liga, 6-8. The League’s statutes were open-ended, stating merely that it “takes as its task to realize, to defend, and to further develop human rights, as they have been pronounced by the United Nations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948.” DEA NLF, Internationale Liga, Satzung (23 September 1965). 23. This paragraph draws upon Mario Kessler, Ein dritter Weg als humane Möglichkeit? Zu Leben und Wirken von Ossip Kurt Flechtheim (1909-1998) (Berlin: Helle Panke, 2004); and Siegfried Heimann, ed., Ossip K. Flechtheim: 100 Jahre (Berlin: Humanistischer Verband, 2009). 24. See Fichter, SDS und SPD, 342-44 and 352-53. 25. “Ossip Flechtheim: Macht und Utopie,” in Hans Karl Rupp and Thomas Noetzel, Macht, Freiheit, Demokratie: Anfänge der westdeutschen Politikwissenschaft: Biographische Annäherungen (Marburg: Schüren, 1991), 1: 45-56. 26. Cited in Mario Kessler, “Ossip K. Flechtheim (1909-1998) im Jahrhundert der Extreme,” in Ossip K. Flechtheim: 100 Jahre, ed. Heimann, 42. 27. See Ulrike C. Wasmuht, Geschichte der deutschen Friedensforschung: Entwicklung—Selbstverständnis—Politischer Kontext (Münster: agenda, 1998), 100-101, 271; and Wilhelm Bleek, Geschichte der Politikwissenschaft in Deutschland (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 286. 28. Ingeborg Rürup, “Die Humanistische Union und Ossip Flechtheim,” in Ossip K. Flechtheim: 100 Jahre, ed. Heimann, 77. See also the essays by his students: Peter Lösche, “Meine Erinnerungen an Ossip K. Flechtheim,” in Ossip K. Flechtheim: 100 Jahre, ed. Heimann, 129-33; and Hans-Rainer Sandvoss, “Flechtheim als akademischer Lehrer— aus der Sicht eines früheren Studenten,” in Ossip K. Flechtheim: 100 Jahre, ed. Heimann, 135-40. 29. Carola Stern, Doppelleben: Eine Autobiographie (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2001), 110-12; and Carola Stern with Thomas Schadt, Uns wirft nichts mehr um: Eine Lebensreise (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004), 4. 30. Wolfgang Heinz, personal communication, 23 April 2009. 31. Wolfgang S. Heinz, Menschenrechte und Dritte Welt: Zur Frage nach den Ursachen von Menschenrechtsverletzungen (Frankfurt: Haag und Herchen, 1980). A new, revised edition appeared after his doctoral defense in 1984: Wolfgang S. Heinz, Ursachen und Folgen von Menschenrechtsverletzungen in der Dritten Welt (Saarbrücken: Breitenbach, 1986). 32. See his own website, http://www.wsheinz.de (accessed 21 April 2011). He is on the staff of the German Institute for Human Rights (Deutsches Institut für Menschenrechte, www.institut-fuer-menschenrechte.de, accessed 21 April 2011). In West German Amnesty, Heinz served as the federal chairperson (Bundesvorsitzender) from

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1977 to 1979, and was on the board from 1981 to1983; he also served on Amnesty International’s International Executive Committee from 1982 to 1987. 33. Marion Thimm, personal communication, 30 March 2009. 34. Archiv der Sozialen Demokratie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Nachlass Carola Stern (hereafter FES NLS), Box 64, Amnesty International, Deutsche Sektion e.V., in Jahresbericht 1969/70 submitted by federal chairperson Carola Stern, 8. 35. DEA, Nachlass Lili Faktor-Flechtheim, Mappe 6 (15 June 1983). The other organization was the Committee for Basic Rights and Democracy (Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie), founded in 1980 by Klaus Vack, Wolf-Dieter Narr, Roland Roth, and Andreas Buro. It sought to sustain the ideas behind the Third International Russell Tribunal on the Human Rights Situation in the Federal Republic of Germany (3. Internationale Russell-Tribunal zur Situation der Menschenrechte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland) held in 1978 but overshadowed at that time by domestic terrorism. 36. Uwe Timm, Der Freund und der Fremde: Eine Erzählung (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2005). 37. Her works are newly available in Margherita von Brentano, Akademische Schriften, ed. Peter McLaughlin (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010); and Iris Nachum and Susan Neiman, eds., Das Politische und das Persönliche: Eine Collage (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010). While these describe her work with Reinhard Strecker, Manfred Rexin, Wolfgang Fritz Haug, and others, the League itself is not discussed. An extended interview with Brentano indicates well the politicized atmosphere of the Free University in the 1970s: “Margherita von Brentano, Berlin. 17. April 1975,” in Grenzenbeschreibung: Gespräche mit Philosophen, ed. Joachim Schickel (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1980), 62-97. 38. DEA NLF, Liga ca. 1965-75, Werbeblatt (n.d.); Nachum and Neiman, eds., Das Politische, 225-26, 262; Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “Aus dem Innenleben eines Herausgebers vor vierzig Jahren,” www.wolfgangfritzhaug.inkrit.de (accessed 19 July 2006); and Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “Zum Tode von Margherita von Brentano,” Das Argument 37, no. 209 (1995): 174-75. 39. See “Presseverlautbarung und Beschlüsse der Berliner Tagung ‘Die Überwinding des Antisemitismus,’” in Brentano, Akademische Schriften, 124-27. See also Nachum and Neiman, eds., Das Politische, 309; and Fichter, SDS und SPD, 314-16. 40. Nachum and Neiman, eds., Das Politische, 227, 309; and Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Von der Totalitarismustheorie zur Faschismustheorie—Zu einem Paradigmenwechsel in der bundesdeutschen Studentenbewegung,” in Totalitarismus: Eine Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Alfons Söllner, Ralf Walkenhaus, and Karin Wieland (Berlin: Akademie, 1997), 269. See Brentano’s co-authored essay “Zur Analyse des faschistischen Antisemitismus,” in Brentano, Akademische Schriften, 165-218; and her 1962 essay “Antisemitismus und Philosemitismus in der BRD,” in Das Politische, ed. Nachum and Neiman, 297-309. 41. See Brentano, “Die Situation der Frauen und das Bild ‘der Frau’ an der Universität” (1963), in Brentano, Akademische Schriften, 132-54; and Brentano, “Abiturientin,

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Studentin, Vorurteil: Die Frau an der Hochschule” (1964), in Brentano, Akademische Schriften, 219-26. 42. Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), 337-70, 447-65, 594-615; and Gerhard Schoenberner, “Joseph Wulf—Die Dokumentation des Verbrechens,” in Engagierte Demokraten: Vergangenheitspolitik in kritischer Absicht, ed. Claudia Fröhlich and Michael Kohlstruck (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999), 132-42. See also DEA NLF, Protokoll der Vorstandssitzung (1 February 1966), 3 on Wulf and a proposed documentation center using materials from the exhibit “Die Vergangenheit mahnt.” 43. E.g., Gerhard Schoenberner, “Alte Illusionen—Neues Wunschdenken,” in Berlin und keine Illusion: 13 Beiträge zur Deutschlandpolitik, ed. Ansgar Skriver (Hamburg: Rütten und Loening, 1962), 83-93; and Gerhard Schoenberner, “Zerstörung der Demokratie,” in Die Alternative oder Brauchen wir eine neue Regierung?, ed. Martin Walser (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1961), 137-45. 44. Warum Internationale Liga, 8. Gerhard Schoenberner, ed., Der gelbe Stern: Die Judenverfolgung in Europa 1933 bis 1945 (Hamburg: Rütten und Loening, 1960), now in English: The Yellow Star: The Persecution of the Jews in Europe, 1933-1945 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). The original exhibit, “Die Vergangenheit mahnt: Geschichte der Juden und ihre Verfolgung im Dritten Reich,” appeared at West Berlin’s Kongresshalle in 1960 and then toured West Germany and abroad. See Stephan Alexander Glienke, “Die Darstellung der Shoah im öffentlichen Raum: Die Ausstellung ‘Die Vergangenheit mahnt’ (1960-1962),” in Erfolgsgeschichte Bundesrepublik? Die Nachkriegsgesellschaft im langen Schatten des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Stephan Alexander Glienke, Volker Paulmann, and Joachim Perels (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 147-75; Habbo Knoch, Die Tat als Bild: Fotografien des Holocaust in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001), 699-721; and Robert Sackett, “Pictures of Atrocity: Public Discussion of Der gelbe Stern in Early 1960s West Germany,” German History 24, no. 4 (2006): 526-61. 45. A radio and print journalist, Manfred Rexin (b. 1935) is active in the anti-nuclear movement and in the SPD. Ansgar Skriver (1934-97) was a political editor at the WDR in Cologne. Their book was Der Weg zum Massenmord: Hundert Jahre Antisemitismus in Deutschland (Berlin: privately published, 1960). Skriver was active in Action Reconciliation Service (Aktion Sühnezeichen), an organization founded in 1961 in West Germany that organizes service work by West Germans with groups targeted by Nazism, such as Jews, Sinti, and Roma. See www.asf-ev.de (accessed 1 March 2011). 46. “Presseverlautbarung und Beschlüsse der Berliner Tagung ‘Die Überwinding des Antisemitismus.’” 47. Margherita von Brentano helped Strecker (b. 1930) assemble the material. See Nachum and Neiman, Das Politische, 226. Another partner in arranging the exhibit, Wolfgang Koppel, published Ungesühnte Nazijustiz: Hundert Urteile klagen ihre Richter an, ed. Wolfgang Koppel (Karlsruhe: privately published, 1960). On the SPD’s response to the exhibit, see Fichter, SDS und SPD, 306-10. Reinhard-M. Strecker, ed., Dr. Hans

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Globke: Aktenauszüge—Dokumente (Hamburg: Rütten und Loening, 1961). See Michael Kohlstruck, “Reinhard Strecker—‘Darf man seinen Kindern wieder ein Leben in Deutschland zumuten?,’” in Engagierte Demokraten, ed. Fröhlich and Kohlstruck, 185200. 48. DEA NLF, “1914 bis 1984: 70 Jahre Kampf für die Menschenrechte in Deutschland; 1959 bis 1984: 25 Jahre Internationale Liga für Menschenrechte—Sektion Berlin.” 49. Kraushaar, “Von der Totalitarismustheorie zur Faschismustheorie,” 27577; and Klaus Bästlein, “‘Nazi-Blutrichter als Stützen des Adenauer-Regimes’: Die DDR-Kampagnen gegen NS-Richter und –Staatsanwälte, die Reaktionen der bundesdeutschen Justiz und ihre gescheiterte ‘Selbstreinigung’ 1957-1968,” in Die Normalitat des Verbrechens: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung zu den nationalsozialistischen Gewaltverbrechen, ed. Helge Grabitz, Klaus Bästlein, and Johannes Tuchel (Berlin: Edition Hentrich), 408-43. Unsurprisingly, East Germany did not expose its own exNazis in high places, as long as they remained in state favor. See Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). 50. On Reimar Lenz’s exhibit, see Leggewie, Kofferträger, 11-33. 51. Skriver, ed., Berlin und keine Illusion. Dietrich Goldschmidt (1914-98), an education expert and sociologist who was persecuted in the Nazi era for his Jewish ancestry, chaired the League committee charged with awarding the Carl von Ossietzky Medal for many years. 52. DEA NLF, “1914 bis 1984: 70 Jahre Kampf für die Menschenrechte in Deutschland; 1959 bis 1984: 25 Jahre Internationale Liga für Menschenrechte—Sektion Berlin.” 53. Klessmann, Zwei Staaten, eine Nation, 179-85. 54. DEA NLF, Mappe “Informationen: Oktober 1965.” League press release (5 September 1965) and clipping from the Deutsche Wochenzeitung/Deutsche Nachrichten, Han­over (17 September 1965). 55. Two examples of older League members commenting on the League’s unwillingness to criticize Soviet aggression in the 1980s are DEA NLF, Liga, “Briefe (teilweise Rundschreiben), ca. ab 1985-1990,” Manfred Rexin to League board (16 December 1984), and Reimar Lenz to the “Circle of Former League members” (23 January 1986). 56. Kraushaar, “Von der Totalitarismustheorie zur Faschismustheorie,” 275-77. 57. Jürgen Wüst, Menschenrechtsarbeit im Zwielicht: Zwischen Staatssicherheit und Antifaschismus (Bonn: Bouvier, 1999), 199-211, esp. 201. 58. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “Erinnerung an Margherita von Brentano,” 4 (at www. wolfgangfritzhaug.inkrit.de, accessed 1 March 2011); and Peter Wensierski, “Akte aus dem Sack,” Der Spiegel (9 May 2005). 59. The League was definitely under Stasi observation in the 1980s. See BStU, SIRA Teildatenbank 12 (information retrieved 18 December 2001); and MfS HA XX ZMA Nr. 1626, 29 (quotation) and 36. This internal Stasi report criticized, for example, the granting of the Carl von Ossietzky Medal to the East German dissident Rudolf Bahro in 1978. 60. See its website, www.ilmr.de (accessed 1 March 2011). In the 1990s, its presi-

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dent was the German-Jewish rémigrée Alisa Fuss, and its focus was on education about Nazism, aiding refugees, and legal work on the right of asylum and against discrimination toward foreigners. See Barbara Heber-Schärer, Solidarität und Eigensinn: Das tätige Leben der Alisa Fuss—Berlin, Tel Aviv, Berlin (Berlin: PapyRossa, 2009). 61. Leo Müller, Betrifft: Amnesty International (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989), 20. 62. It was legally registered as a nonprofit organization about two months after that. The Cologne register of associations (Vereinsregister) shows it was registered on 25 September 1961 under the name Amnestie-Appell e.V. Amtsgericht Köln, VR 5588. In 1964 the name was changed to Amnesty International—German Section. West German Amnesty has been documented to a far greater extent than the League or Humanist Union. The most important accounts are Thomas Claudius and Franz Stepan, Amnesty International: Portrait einer Organisation (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1976); Müller, Betrifft: Amnesty International; Schmidt, “Menschenrechte in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte”; Anja Mihr, Amnesty International in der DDR: Der Einsatz für Menschenrechte im Visier der Stasi (Berlin: Chr. Links, 2002); and Daniela Steenkamp, Zur Entwicklung von amnesty international (ai) in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Marburg: Tectum, 2007). Useful in-house histories include Carola Stern’s numerous accounts, such as in Stern, Doppelleben, 166-72; and Volkmar Deile and Carola Stern, “‘Dass es nicht so bleibt, wie es ist,’” in 40 Jahre für die Menschenrechte, ed. Amnesty International (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 2001), 1-13. 63. Schmidt, “Menschenrechte in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte,” 88. A parallel Amnesty group developed in 1964 in Hamburg around Hajo and Helga Wandschneider. See www.amnesty-hamburg.de, “Über Amnesty International,” “Chronologie” (accessed 22 May 2011). Hajo Wandschneider served as defense counsel in the Spiegel Affair trial and other controversial trials. In 1966 the Cologne and Hamburg groups joined with twenty-one other local groups to form a unified Amnesty International—German Section. Stern, Doppelleben, 167. 64. Müller, Betrifft: Amnesty International, 19. 65. Tom Buchanan, “‘The Truth Will Set You Free’: The Making of Amnesty International,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 4 (2002): 576-77. See also Müller, Betrifft: Amnesty International, 13. 66. “‘Ich war überzeugt, dass man es versuchen muss!’ Carola Stern im Gespräch,” at www.amnesty.de (accessed 4 May 2009). See also Claudius and Stepan, Amnesty International, 217; Carola Stern, “Als die Hoffnung gehen lernte—Wie die Menschenrechtsbewegung entstand,” Forschungsjournal NSB 12, no. 1 (1999), 8-9; and Stern, Doppelleben, 167. 67. Müller, Betrifft: Amnesty International, 19; Stern, “Gefangen und vergessen”; Rein­hard Marx, “Amnesty International—Die Hervorbringung einer spezifischen Stra­ tegie aus dem aktuellen Kontext des menschenrechtlichen Diskurses,” in 40 Jahre für die Menschenrechte, ed. Amnesty International, 14-16. 68. “Satzung des Vereins Amnestie-Appell” (28 July 1961), cited in Schmidt, “Menschenrechte in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte” (unpaginated appendix).

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In 1968 it broadened its mandate for the first time, adding a campaign for fair and speedy trials for political prisoners. In the 1970s there followed work against the death penalty and torture, in the 1980s disappearances, and in 1991 the specific political prisoner orientation was dropped altogether. Schmidt, “Menschenrechte in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte,” 97-98. 69. “Satzung des Vereins Amnestie-Appell” (28 July 1961). 70. Cited in Christina von Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise: Eine Geschichte der westdeutschen Medienöffentlichkeit 1945-1973 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 256. Wolfgang Leonhard, Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1955), published in English as Child of the Revolution, trans. C. M. Woodhouse (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1958). 71. Stern with Schadt, Uns wirft nichts mehr um, 41. 72. These were Ruge, Stern, Sabine Rühle, her husband, Jürgen Rühle, Wolfgang Leonhard, and Berend von Nottbeck. Jürgen Rühle (1924-86) was a journalist and literary critic who had had to leave East Germany due to his anti-Stalinism. The remaining three founding board members were not Cologne CCF members: Felix Rexhausen; the economist Gerhard Scherhorn (b. 1930), who pioneered work in sustainable consumption; and the journalist Peter Bender (1923-2008), a leading advocate of détente with his book Offensive Entspannung: Möglichkeit für Deutschland (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1964). Bender was a lifelong close friend of Stern’s. See Stern, Doppelleben, 164-65. 73. Varying but compatible accounts of the contacts between Benenson and the CCF are in Müller, Betrifft: Amnesty International, 20; Michael Hochgeschwender, Freiheit in der Offensive? Der Kongress für kulturelle Freiheit und die Deutschen (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1998), 506-13; and Schmidt, “Menschenrechte in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte,” 58, 89-90, 109. On the importance of the CCF for West German journalists, see Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise, 259-60. 74. Müller, Betrifft: Amnesty International, 20, 22; and Mihr, Amnesty International in der DDR, 76. Brandt’s memoir is Heinz Brandt, Ein Traum, der nicht entführbar ist: Mein Weg zwischen Ost und West (Munich: List, 1967), published in English as The Search for a Third Way: My Path between East and West, trans. Salvator Attanasio and with a foreword by Erich Fromm (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970). 75. Müller, Betrifft: Amnesty International, 23. Beginning in 1968, Amnesty International did impose a “work on own country” (WOOC) rule, according to which “no group may be assigned to a prisoner of conscience from its own country.” See Herbert Haines, Against Capital Punishment: The Anti-Death Penalty Movement in America, 1972-1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 68-69; Claudius and Stepan, Amnesty International, 292; and Mihr, Amnesty International in der DDR, 237-38. At this early stage, however, the rule had not taken on clear form. The WOOC rule has always been problematic in that it diverted the energies of those committed to change in their own country into other forums, and since 2001 it has been allowed to fall into abeyance.

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Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 97-99. 76. Müller, Betrifft: Amnesty International, 21. 77. Gerd Ruge, “40 Jahre amnesty international: Ein Blick zurück zu den Anfängen: Gerd Ruge, Mitbegründer der deutschen Sektion von ai, erinnert sich,” in Die Menschenrechte: Eine Investition in die Zukunft? Prominente nehmen Stellung (Mainz: ai Mainz Gruppe 1260 and KoGruppe “Schriftsteller und Journalisten,” 2001), 1-2; Stern, Doppelleben, 112; Schmidt, “Menschenrechte in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte,” 89. 78. Hochgeschwender, Freiheit in der Offensive?, 508. 79. Of the founding board of West German Amnesty, Stern was the political editor in Witsch’s publishing house; Nottbeck ran a subsidiary of the same house; Sabine Rühle worked for Witsch in his capacity with the CCF; and Jürgen Rühle and Wolfgang Leonhard were Witsch’s house authors (and Stern was their editor). Nottbeck and Leonhard had a business-related split with Witsch as well: Nottbeck had headed up a division of Witsch’s publishing business and then founded his own publishing house and took his authors, including Leonhard, with him. Stern, Doppelleben, 159. 80. Stern gives a humorous account of Witsch’s bombast and publishing skill in her memoirs. Stern, Doppelleben, 156-65. 81. In 1973 he resumed his record of remarkable postings in communist countries, working from Beijing for three years for the newspaper Die Welt. In 1987 he returned to Moscow for the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ARD), and was there to report the coup in 1991. After 1993, he retired, but he has continued working as an independent documentary filmmaker and is still active at the time of writing. 82. Gerd Ruge, Gespräche in Moskau (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1961); and Gerd Ruge, ed., Vergessene Kinder Europas? Europäisches Antlitz jenseits des Eisernen Vorhangs (Düsseldorf: Europa Union, 1962). 83. He raised DM 30,000 for the organization from Krupp, IG Metall, and the Archbishopric of Cologne, and he hosted an international Amnesty meeting in Königswinter in 1963, the only one to be held in Germany for many years. Müller, Betrifft: Amnesty International, 22. 84. Stern, Doppelleben, 168. 85. Gustav Heinemann, who later became federal president (1969-74), was a hero to many members of the organizations discussed in this chapter. In 1977 Stern helped found the Gustav-Heinemann-Initiative (GHI) to focus on domestic liberties in the midst of anti-terrorism policies. The GHI merged with the Humanist Union in 2009. 86. Ruge, “40 Jahre amnesty international,” 1-2. 87. See Gerd Ruge, ed., Landesverrat und Pressefreiheit: Ein Protokoll (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1963). As Müller notes, in later years such domestically focused activism would not have taken place. Müller, Betrifft: Amnesty International, 23. Jürgen Seifert of the Humanist Union assembled its definitive documentation: Seifert et al., Die Spiegel-Affäre, 2 vols. (Olten: Walter, 1966).

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88. Kommers, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany, 397-403. 89. Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise, 331-32. 90. Bauer, a leading member of the Humanist Union, could not attend but sent a statement that was published in the proceedings. Ruge, ed., Landesverrat, 135-40. 91. Stern was chair until 1970, she represented West German Amnesty in Amnesty International’s International Executive Committee until 1972, and she joined West German Amnesty’s advisory board in 1975. Claudius and Stepan, Amnesty International, 218. Ruge could no longer be as active after he took a journalistic posting to Washington, D.C. in 1964. 92. Stern was also active in literary affairs connected to politics, helping to bring Eastern European authors to Western readings with the literary journal L 76, which she co-founded with Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, and serving as vice president of West German PEN in the 1980s and 1990s. From the 1980s onward, finally, Stern was a successful author of historical biographies of famous women and her own autobiographies. See Carola Stern, Ich möchte mir Flügel wünschen: Das Leben der Dorothea Schlegel (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1990); Carola Stern, Der Text meines Herzens: Das Leben der Rahel Varnhagen (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1994). She also joined historiographical debates: see Carola Stern and Heinrich August Winkler, eds., Wendepunkte deutscher Geschichte 1848-1945 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1979); and her antagonist Hermann Lübbe’s essays in Hermann Lübbe, Vom Parteigenossen zum Bundesbürger—über beschwiegene und historisierte Vergangenheiten (Munich: Fink, 2007). She wrote three autobiographies: Carola Stern, In den Netzen der Erinnerungen: Lebensgeschichten zweier Menschen (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1986); Stern, Doppelleben; and Stern with Schadt, Uns wirft nichts mehr um. While the second is the most comprehensive, the third is franker and so well worth consulting; both contain revelations of her espionage work for the United States. Her papers are held at the Fritz Ebert Stiftung, but they reveal little that is not already in the public record. I was fortunate to be granted an interview at her home in Berlin on 27 October 2001. 93. Stern with Schadt, Uns wirft nichts mehr um, 83, 101, 106. 94. Ibid., 159. 95. See Stern, In den Netzen, 255-56. Stern must have seen the predicament of leftist radicals in Adenauer’s West Germany in part through the eyes of her husband, Heinz Zöger, whom she met in 1960. Formerly an editor of the respected periodical Sonntag in East Germany and then imprisoned there, he had arrived in West Germany in 1959 and was for some time unable to find work because he was not recognized as a political refugee. Stern, Doppelleben, 179, 181; and Stern with Schadt, Uns wirft nichts mehr um, 144. 96. Stern, Doppelleben, 39-40. 97. Carola Stern, Die SED: Ein Handbuch über Aufbau, Organisation und Funktion des Parteiapparates (Cologne: Verlag für Politik und Wirtschaft, 1954); Carola Stern, Porträt einer bolschewistischen Partei: Entwicklung, Funktion und Situation der SED (Cologne: Verlag für Politik und Wirtschaft, 1957). She also published a biography of Walter

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Ulbricht, the party secretary and head of state: Ulbricht: Eine politische Biographie (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1963). It was soon translated into English: Ulbricht: A Political Biography, trans. Abe Farbstein (New York: Praeger, 1965). 98. Stern, Doppelleben, 109. 99. Ibid., 137, 145, 147, 159; and Stern with Schadt, Uns wirft nichts mehr um, 86, 99. 100. Stern, Doppelleben, 51-53, 84; and Stern with Schadt, Uns wirft nichts mehr um, 61-68, 91-93 (quote on 93), 99-105. 101. The Stasi infiltrated West German Amnesty and the Humanist Union. In the former case at least, these efforts took place when the organization was so well known that even the Stasi found it fruitless to seek to discredit it. See Wüst, Menschenrechtsarbeit im Zwielicht, 226-31; and Anna Elmiger, “Früher . . . Private Erinnerungssplitter an meine aktive Zeit in der HU,” in 40 Jahre Bürgerrechtsbewegung, a special issue of Vorgänge no. 155, no. 3 (September 2001): 80. For a discussion of British Amnesty’s contacts with British intelligence, see Tom Buchanan, “Amnesty International in Crisis, 1966-7,” Twentieth Century British History 15, no. 3 (2004): 267-89. 102. On the continuity across 1945, see Felix Rexhausen, Berührungen: Eine Zeitreise durch die 1960er Jahre (Hamburg: MännerschwarmSkript, 2003), 94; and Andreas Pretz­el, NS-Opfer unter Vorbehalt: Homosexuelle Männer in Berlin nach 1945 (Hamburg: LIT, 2002). Sexual acts between women were not criminalized. 103. Quoted from Felix Rexhausen, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin: rosa Winkel, 1982), endpaper. 104. Hans Rillow, “‘Erwache und lache!’ Ein Kalendarblatt für Felix Rexhausen,” in Felix Rexhausen, Lavendelschwert: Dokumente einer homosexuellen Revolution (Berlin: rosa Winkel, 1999), 284. 105. Felix Rexhausen, Die Finanzpublizität der Länder und Gemeinden (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1963), 10. 106. Felix Rexhausen, “Der Linkische und der Weg zum Rechts-Staat: Oder; Wer zersetzt hier was?,” Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 10, no. 7 (July 1965): 571-79, quote on 578. 107. Rexhausen often conceded his desire to mix political education with humor. See Felix Rexhausen, “Anmerkung [Zur Neuausgabe 1978],” vi-vii; and “Ein Nachruf auf Felix Rexhausen,” 307-9, both in Rexhausen, Lavendelschwert (1999). 108. The sketch is reprinted in Rexhausen, Mit Bayern leben! Briefe auf eine Glosse (Offenbach: W. Kumm, 1963), 7-9, quote on 8. 109. On the reaction to “Living with Bavaria,” see Rexhausen, Mit Bayern leben!, 10 and passim; Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise, 337-38; Rillow, “‘Erwache und lache!,’” 27980. His obituary in Der Spiegel claims that the WDR refused to permit him to appear by name on the air again (17 February 1992), but Hodenberg does not mention that. 110. His papers are held in the Gay Museum (Schwules Museum) in Berlin, but they have not yet been processed and made available to researchers. 111. Felix Rexhausen, Mit deutscher Tinte: Briefe und Ansprachen für alle Wechselfälle des Lebens (Frankfurt: Bärmeier und Nikel, 1965). The letters mentioned below

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are “Sie haben DDR gesagt” (107), “Entschuldigung wegen Kränkung eines Parteipolitikers” (98), “Ein NS-Richter wird freigesprochen” (30), “Unser Neffe heiratet eine Jüdin” (26), “Spanien ist anders” (108), “Südafrika muss so sein” (109), “Von einem Vertreter der Vertriebenen” (141), “Verleihung des Sudetendeutschen Karlspreises” (216), “Der Vorsitzende eines Kuratoriums ‘Unteilbares Deutschland’ gibt sein Amt ab” (176), “175 Jahre Michelangelo-Forschung” (202), and “Ein Linksintellektueller lehnt eine Mitarbeit ab” (81). 112. Felix Rexhausen, “Anmerkung zur Neuausgabe 1978,” , vi. 113. Felix Rexhausen, Lavendelschwert: Dokumente einer seltsamen Revolution (Frankfurt: Bärmeier und Nikel, 1966). I used the reprint edition Felix Rexhausen, Laven­ delschwert: Dokumente einer homosexuellen Revolution (Berlin: rosa Winkel, 1999). On the reception of The Lavender Sword, see the essay there: Dirck Linck, “‘Und sieh’! Da kam ein mut’ges Volk gezogen!’ Zu Felix Rexhausens ‘Lavendelschwert,’” 287303; and also the 2003 reprint edition of Rexhausen, Berührungen, 209-10. 114. Rexhausen, Lavendelschwert (1999), 243. 115. Stefan David (pseud.), Berührungen: Eine Zeitreise durch die 1960er Jahre (Darmstadt: Olympia Press, 1969). 116. Felix Rexhausen, Die Sache: Einundzwanzig Variationen (Frankfurt: Bärmeier und Nikel, 1968), 11-14, quote on 14. 117. Rexhausen, “Ein Nachruf,” 309. Rexhausen wrote this obituary himself. 118. Felix Rexhausen, Über Wahlkampf: Ein Leitfaden für das zahlende Publikum (Lucerne: Edition Guido Baumann im Verlag C. J. Bucher, 1980). The phrase “mündige Bürger” was a sort of motto of federal president Gustav Heinemann (1969-74), who was a hero to members of all three organizations discussed here. See Habbo Knoch, “‘Mündige Bürger,’ oder: Der kurze Frühling einer partizipatorischer Vision: Einleitung,” in Bürgersinn mit Weltgefühl: Politische Moral und solidarischer Protest in den sechziger und siebziger Jahren, ed. Habbo Knoch (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 9-54. Carola Stern used the phrase in an essay on the ideal citizen, whom Heinemann exemplified in her view. Carola Stern, “Erfahrungen mit einem Bürgerpräsidenten,” in Anstoss und Ermutigung: Gustav W. Heinemann, Bundespräsident 1969-1974, ed. Heinrich Böll, Helmut Goll­ witzer, and Carlo Schmid (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 260. 119. Schmidt, “Menschenrechte in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte,” 94. 120. Stern, “Verteidiger.” 121. Stern, Doppelleben, 167. 122. Stern, Strategien, 101-2. 123. Ibid., 102. 124. Claudius and Stepan, Amnesty International, 218. “‘Ich war überzeugt, dass man es versuchen muss!’ Carola Stern im Gespräch,” at www.amnesty.de (accessed 4 May 2009). See also Schmidt, “Menschenrechte in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte,” 95. 125. Claudius and Stepan, Amnesty International, 219; and Stern, Doppelleben, 172. 126. Gerhard Szczesny, “Humanistische Union,” in Die Alternative, ed. Walser, 38.

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127. Ibid., 36-43. His manifesto became public in June 1961; the founding meeting was held in late August (after the Wall was erected), and it was legally registered in September. Till Müller-Heidelberg, “Die Humanistische Union als älteste deutsche Bürgerrechtsorganisation: Geschichte und Perspektiven,” in 40 Jahre Bürgerrechtsbewegung, 13. The history of the Humanist Union is better documented than the League’s, and unlike West German Amnesty with its confidentiality and image concerns, it is in the nature of the Humanist Union that its own members tend to be its toughest critics. Useful accounts of the Humanist Union’s past include 40 Jahre Bürgerrechtsbewegung; Hofmann, “Die Humanistische Union”; and Alfred Roos, “Nicht-parlamentarische Politik und Opposition: Die Bürgerrechtspolitik der Humanistischen Union,” Vorgänge no. 3 (1993): 75-89. As this book was going to press, the Humanist Union marked its fiftieth anniversary with Fünfzig Jahre Humanistische Union, a special issue of Vorgänge no. 194, vol. 40, no. 2 (June 2011). 128. “Zu diesem Buch,” in Die Alternative, ed. Walser, n.p. On Walser’s book, see A. Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 163-66. 129. On West German conservatives’ positive view of Salazar’s Portugal and other authoritarian regimes, see Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in PostWar European Thought (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 138-39. 130. See, e.g., Horst Krüger, “Was wir mit Freiheit machen,” Vorgänge 4, no. 6 (1965): 249-51. 131. See, e.g., Ernst Topitsch, “Die Menschenrechte als Problem der Ideologiekritik,” Vorgänge 2, no. 6 (1963): 161-69. 132. E.g., Axel Eggebrecht, “Soll die Ära der Heuchelei andauern?,” in Die Alternative, ed. Walser, 27, 34; Gerhard Szczesny, “Humanistische Union,” 42-43. See also Stern, Doppelleben, 168. 133. Norbert Reichling, “Die HU und die Aufklärung über den Nationalsozialismus,” in 40 Jahre Bürgerrechtsbewegung, 35-48. 134. See, e.g., Dieter Schoner, “Zur Vertriebenendenkschrift der EKD,” Vorgänge 4, no. 12 (1965): 515-16. 135. Gerhard Szczesny, “Humanistische Union,” 37-39. Abendland was a keyword of post-1945 West German conservatism. See Axel Schildt, “Deutschlands Platz in einem ‘christlichen Abendland’: Konservative Publizisten aus dem Tat-Kreis in der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit,” in Deutschland nach Hitler: Zukunftspläne im Exil und aus der Besatzungszeit 1939-1949, ed. Thomas Koebner, Gert Sautermeister, and Sigrid Schneider (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987), 344-69. 136. Gerhard Szczesny, “Humanistische Union,” 36-37. 137. Ibid., 37. 138. See Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in TwentiethCentury Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 103-7. The “reChristianization” efforts of the Catholic Church regarding film were exactly the sort of thing that precipitated the Humanist Union, and are well described in Christian Kuchler,

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“Zwischen Rechristianisierung und säkularer Medienwelt: Die Katholische Filmarbeit in Westdeutschland nach 1945,” in Zwischen Kriegs- und Diktaturerfahrung: Katholizismus und Protestantismus in der Nachkriegszeit, ed. Andreas Holzem and Christoph Holzapfel (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2005), 109-36. Recent historical work is showing how this struggle also unfolded inside the churches over the 1960s. See, e.g., Siegfried Hermle, Claudia Lepp, and Harry Oelke, eds., Umbrüche: Der deutsche Protestantismus und die sozialen Bewegungen in den 1960er und 70er Jahren (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2007). 139. A detailed account is in Sabine Korsukéwitz, “Der Fall Szczesny: Zum Verhältnis von Kreativität und Kontrolle im öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunksystem” (Ph.D. diss., Free University of Berlin, 1979). 140. Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise. 141. Gerhard Lampe, Panorama, Report und Monitor: Geschichte der politischen Fernsehmagazine 1957-1990 (Konstanz: UVK Medien, 2000), 110-13. 142. On this and the other affairs, see Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise, 298-99. Heinrich von Brentano was the uncle of Margherita von Brentano. On Szczesny’s firing, see ibid., 277, 341. The historian Joachim Fest and the author Gert von Paczensky were also fired from Panorama. See also ibid., 245-57 and 293-360 and references cited there regarding the “45er” generation of journalists and its concern for human and basic rights. Rüdiger Proske, a Panorama editor fired in 1963, recalled the early 1960s in exactly the same phrases as those used in Humanist Union statements. Ibid., 306. On the so-called TV (I) case, see Kommers, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany, 69-75 and 404-7. The government’s proposed press restrictions were also a sensitive point in the state of emergency legislation (Notstandsgesetzgebung) that was proposed and failed in 1960. 143. Hofmann, “Die Humanistische Union,” 7; and Reichling, “Die HU und die Aufklärung über den Nationalsozialismus,” 37. Today the Humanist Union has sixteen hundred members. “Pressemitteilung: Anwältin der Bürgerrechte: Festakt zum 50jährigen Bestehen der Humanistischen Union am 24. September 2011” (26 August 2011), at www.humanistische-union.de (accessed 9 October 2011). 144. Christian Szczesny, “Mein Grossvater Gerhard Szczesny und die Humanistische Union,” in 40 Jahre Bürgerrechtsbewegung, 25-32; and Gerhard Szczesny, “Den Utopismus und Radikalismus habe ich mir selbst ins Haus geholt,” in 40 Jahre Bürgerrechtsbewegung, 33-34. 145. On Mitscherlich, see Angelika Ebrecht, “Alexander und Margarete Mitscherlich— Erinnerungsarbeit als politische Kritik,” in Engagierte Demokraten, ed. Fröhlich and Kohlstruck, 277-88; the excellent Tobias Freimüller, Alexander Mitscherlich: Gesellschaftsdiagnosen und Psychoanalyse nach Hitler (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007); and Tobias Freimüller, ed., Psychoanalyse und Protest: Alexander Mitscherlich und die “Achtundsechziger” (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008). Kesten was active in PEN. See Walter Fähnders and Hendrik Weber, eds., Dichter–Literat–Emigrant: Über Hermann Kesten (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2005). On König, see his memoir Leben im Widerspruch: Versuch einer intellektuellen Autobiog-

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raphie (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1980), 177-79; and Heine von Alemann and Gerhard Kunz, eds., René König: Gesamtverzeichnis der Schriften: In der Spiegelung von Freunden, Schülern, Kollegen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1992). Ludwig Marcuse was a philosopher and literary critic. See Dieter Lamping, ed., Ludwig Marcuse: Werk und Wirkung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1987). Kesten, König, and Marcuse were all returned émigrés. Just as West German Amnesty sprang from the Cologne branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, so did the Humanist Union overlap with the membership and mission of the Munich CCF. Hochgeschwender, Freiheit in der Offensive?, 514-16. 146. Jürgen Seifert, “Verfassungspatriotismus im Streit um die Notstandsgesetzgebung: Erinnerungen aus der Zeit, in der ich ‘Notstands-Seifert’ genannt wurde,” in 40 Jahre Bürgerrechtsbewegung, 97. 147. Hofmann, “Die Humanistische Union,” 2-3, 6, 8-11. 148. The school issue arose in every single issue of Vorgänge in 1962 and 1963, and often thereafter. 149. On the latter, see Peter C. Caldwell, “The Crucifix and German Constitutional Culture,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 2 (1996): 259-73. The course of the crucifix debate resembled that of the Humanist Union’s early confessional school campaign. 150. E.g., Vorgänge 1, no. 4/5 (1962): 17-21. 151. Ludwig Marcuse, Obszön: Geschichte einer Entrüstung (Munich: List, 1962). On this book and its context of censorship in West Germany, see Elizabeth Heineman, Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 131-34. 152. N. N., Öffentliche Warnung der Humanistischen Union vor der “Aktion Saub­ ere Leinwand,” Vorgänge 4, no. 6 (1965): 245. 153. Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 134. 154. On Pölnitz, see Vorgänge 4, no. 12 (1965): 535; and Rolf Seeliger, ed., Braune Universität: Deutsche Hochschullehrer gestern und heute: Dokumentation mit Stellungnahmen, 6 vols. (Munich: privately published, 1964-68). 155. A detailed account of his life is in Irmtrud Wojak, Fritz Bauer 1903-1968: Eine Biographie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009). On the legal issues Bauer highlighted, such as resistance and prosecution of Nazi-era crimes (crimes that would have expired under the statute of limitations, had the West German parliament not extended it), see Fritz Bauer, “Die Verjährung nazistischer Mordtaten,” Vorgänge 4, no. 2 (1965): 49. His writings are available in Fritz Bauer, Die Humanität der Rechtsordnung: Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Joachim Perels and Irmtrud Wojak (Frankfurt: Campus, 1998). Today, the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt sustains Bauer’s legacy by researching the history of Nazi crimes. See its website at www.fritz-bauer-institut.de (accessed 5 June 2011). 156. Fritz Bauer, “Eine Grenze hat Tyrannenmacht,” in Bauer, Die Humanität, 169-79. On the Remer trial, see Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past, 251-76; and Claudia Fröhlich, “Wider die Tabuisierung des Ungehorsams”: Fritz Bauers Widerstandsbegriff und die Aufarbeitung von NS-Verbrechen (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006), 31-128.

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157. Fritz Bauer, “Im Kampf um des Menschen Rechte,” in Bauer, Die Humanität, 37-49. 158. Fritz Bauer, “Was ist unzüchtig?,” Vorgänge 1, no. 4/5 (1962): 8-11; co-author of Sexualität und Verbrechen: Beiträge zur Strafrechtsreform (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1963) with Hans Bürger-Prinz, Hans Giese, and Herbert Jäger. On Schoeps’s activism, see Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 94, 134; and, e.g., Vorgänge 2, no. 2 (1963): 50-53. In the mid-1970s the Humanist Union took up work on the rights of transsexuals. DEA NLF, box on HU, Bundesvorstand minutes, 12-13 July 1975. 159. On sterilization, see “Das Problem der Strafbarkeit der sozial indizierten Sterilisation,” Vorgänge 2, no. 9 (1963): 270-73. On divorce, see Hofmann, “Die Humanisti­sche Union,” 6. After the Constitutional Court overturned the abortion law of 1974, a new abortion law was passed that permitted abortion only when accredited experts stated that it was socially or medically indicated. Müller-Heidelberg, “Die Humanistische Union als älteste deutsche Bürgerrechtsorganisation,” 16. Unification led to a new law in 1992, permitting abortion in the first trimester after mandatory anti-abortion counseling and a waiting period. See Kommers, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany, 335-56. 160. On feminist work inside the Humanist Union, see, e.g., Charlotte Maack, “Die Situation der Frau in der Bundesrepublik,” Vorgänge 4, no. 5 (1966): 199-207; and Heide Hering, “Geschafft! Eine Verfassungsänderung! Über eine erfolgreiche HU-Initiative in der Frauenpolitik,” in 40 Jahre Bürgerrechtsbewegung, 114-20. 161. See his memoirs: Heinrich Hannover, Die Republik vor Gericht 1954-1995: Erinnerungen eines unbequemen Rechtsanwalts (Berlin: Aufbau, 2005). 162. Fritz Bauer, “Gegen die Todesstrafe,” in Bauer, Die Humanität, 393-97. Helga Einsele, “Humanisierung des Strafvollzugs,” Vorgänge 8, no. 9 (1969): 297-98. 163. Fritz Bauer, “Die Schuld im Strafrecht,” in Bauer, Die Humanität, 249-78. Heinrich Hannover, “‘Es muss endlich geköpft werden’: Beitrag zu einer Bewusstseinsanalyse der deutschen Führungsschicht anhand einer Umfrage über die Todesstrafe,” Vorgänge 3, no. 11 (1964): 381-87, and no. 12 (1964): 432-39. 164. Ossip K. Flechtheim, “Gefahren der Notstandsgesetzgebung,” Vorgänge 2, no. 1 (1963): 1-3; Jürgen Seifert, Gefahr im Verzuge. Zur Problematik der Notstandsgesetzgebung (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1965); Seifert, “Verfassungspatriotismus im Streit um die Notstandsgesetzgebung.” 165. “Memorandum der Humanistischen Union zum Sympathisanten-Begriff: Offener Brief an den Bundespräsidenten, Vorgänge 15, no. 5 (1977): 128-30. 166. This even happened in the highly controversial area of terrorism: federal president Walter Scheel made the Humanist Union’s critique of the term of abuse “terrorist sympathizer” (Sympathisant) his own in an official speech at the funeral of Hanns Martin Schleyer, one of the victims of the Red Army Faction. Müller-Heidelberg, “Die Humanistische Union als älteste deutsche Bürgerrechtsorganisation,” 17-19. 167. Ibid., 23. Schily had been prominent in the 1970s among those defending the rights of the Red Army Faction prisoners, but as minister of the interior he faced criticism from the Humanist Union for his anti-terrorism policies.

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168. On women and Amnesty membership, see Claudius and Stepan, Amnesty International, 224; and Stern with Schadt, Uns wirft nichts mehr um, 160. A study of the Humanist Union in 1967 indicated that only one-fifth of its members were women. Hofmann, “Die Humanistische Union,” 81. Examples include Ingrid Matthäus-Maier, initially a parliamentarian for the FDP (1976-82), then for the SPD (1983-99); the FDP politician and former justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger; and the Green Party co-chairperson Claudia Roth. Hildegard Hamm-Brücher, a leading FDP politician and parliamentarian from 1976 to 1990, may or may not have been a member, but the Humanist Union eagerly supported her positions over the years. See, e.g., Vorgänge 2, no. 6 (1963): 183, where she and the Humanist Students’ Union protested the preference of Theodor Maunz, the Bavarian minister of education and the arts, for conservative and Catholic candidates. After his death in 1993, the noted jurist Maunz was discovered to be an active supporter of neo-Nazi politics. 169. Carola Stern, personal communication, 27 October 2001. 170. E.g., the documentation of police excesses in 1975, DEA NLF, box “Humanist­ ische Union.” Discussion of a merger was ongoing when I visited the Humanist Union in 2001, but it has not taken place. 171. Stern, personal communication, 27 October 2001. Charlotte Maack, the chairperson of the Humanist Union, complained to Flechtheim about West German Amnesty’s reluctance to cooperate on a case of deportations of Turkish citizens, for example. DEA NLF, box “Humanistische Union,” Maack to Flechtheim, 15 June 1976. Amnesty International was generally reluctant to cooperate with other organizations, for fear of damaging its own reputation for impartiality. Haines, Against Capital Punishment, 69. Today there is a certain form of cooperation among these and other human rights organizations in West Germany, through the Human Rights Forum (Forum Menschenrechte), founded in 1994. 172. Wolfgang Heinz, personal communication, 23 April 2009. 173. FES NLS, Box 64, Amnesty International, Deutsche Sektion e.V., “Rechenschaftsbericht des Vorstandes,” in Jahresbericht 1969/70, submitted by chairwoman Carola Stern, 9-10. 174. Claudius and Stepan, Amnesty International, 228-29; and Müller, Betrifft: Amnesty International, 37-48. 175. Deile and Stern, “‘Dass es nicht so bleibt, wie es ist,’” 4; and Wolfgang Heinz, personal communication, 23 April 2009. 176. Stern, Doppelleben, 206-7; and Stern with Schadt, Uns wirft nichts mehr um, 169-71. The issue was formally closed when the European Commission for Human Rights dismissed the Red Army Faction prisoners’ complaints in 1978. 177. Peter Lange, “Die erfolgreichste Internationale des 20. Jahrhunderts: 40 Jahre amnesty international,” in Jahrbuch Menschenrechte 2001, ed. Gabriele von Arnim, Volkmar Deile, Franz-Josef Hutter, Sabine Kurtenbach, and Carsten Tessmer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 267-68. 178. On Alexander, see Vorgänge 2, no. 12 (1963): 402. On foreigners’ rights and fami-

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lies with mixed citizenship, see, e.g., Hans Heinz Heldmann, “Was läßt das Ausländergesetz vom Asylrecht übrig?,” Vorgänge 5, no. 3 (1967): 81-83; and Ansgar Skriver, “Kein Schutz für Ehen mit Ausländer,” Vorgänge 7, no. 3 (1969): 122-23. This work drew Rosi WolfAlmanasreh, the founder of the Interessengemeinschaft der mit Ausländern verheirate­ ten deutschen Frauen (IAF) to the Humanist Union in 1972; see Chapter 5. On the presence of foreign students in West Germany in the 1960s and their impact on radical politics, see Quinn Slobodian, “Dissident Guests: Afro-Asian Students and Transnational Activism in the West German Protest Movement,” in Migration and Activism in Europe since 1945, ed. Wendy Pojmann (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 33-56; and Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). 179. Stefan Hemler, “Wie die 68er-Revolte eines ihrer liberalen Kinder frass: Eine kurze Geschichte der Humanistischen Studenten-Union, erzählt am Beispiel Münchens,” in 40 Jahre Bürgerrechtsbewegung, 49-61. 180. See, e.g., “Erklärung westdeutscher Intellektueller über den Krieg in Vietnam,” Vorgänge 4, no. 12 (1965): 534-35. 181. Alfred Roos makes this argument for the Humanist Union in Roos, “Nichtparlamentarische Politik und Opposition.” 182. On Mahler’s resignation from the League board in 1968, see DEA NLF, Mappe Liga. ca. 1965-75, minutes of Berlin chapter of League, June 1969. This document also mentions that the membership of that chapter, which must have been by far the largest of all League chapters, was only 170. On Möllendorf, see DEA NLF, Mappe “Liga. ca. 1965-1975,” minutes of board meeting 28 December 1965. 183. Deile and Stern, “‘Dass es nicht so bleibt, wie es ist,’” 4. 184. Wolfgang Heinz, personal communication, 23 April 2009. 185. Volker Braunbehrens, “Aus den Anfängen der HU: Persönliche Erfahrungen,” in 40 Jahre Bürgerrechtsbewegung, 65; Christian Szczesny, “Mein Grossvater Gerhard Szczesny und die Humanistische Union,” in 40 Jahre Bürgerrechtsbewegung, 31-32; and Gerhard Szczesny, “Den Utopismus und Radikalismus habe ich mir selbst ins Haus geholt,” in 40 Jahre Bürgerrechtsbewegung, 34 (quote). 186. Hannes Schwenger, “Ist die Humanistische Union ‘ostblind’?,” Vorgänge 2, no. 11 (November 1964): 417-18. 187. That organization is the subject of Wüst, Menschenrechtsarbeit im Zwielicht. Chapter 4 1. On the expellee lobby and international law, and on the impact of détente, or Ostpolitik, see Pertti Ahonen, After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe 19451990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 42-43, 46-47, 210, 246-47. On the 1970s as a period of intensive human rights talk, see Jan Eckel, “Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht: Menschenrechte in der globalen Politik seit 1945,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009): 437-84, here 458-78; and Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). The expellee

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lobby has been accused of using human rights language strategically or cynically; see, e.g., Samuel Salzborn, Die Ethnisierung der Politik: Theorie und Geschichte des Volksgruppenrechts in Europa (Frankfurt: Campus, 2005), 17; or less polemically, Ahonen, After the Expulsion, 43-44. 2. Some of the more prominent West German international law scholars who focused on expellee-related issues were, in addition to Rudolf Laun and Otto Kimminich, Theodor Veiter (1907-94), Kurt Rabl (1909-92), Boris Meissner (1915-2003), Karl Doehring (1919-2011), Dieter Blumenwitz (1939-2005), Jochen Frowein (b. 1934), Eckart Klein (b. 1943), and Dietrich Murswiek (b. 1948). 3. He also wrote on the topics of the head of state (Staatsoberhaupt) and the law of the university and of the sciences. A committed teacher, he wrote textbooks on constitutional history, public law, and international law. See Otto Kimminich, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, 1st ed. (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1970) and 2nd ed. (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1987); Otto Kimminich, Einführung in das öffentliche Recht (Freiburg: Rombach, 1972); and Otto Kimminich, Einführung in das Völkerrecht, 1st ed. (Pullach bei München: Dokumentation Saur, 1975). This last one was authored by Kimminich through the sixth edition in 1997, then was taken over by Stephan Hobe, under whose name it appeared in its ninth edition in 2008. Kimminich’s contributions to standard reference works include commentaries on Article 14 of the Basic Law in the Bonner Kommentar zum Grundgesetz (Heidelberg: C. F. Müller, 1992): 65-67, and on Articles 6 and 14 of the U.N. Charter. See Otto Kimminich, “Art. 6 SVN” and “Kommentierung von Art. 14 SVN,” in Charta der Vereinten Nationen: Kommentar, ed. Bruno Simma (Munich: C. H. Beck: 1991), 142-50 and 239-47. See also Otto Kimminich, “Die Entsteh­ung des neuzeitlichen Völkerrechts,” in Pipers Handbuch der Politischen Ideen: Band 3 Neuzeit: Von den Konfessionskriegen bis zur Aufklärung, ed. Iring Fetscher and Herfried Münkler (Munich: Piper, 1985), 73-100; and Otto Kimminich, “Der Bundesstaat,” in Handbuch des Staatsrechts der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed. J. Isensee and P. Kirchhof, 1st ed. (Heidelberg: C. F. Müller, 1987), 1: 1113, 1115, and 2nd ed. (Heidelberg: C. F. Müller, 1995), 1113, 1149. 4. Ingo Koller, “Nachruf auf Otto Kimminich,” in Deutschland als Rechtsproblem: Wissenschaftlichkeit als Entscheidungskriterium: Innere Unruhen vor dem Europäischen Gerichtshof. Otto Kimminich zum Gedenken, ed. Andreas Hoyer (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2000), 8. 5. See Otto Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 2nd ed. (Bonn: Osmipress, 1979), 51, 104-8; and generally, Christian Tomuschat, ed., Modern Law of Self-Determination (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1993). Self-determination discussions intensified circa 1973, when both West and East Germany joined the United Nations. For West Germans, East Germany’s accession to the United Nations seemed to solidify the notion that the latter was a genuine state (which in turn conflicted with West Germany’s Basic Law). See Karl Doehring, Das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker als Grundsatz des Völkerrechts (Karlsruhe: C. F. Müller, 1974). In 1979 West Germany officially countered India’s claim that the right of self-determination belonged only to former colonial subjects; West Germany and other states were particularly concerned to affirm that persons who com-

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prised only a portion of “a people” also held the right of self-determination. See Christ­ ian Tomuschat, “Das Recht auf die Heimat: Neue Rechtliche Aspekte,” in Des Menschen Recht zwischen Freiheit und Verantwortung: Festschrift für Karl Josef Partsch zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Jürgen Jekewitz et al. (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1989), 183-212, here 196, 201-2. The argument concerning the rights of a subset of “a people” was of course important to the expellee lobby. It was especially interested in the right of selfdetermination, not only because of Germany’s division but also because of the Allies’ annexations of the Eastern Territories. Some scholars foregrounded self-determination to criticize the Entente powers’ decision after the First World War not to permit the Sudetenland and Austria to join Germany, and to support the validity of the Munich Agreement of 1938 as the delayed realization of ethnic German self-determination. See Dieter Blumenwitz and Boris Meissner, eds., Das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker und die deutsche Frage (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1984), to which Kimminich contributed. 6. Karen Schönwälder, “Minderheitenschutz: Anerkennung kultureller Pluralität oder Ausdruck ‘völkischen Denkens’?,” in Antifaschismus, ed. Frank Deppe, Georg Fülberth, and Rainer Rilling (Heibronn: Distel, 1996), 453-67, esp. 453 (quote) and 466. While Schönwälder thinks it is not useful to map all discussion of minority or other group rights onto either “völkisch” or “western” thought as supposed polar opposites, Salzborn does assert that Volksgruppenrecht, and even formulations of group rights generally, are in fundamental conflict with the bourgeois equality guaranteed by the unitary state after the French Revolution. Salzborn, Die Ethnisierung der Politik, 15-18; see also 237-38. For all the power of his arguments, human rights advocates will probably find Salzborn too sanguine about that unitary state. More generally on the term völkisch, see Ingo Haar and Michael Fahlbusch, eds., Handbuch der völkischen Wissenschaften: Personen, Institutionen, Forschungsprogramme, Stiftungen (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2008), 13-16. 7. Otto Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 1st ed. (Bonn: Osmipress, 1978). This book appeared in a second edition in 1979 and in a third, revised and expanded edition in 1989 sponsored by the Kulturstiftung der Deutschen Vertriebenen. Citations in this chapter are to the second edition. See also, e.g., Otto Kimminich, Die völkerrechtliche Beurteilung des Münchner Abkommens (Bonn: Bundesgeschäftsstelle des Arbeitskreises Sudetendeutscher Studenten, 1963); Otto Kimminich, “Völkerrecht und Geschichte im Disput über die Beziehungen Deutschlands zu seinen östlichen Nachbarn,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B28/96 (5 July 1996): 28-38; and Otto Kimminich, “Rechtscharakter und Inhalt des Selbstbestimmungsrechts,” in Blumenwitz and Meissner, Das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker und die deutsche Frage, 37-46. 8. See Samuel Moyn, “Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights,” in A History of Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 85-106; and Samuel Moyn, “The First Historian of Human Rights,” American Historical Review 116, no. 1 (February 2011): 5879; A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis

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of the European Convention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), where material on European conservatives is scattered throughout; and Marco Duranti, “Conservatism, Christian Democracy, and the European Human Rights Project, 1945-50” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2009). If I had not chosen the specific context of West Germany for the present book, I would analyze Felix Ermacora’s career here. Ermacora (1923-95) was an Austrian law professor and distinguished human rights official at the European and U.N. levels, with an intellectual background and pattern of far-right contacts similar to Kimminich’s. For German speakers, Ermacora and Christian Tomuschat were frequently cited authorities on human rights in general; see, e.g., Carola Stern, Strategien für die Menschenrechte, exp. ed. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1983), 106 n. 1. 9. Otto Kimminich, Die Menschenrechte in der Friedensregelung nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1990), 39; Otto Kimminich, Der internationale Rechts­s­tatus des Flüchtlings (Cologne: Carl Heymann, 1962), 24-25. 10. See Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Dial Press, 1948); and Hannah Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 121-32. 11. This paragraph draws upon Peter Badura, “Nachruf: Otto Kimminich †,” Archiv des öffentlichen Rechts 122 (1997): 629-30; and Koller, “Nachruf auf Otto Kimminich.” On his Fulbright scholarship, see also Otto Kimminich, “Die Grundwerte im System des demokratischen Rechtsstaats,” in Was sind Grundwerte?, ed. Otto Kimminich (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1977), 56. 12. Otto Kimminich, “Das Recht der Nacheile im modernen Völkerrecht” (Ph.D. diss., Würzburg University, 1957). 13. Otto Kimminich, “Der internationale Rechtsstatus des Flüchtlings” (Habil., Würzburg University, 1961), available in revised form as Kimminich, Der internationale Rechtsstatus des Flüchtlings. 14. Christoph Cornelissen, “Nur noch ‘strenge Wissenschaftlichkeit’: Das Collegium Carolinum im Gründungsjahrzehnt (1955-1965),” in Geschichtsschreibung zu den böhmischen Ländern im 20. Jahrhundert: Wissenschaftstraditionen—Institutionen—Diskurse, ed. Christiane Brenner, K. Erik Franzen, Peter Haslinger, and Robert Luft (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2006), 350. 15. Cornelissen, “Nur noch ‘strenge Wissenschaftlichkeit,’” 359, referring to individuals including Kimminich’s mentor, Hermann Raschhofer. 16. Kimminich was Raschhofer’s Assistent from 1959 at the Institut für Völkerrecht und Internationale Beziehungen and from 1961 at the Fridtjof-Nansen-Seminar für Minderheiten und Selbstbestimmung, both at Würzburg University. 17. On Boehm, see Ulrich Prehn, “‘Volk’ und ‘Raum’ in zwei Nachkriegszeiten: Kontinuitäten und Wandlungen in der Arbeit des Volkstumsforschers Max Hildebert Boehm,” in Das Erbe der Provinz: Heimatkultur und Geschichtspolitik nach 1945, ed. Habbo Knoch (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), 50-72; Ulrich Prehn, “Metamorphosen rad­ ikalen Ordnungsdenkens im ‘europäischen Großraum’: Ethnopolitische und ‘volksthe-

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oretische’ Konzepte Max Hildebert Boehms vom Ersten bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Deutschbalten, Weimarer Republik und Drittes Reich, ed. Michael Garleff (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008), 2: 1-70; and Ulrich Prehn, “Die wechselnde Gesichter eines ‘Europa der Völker’ im 20. Jahrhundert: Ethnopolitische Vorstellungen bei Max Hildebert Boehm, Eugen Lemberg und Guy Héraud,” in Völkische Bande: Dekadenz und Wiedergeburt— Analysen rechter Ideologie, ed. Heiko Kauffmann, Helmut Kellershohn, and Jobst Paul (Münster: Unrast, 2005), 123-57. See also Ingo Haar, Historiker im Nationalsozialismus: Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft und der “Volkstumskampf ” im Osten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2000). 18. Oberländer became the head of the West German ministry dealing with expellee affairs in 1953. The Humanist Union and the International League for Human Rights demanded his resignation, which finally took place in 1960. Raschhofer intervened in the debate with a book defending his friend and colleague: Hermann Raschhofer, Der Fall Oberländer: Eine vergleichende Rechtsanalyse der Verfahren in Pankow und Bonn (Tübingen: Schlichtenmayer, 1962). 19. Samuel Salzborn, “Zwischen Volksgruppentheorie, Völkerrechtslehre und Volkstumskampf: Hermann Raschhofer als Vordenker eines völkischen Minderheitenrechts,” Sozial.Geschichte. Zeitschrift für historische Analyse des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 21, no. 3 (2006): 29-52; Tobias Weger, “Hermann Raschhofer,” in Handbuch der völkischen Wissenschaften, ed. Haar and Fahlbusch, 505-6; Tobias Weger, “Volkstumskampf ” ohne Ende? Sudetendeutsche Organisationen, 1945-1955 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008); and Haar, Historiker im Nationalsozialismus, 304. 20. Manfred Abelein and Otto Kimminich, eds., Studien zum Staats- und Völkerrecht: Festschrift für Hermann Raschhofer zum 70. Geburtstag am 26. Juli 1975 (Kallmünz: Lassleben, 1977); and Hermann Raschhofer, Die Sudetenfrage, ed. Otto Kimminich, 2nd exp. ed. (Munich: Olzog, 1988), originally published in 1953. 21. Salzborn, Die Ethnisierung der Politik, 232-64. The INTEREG has consultative status at the Council of Europe. For a discussion of space and international law, see Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 128 n. 148. 22. Dieter Blumenwitz, “Der grenzüberschreitende Regionalismus als mögliches Instrument der Konfliktentschärfung,” in Vielfalt des Wissenschaftsrechts: Gedächtnis­ schrift für Prof. Dr. Otto Kimminich, ed. Christian Flämig et al. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1999), 1. On the Collegium Carolinum, see Cornelissen, “Nur noch ‘strenge Wissenschaftlichkeit.’” 23. Blumenwitz, “Der grenzüberschreitende Regionalismus,” 1. 24. He spoke to the Witiko League on at least one occasion: see Otto Kimminich, Die sudetendeutsche Volksgruppe, ihr Name und ihr Selbstverständnis (Munich: Witikobund, 1981). It is not surprising that he had contacts in it, since a later chairman of the Witiko League was Horst Rudolf Übelacker, a student of Raschhofer’s at Würzburg. On the Witiko League, see Weger, “Volkstumskampf ” ohne Ende?, 186-203. 25. See Otto Kimminich, “Der Schutz der Stille,” Mut 340 (December 1995): 65-76. 26. Salzborn, Die Ethnisierung der Politik, 278. Kimminich wrote for the FPÖ’s

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yearbook; see, e.g., Otto Kimminich, “Volksgruppenrecht im ‘neuen Europa,’” in Freiheit und Verantwortung: Jahrbuch für politische Erneuerung 1993, ed. Lothar Höbelt, Andreas Mölzer, and Brigitte Sob (Vienna: Freiheitliches Bildungswerk, 1992), 209-19. 27. Kimminich contributed an essay to one of the Festschriften honoring Laun: Otto Kimminich, “Der normative Gehalt des Friedensbegriffs und seine Erforschung,” Internationales Recht und Diplomatie (1972): 93-105. This was a special issue of the journal edited by Boris Meissner and Edgar Tomson for Laun’s ninetieth birthday. In the essay, Kimminich marshaled Laun as an alibi for considerably browner colleagues such as Rasch­hofer, saying that Laun was proof that the idea that the traditional German university had capitulated to the Nazis was a “propaganda lie” (93). 28. Hartmut Krüger, “Wissenschaftsfreiheit in Österreich—eine historische Ausleg­ ung,” in Vielfalt des Wissenschaftsrechts, ed. Flämig et al., 29; and Badura, “Nachruf,” 630. 29. See, e.g., Kimminich, Die sudetendeutsche Volksgruppe, 11. 30. See Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 2nd rev. ed. (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2006); and Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). 31. Kimminich, Die sudetendeutsche Volksgruppe, 11. 32. On the concept of a “Europe of regions,” see Undine Ruge, Die Erfindung des “Europa der Regionen”: Kritische Ideengeschichte eines konservativen Konzepts (Frankfurt: Campus, 2003). 33. Personal communications with the political scientist Lothar Brock (30 August 1999) and the legal scholars Hans Baade (2 June 2008) and Michael Stolleis (3 March 2009) suggest this. 34. See, e.g., Kimminich, Die Menschenrechte in der Friedensregelung, 90; and Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 31. Kimminich noted that the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals had highlighted the individual’s responsibilities under international law; the next step was to connect responsibilities to rights, and to make the individual a fuller subject of international law with both responsibilities and rights. Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 43. 35. E.g., Otto Kimminich, Einführung in das Völkerrecht, 4th rev. and exp. ed. (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1990), 91-92. Of course, he and others cited earlier innovations in the League of Nations statute and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, but the U.N. Charter was decisive. 36. E.g., Otto Kimminich, “Der internationale Schutz des Einzelnen,” Archiv des Völkerrechts 15 (1972): 402-24. 37. Kimminich, Der internationale Rechtsstatus des Flüchtlings. The prize competition was held by the Hochschule für Politische Wissenschaften in Munich. 38. Ibid., 16. 39. Ibid., 22. 40. Ibid., 49.

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Notes to Pages 110–113

41. Ibid., 127. Kimminich argued that the Nuremberg trial contributed to this trend, but only one-sidedly, as it focused only on individual liability, not individual rights (125). 42. Ibid., 49-50. Even though Kimminich’s discussions of human rights superficially resemble arguments from natural law, it should be noted that, like Laun, Kimminich rejected natural law, seeing its invocation as a matter of retrospective justification (67). 43. Ibid., 50. 44. Ibid., 78, 94. 45. Ibid., 82-83. 46. Ibid., 127. 47. Otto Kimminich, Asylrecht (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1968). 48. Ibid., 32. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 45-47. 51. Ibid., 30-31. 52. Ibid., 29. 53. Ibid., 127. 54. Ibid., 71. 55. Ibid., 70. 56. Ibid., 155-57, 160. 57. Ibid., 150. 58. Ibid., 159. On the limitations on asylum holders’ political activity inside West Germany, which were within international law norms, see 172. See also Otto Kimminich, “Völkerrechtsprobleme der exilpolitischen Betätigung,” Archiv des Völkerrechts 10 (1962): 132-65, where he explained that a state may ban exiles’ peaceful political activity, but that international law did not require it to do so. 59. Kimminich, Asylrecht, 72, 156. See also Otto Kimminich, “Zur Theorie der immanenten Schranken des Asylrechts,” Juristenzeitung 20 (1965): 739-45; and Otto Kimminich, “Völkerrecht und Verfassung in der deutschen Asylpraxis,” Jahrbuch für internationales Recht 13 (1970): 296-318. 60. Kimminich, Asylrecht, 157. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 158. 63. Otto Kimminich, Grundprobleme des Asylrechts (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 45. On Cap Anamur, see Rupert Neudeck, Abenteuer Mensch­ lichkeit: Erinnerungen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2007). 64. Kimminich, Grundprobleme des Asylrechts, 70, 153, 145, 149-50. 65. Ibid., 63, 154, 70. 66. Otto Kimminich, “Neue Probleme im Asylrecht: Krieg, Bürgerkrieg, Flucht und Vertreibung heute,” A. W. R. Bulletin [journal of the Association for the Study of the World Refugee Problem, Vaduz, Liechtenstein] 32, no. 4 (1994): 160-74. 67. See Kimminich, “Der normative Gehalt des Friedensbegriffs,” 99. See also, e.g.,

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Otto Kimminich, “Der Weltfriede als Ziel im neuen Völkerrecht,” Universitas 34, no. 5 (1979): 449-56, here 456. 68. Otto Kimminich, “Die friedensstiftende Funktion des Rechts,” in Gewalt oder Recht?, ed. Wolfgang Böhme (Karlsruhe: Wolfgang Böhme/Evangelische Akademie Baden, 1982), 9-32, esp. 21-22. See also Kimminich, “Die Grundwerte im System des demokratischen Rechtsstaats.” 69. Otto Kimminich, Rüstung und politische Spannung: Studien zum Problem der internationalen Sicherheit (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1964). 70. Kimminich, Rüstung und politische Spannung, 219-20. For a discussion of economic factors, see 97-145; Kimminich cited Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt’s book of 1929, Die blutige Internationale der Rüstungsindustrie, extensively here. 71. Ulrike C. Wasmuht, Geschichte der deutschen Friedensforschung: Entwicklung— Selbstverständnis—Politischer Kontext (Münster: agenda, 1998), 156-58. 72. Otto Kimminich, Völkerrecht im Atomzeitalter: Der Atomsperrvertrag und seine Folgen (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1969). 73. Otto Kimminich, Atomrecht (Munich: Goldmann, 1974). 74. Otto Kimminich, “Das Völkerrecht und die friedliche Streitschlichtung,” in Den Frieden denken: Si vis pacem, para pacem, ed. Dieter Senghaas (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 142-61. It was a revised version of an essay originally published in a volume edited by two other leading West German peace researchers: Otto Kimminich, “Zur Bedeutung des Völkerrechts für die Streitschlichtung in der Weltgesellschaft,” in Konflikte der Weltgesellschaft und Friedensstrategien, ed. Bernhard Moltmann and Eva SenghaasKnobloch (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1989), 151-71. 75. Otto Kimminich, Humanitäres Völkerrecht—humanitäre Aktion (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1972), esp. 8, 41-72. 76. Otto Kimminich, Menschenrechte: Versagen und Hoffnung (Munich: Langen Müller, 1973), 100. 77. Otto Kimminich, “Der gerechte Krieg im Spiegel des Völkerrechts,” in Der gerechte Krieg: Christentum, Islam, Marxismus, ed. Reiner Steinweg (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 206-23. 78. Otto Kimminich, “Der Mythos der humanitären Intervention,” Archiv des Völkerrechts 33 (1995): 430-58. 79. Otto Kimminich, Umweltschutz: Prüfstein der Rechtsstaatlichkeit (Linz: Veritas, 1987). His first major work on environmental law was Das Recht des Umweltschutzes (Munich: Goldmann, 1972, 2nd ed. 1974). 80. Kimminich, Umweltschutz, 78-79. 81. Ibid., 87. 82. Ibid., 86 (quote), 162. 83. Kimminich, Menschenrechte: Versagen und Hoffnung. 84. Günther van Well, “Deutschland und die UN,” in Handbuch Vereinte Nationen, ed. Rüdiger van Wolfrum, 2nd rev. ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991), 71-77. 85. Kimminich, Menschenrechte: Versagen und Hoffnung, 18.

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86. Ibid., 59. 87. Ibid., 87. 88. Ibid., 86-89. 89. Ibid., 112. 90. Ibid., 58. 91. Ibid.; see also 55. 92. Ibid., 81-82. 93. Ibid., 61. 94. Ibid., 76, 80-81, 134. 95. Kimminich, Der internationale Rechtsstatus des Flüchtlings, 49. 96. Otto Kimminich, “A ‘Federal’ Right of Self-Determination?,” in Modern Law of Self-Determination, ed. Tomuschat, 83-100. 97. Kimminich, Der internationale Rechtsstatus des Flüchtlings, 48. 98. Kimminich, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, 1st ed., 659-60. 99. Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 53-54. 100. Peter K. Steck, Zwischen Volk und Staat: Das Völkerrechtssubjekt in der deutschen Völkerrechtslehre (1933-1941) (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2003). On Raschhofer, see 123-24. 101. On the concept of the Volksgruppe, see Schönwälder, “Minderheitenschutz,” 463; and Samuel Salzborn, “Die Volksgruppenkonzeption der Sudetendeutschen Landsmannschaft und die sudetendeutsche Volksgruppenforschung,” in Geschichtsschreibung zu den böhmischen Ländern im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Brenner et al., 433-43. 102. This paragraph is drawn from these texts: Kimminich, “Minderheiten, Volksgruppen, Ethnizität und Recht,” in Das Manifest der 60: Deutschland und die Einwanderung, ed. Klaus J. Bade (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994), 195; Kimminich, “Neue Probleme im Asylrecht,” 160-74, esp. 168; and Kimminich, Rechtsprobleme der polyethnischen Staatsorganisation (Mainz: Grünewald and Munich: Kaiser, 1985). 103. Kimminich claimed that new arrivals can “reshape” (umgestalten) the relationship between “space and man” such that the inhabitants of longer standing—without having themselves moved—lose their “homeland.” Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 26. Organizations that Kimminich supported and in some cases had helped to found made all these arguments, including the Federal Union of European Nationalities (Föderalistischer Verein Europäischer Volksgruppen, FUEV) and INTEREG. See Sudetendeutsche Stiftung, ed., In europäischer Verantwortung: 40 Jahre Föderalistische Union Europäischer Volksgruppen (FUEV) (Munich: Sudetendeutsche Stiftung, 1990); and Salzborn, Die Ethnisierung der Politik, 254. 104. Salzborn, Die Ethnisierung der Politik, 17, 25 (on 1992 and 1995), 249 (on Veiter); Schönwälder, “Minderheitenschutz.” 105. Otto Kimminich, “Die Funktion des Volksgruppenrechts in der internationalen Ordnung,” Zeitschrift für Politik 27, no. 1 (1980): 66. This article was published in English as “The Function of the Law of Ethnic Groups in the International System,” in Law and State 23 (1981): 37-51.

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106. Kimminich emphasized the plight of the sufferer of a human rights violation having to be represented by a state that was very possibly his oppressor when he wrote of “the human mediatized by ‘his’ state” (der durch ‘seinen’ Staat mediatisierte Mensch). Kimminich, “Die Funktion des Volksgruppenrechts,” 66. See also Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 39. A good summary of his arguments concerning rights for the Volksgruppe as human rights is in Otto Kimminich, “Die innerstaatliche Organisation eines völkerrechtlich gebotenen Schutzes ethnischer Gruppen,” in Staat und Volkerrechtsordnung: Festschrift für Karl Doehring, ed. Kay Hailbronner, Georg Ress, and Torsten Stein (Berlin: Springer, 1989), 421-37. 107. Kimminich, Die Sudetendeutsche Volksgruppe, 14. In this speech to the Witiko League, he pointed to 1866 and 1919 as the historical moments that produced the Sud­ eten Germans as a Volksgruppe (9, 11). 108. Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat. 109. Ibid., 11-12. 110. Ibid., 22. 111. Ibid., 18, 19, 26. 112. Ibid., 34. 113. Even a dictatorship need not alter one’s relationship to one’s homeland, he claimed: Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 17. Kimminich cited the GermanRussian sociologist Fedor Stepun, who was in turn paraphrasing Voltaire and la Bruyère: “Homeland does exist under despotism, as it does under a bad king, and even in the case of the complete loss of one’s state.” See Fedor Stepun, “Heimat and Fremde,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie 3, no. 2 (1950-51): 146-59, here 150. This passage must have spoken powerfully to Kimminich of the Sudeten German predicament before, during, and after Nazism. 114. Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 115. 115. On the existing elements, see ibid., 9, 31, 60, 67, 81. 116. Ibid., 14, 64 (quote). 117. On the individual’s right to affiliate with a group, see ibid., 51; and on connecting individual rights to group rights, see Kimminich, “Der internationale Schutz des Einzelnen,” esp. 421. Examples of mere beneficiaries were asylum holders, refugees, members of international organizations, members of protected minorities, and in the law of war, the wounded, prisoners of war, and civilians under occupation. On the need for innovation, see Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 43, 114. Kimminich noted that the concept of Heimat was congruent with subsidiarity, one of the most important legal principles in West Germany and the European Union (34). 118. Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 9, 81. 119. Ibid., 94. See Giorgio Balledore Pallieri, “Les transferts internationaux de populations,” Annuaire de l’Institut de Droit International 44, no. 2 (1952): 138-99. 120. Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 91. This is not surprising, given Scelle’s interwar work on the rights of minorities and the individual in international law. See Anja Wüst, Das völkerrechtliche Werk von Georges Scelle im Frankreich der Zwischen-

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kriegszeit (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2007), esp. 175-98. Scelle’s concept of “objective law” resembled Laun’s concept of the conscience publique. See Hubert Thierry, “The Thought of Georges Scelle,” European Journal of International Law 1, no. 1 (1990): 193-209. 121. Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 85. 122. See, e.g., Theodor Veiter, ed., System eines internationalen Volksgruppenrechts (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller 1970, 1972, and 1978). On these Volksgruppenrecht advocates’ own politics, see Salzborn, Die Ethnisierung der Politik, 204, 218, 221. On Kurt Rabl, who had belonged to the SS and helped write Konrad Henlein’s Carlsbad Program for the Sudeten German, see Norbert Podewin, ed., Braunbuch: Kriegs- und Naziverbrecher in der Bundesrepublik und in Berlin (West) (Berlin: Edition Ost, 2002), 355. 123. Kimminich, “Die Funktion des Volksgruppenrechts,” 60. 124. Kimminich, Das Recht auf die Heimat, 33-34. 125. E.g., ibid., 33, 37, 39, 47. 126. Ibid., 41. 127. Hans-Dieter Bamberg, Die Deutschland Stiftung e.V. Studien über Kräfte der “demokratischen Mitte” und des Konservatismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1978), 317. See the NPD’s own website, which names Münch as one of the party’s intellectuals: www.npd.de, then “Partei,” “Geschichte,” “Teil III” (accessed 8 October 2010). 128. In this passage, he was responding to Johann Wolfgang Bruegel, a Bohemian German Social Democrat, jurist, and civil servant of the Czech Republic who had had to flee the Nazis in 1939 and later wrote histories of Czechs and Germans that were strongly critical of Sudeten German apologetics. See J. P. Stern, “Defending the State against the Nations: The Work of J. W. Bruegel,” Historical Journal 28, no. 4 (1985): 1023-27. 129. Kimminich, Rechtsprobleme. 130. Ibid., esp. 123, 205, 207. 131. Kimminich also made clear that he did not oppose limits on asylum. The right of asylum in West Germany could certainly be limited, he argued, as long as such limits were developed through the proper channels of constitutional amendment. See Kimminich, Asylrecht, 31, 157-59. 132. Otto Kimminich, “Ansätze für ein europäisches Volksgruppenrecht,” Archiv des Völkerrechts 28, no. 1/2 (1990): 1-16 (quote on 16). 133. Kimminich, Die sudetendeutsche Volksgruppe, 11. 134. Ibid., 122. 135. Ibid., 120. 136. Ibid., 10, 111; see also 120, 122. 137. Otto Kimminich, “Die Geschichte des Asylrechts,” in Bewährungsprobe für ein Grundrecht: Art. 16 Abs. 2 Satz 2 Grundgesetz—“Politisch Verfolgte geniessen Asylrecht,” ed. Amnesty International, Sektion der BRD (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1978), 19-66. On the course of the debate, see Alfons Söllner, “The Politics of Asylum,” New German Critique 46 (Winter 1989): 141-54. Söllner also cites Kimminich.

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138. On Reinhard Marx, see his law practice website, www.ramarx.de (accessed 13 August 2010). 139. Namo Aziz, ed., Fremd in einem kalten Land: Ausländer in Deutschland (Freiburg: Herder, 1992). 140. Bade, ed., Das Manifest der 60. 141. Kimminich, “Minderheiten, Volksgruppen, Ethnizität und Recht,” in Das Manifest der 60, ed. Bade, 48-51 and 180-97. On Kimminich’s participation in writing the manifesto, see Bade, ed., Das Manifest der 60, 10. 142. Barbara Laubenthal, Vergewaltigung von Frauen als Asylgrund: Die gegenwärt­ ige Praxis in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Campus, 1999). See esp. 12, 84. 143. In addition to the textbooks cited in Chapter 2, see the works of Karl Doehring, Felix Ermacora, Jochen Frowein, Hans-Joachim Heintze, Stephan Hobe, Rainer Hofmann, Stefan Oeter, Eckart Klein, Dietrich Murswiek, and Eibe Riedel. 144. For the commission’s report, see Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, 12 vols. (Guatemala City: Oficina para Proyectos de las Naciones Unidas, 1999). 145. Tomuschat’s term on the Human Rights Committee ran from 1977 to 1986, and he served on the International Law Commission from 1985 to 1996, including serving as its president in 1992. He was rapporteur to the U.N. Human Rights Commission on Guatemala from 1990 to 1993, and then chairman of Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification until 1999. 146. Tomuschat, ed., Modern Law of Self-Determination; Christian Tomuschat, Human Rights between Realism and Idealism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Christian Tomuschat, “Staatsvolk ohne Staat? Zum Teso-Urteil des Bundesverfassungsgerichts (BVerfGE 77, 137),” in Staat und Völkerrechtsordnung: Festschrift für Karl Doehring, ed. Hailbronner et al., 985-1008, among many other publications. On his career, see Pierre-Marie Dupuy et al., eds., Völkerrecht als Wertordnung: Festschrift für Christian Tomuschat (Kehl: N. P. Engel, 2006). 147. www.z-g-v.de, “Menschen an unserer Seite,” “Unsere Stiftung,” and “Wissenschaftlicher Beirat” (accessed 8 October 2010). 148. E.g., Tomuschat, “Das Recht auf die Heimat.” 149. Christian Tomuschat, “Protection of Minorities under Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” in Völkerrecht als Rechtsordnung— Internationale Gerichtsbarkeit—Menschenrechte: Festschrift für Hermann Mosler, ed. Rudolf Bernhardt, Wilhelm Karl Geck, Günther Jaenicke, and Helmut Steinberger (Berlin: Springer, 1983), 949-79, esp. 966. 150. Tomuschat, “Das Recht auf die Heimat,” 212. 151. Tomuschat, “Die Vertreibung der Sudetendeutschen: Zur Frage des Bestehens von Rechtsansprüchen nach Völkerrecht und deutschem Recht,” Zeitschrift für ausländ­ isches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht 56 (1996): 1-69. The German-Czech Declaration on Mutual Relations and Their Future Development (Deutsch-Tschechische Erklärung

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über die gegenseitigen Beziehungen und deren künftige Entwicklung) was signed in 1997. 152. Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 150-63. 153. See Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, eds., Moral für die Welt? Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er Jahren (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, forthcoming 2012). 154. See Josef Kardinal Frings, “Abenteuer im Heiligen Geist,” available at www. misereor.de, “Über uns,” then “Geschichte” (accessed 29 October 2011); and see “50 Jahre ‘Brot für die Welt’: Geschichtliches zur evangelischen Hilfsaktion,” available at www.brot-fuer-die-welt.de, “Über uns,” then “Menschen und Strukturen” (accessed 29 October 2011). On Brot für die Welt, see Konstanze Kemnitzer, Der ferne Nächste: Zum Selbstverständnis der Aktion “Brot für die Welt” (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2008). 155. Tilman Zülch and Klaus Guercke, eds., Soll Biafra überleben? Dokumente– Berichte—Analysen—Kommentare, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Lettner-Verlag, 1969). 156. On the history of the Society for Threatened Peoples, see Jürgen Wüst, Mensch­ enrechtsarbeit im Zwielicht: Zwischen Staatssicherheit und Antifaschismus (Bonn: Bouvier, 1999), 237-71. In 1975, Zülch described the organization as the “German branch of [the British organization] Survival International.” Tilman Zülch, ed., Von denen keiner spricht: Unterdrückte Minderheiten—von der Friedenspolitik vergessen (Rein­bek: Rowohlt, 1975), 30. However, this organizational connection is not mentioned in more recent accounts, and I have not been able to investigate it further here. 157. See Tilman Zülch, “Neurechts bis völkisch? Wo steht die GfbV? Tilman Zülch über das Selbstverständnis der Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker,” at www.gfbv.it (accessed 10 August 2010); and Tilman Zülch, “Wir wollen keine ideologische Scheuklappen: Rede zum 40. Jahrestag der Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (7. Dezember 2008),” at www.gfbv.de (accessed 9 October 2011). 158. Wüst, Menschenrechtsarbeit im Zwielicht, 250. 159. Neudeck, Abenteuer Menschlichkeit, 11-17; and Rupert Neudeck, Die Mensch­ enretter von Cap Anamur (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2002), 10-11. 160. Neudeck, Abenteuer Menschlichkeit, 16. 161. Freimut Duve, Vom Krieg in der Seele: Rücksichten eines Deutschen (Frankfurt: Eichborn, 1994), 113-212. Here he raised the issue of Volksgruppenrecht, though not to affirm it; for Duve, that project was too rigidly focused on descent. See 192-93. Duve also gave much attention to justifying his vote in 1992 to restrict asylum, when he was a parliamentary delegate of the SPD; see esp. 170-89. 162. Duve, Vom Krieg in der Seele, 193. Chapter 5 1. Terre des Femmes Archive, Terre des Femmes main office, Tübingen, Germany (hereafter TdF Archive). Statutes, n.d. [ca. 1981]. The archivist Ute Binder guided my research there, and located the earliest version of the statutes that was available there. The

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organization has since moved its headquarters and archive to Berlin. See www.frauenrechte.de, then “Dokumentationsstelle” (accessed 30 November 2011). 2. These terms are themselves controversial. This chapter, as a study of some West German women, does not seek to contribute to the literature on these practices themselves, but only to hold open the question of their nature and meaning as a background for West German women’s activism. There are references below to scholarly literature that problematizes these terms and deepens understanding of the practices themselves. 3. For example, Terre des Femmes’s materials seldom mentioned Nazism; I located only two instances between 1981 and 1990. Both passages positioned German women as victims, of the Nazis in one case, and of the Allies in the other. One passage, in the introduction to the German translation of Sentinelles’ book on honor violence, likened the penalties imposed on German women who fraternized with foreign forced laborers in the Nazi era to current instances of honor violence: women were being punished for a notion of sexual honor. Terre des Femmes, ed., Tod als Ehrensache: Frauenschicksale (Berlin: VWB Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 1989), 5. This book was a translation of Sentinelles, ed., Princesses mortes (Lausanne: Sentinelles, 1981). The other passage was in an open letter to President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines, and drew a comparison between poor Filipinas’ vulnerability to sex tourism and German women’s vulnerability to prostitution and trafficking immediately after the Second World War. Rundbrief 3 (1989): 28. It is possible that the open letter originated with Agisra, as Terre des Femmes frequently reprinted Agisra documents in Rundbrief, its internal newsletter circulated to members. I used this internal periodical at the Terre des Femmes main office in Tübingen and at the Frauen Media Turm archive in Cologne, Germany. 4. Seyran Ateş, Der Multikulti-Irrtum: Wie wir in Deutschland besser zusammen leben können (Berlin: Ullstein, 2007). 5. See, e.g., Jan Feddersen and Cigdem Akyol, “Eine Frage der Ehre?,” tageszeitung (7 April 2009). For a feminist critique of European Muslim women’s memoirs, including Ateş’s, see Beverly M. Weber, “Freedom from Violence, Freedom to Make the World: Muslim Women’s Memoirs, Gendered Violence, and Voices for Change in Germany,” Women in German Yearbook 25 (2009): 199-222. Another publication specifically concerns Germany and peripherally mentions Terre des Femmes, but it focuses on men and masculinity: Katherine Pratt Ewing, Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008). On honor violence generally, see Unni Wikan, In Honor of Fadime: Murder and Shame, trans. Anna Paterson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Amir H. Jafri, Honour Killing: Dilemma, Ritual, Understanding (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008), and the references cited in those books. For a comparison between (U.S.) domestic violence and Indian dowry murders, see Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 81-118. 6. For an overview of the history of activism against female genital cutting, including the politics of naming various practices, see Elizabeth Heger Boyle, Female Genital

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Cutting: Cultural Conflict in the Global Community (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Obioma Nnaemeka, ed., Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourse (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005); Ellen Gruenbaum, The Female Circumcision Controversy: An Anthropological Perspective (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); and Ylva Hernlund and Bettina Shell-Duncan, eds., Transcultural Bodies: Female Genital Cutting in Global Context (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007). 7. An influential argument against that opposition is in Leti Volpp, “Feminism versus Multiculturalism,” Columbia Law Review 101, no. 5 (June 2001): 1181-218. More directly on the politics of feminist human rights advocacy is Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol, eds., Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 8. In the 1970s, honor violence committed among Italians was a major issue for Italian feminists. This indicates that some European women did perceive honor violence as something affecting European women as well as Middle Eastern and other women. See Perry Willson, Women in Twentieth-Century Italy (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 163. However, Ingrid Staehle, the founder of Terre des Femmes, did not mention European honor killing in any sources available to me. 9. Contrary to Jennifer Petzen’s assertion, Terre des Femmes has definitely not been oblivious of these issues. See Jennifer Petzen, “Toward an Unenlightened Feminism” (paper given at the conference “Representing Islam: Comparative Perspectives,” Universities of Surrey and Manchester, United Kingdom, 5-6 September 2008), 23-24. Petzen’s paper may be found at www.surrey.ac.uk/politics/conferences/archive/Islam Conference/Panel1 (accessed 27 September 2009). 10. See Jason Verber, “The Conundrum of Colonialism in Postwar Germany” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 2010). 11. TdF Archive, file “TdF—Gründung 1981.” 12. See Werner Balsen and Karl Rössel, Hoch die internationale Solidarität: Zur Geschichte der Dritte Welt-Bewegung in der Bundesrepublik (Cologne: Kölner Volksblatt, 1986). 13. See Susanne Hübel, “Ingrid Stähle—Gründerin und erste Vorstandsfrau von Terre des Femmes,” Rundbrief 2 (1991): 5-7; and Ingrid Staehle and Britta Hübener, “Wie ein Schnitt ins eigene Fleisch,” in Widerstand ist ein Geheimnis des Glücks: 20 Jahre Terre des Femmes, ed. Terre des Femmes (Tübingen: Terre des Femmes, 2001), 16-21. In this section I also draw upon “Talkrunde,” in Leben heisst frei sein: Internationaler Kongress für Frauen- und Menschenrechte, 12.–13. Oktober 2001, Berlin: Dokumentation, ed. Terre des Femmes, (Tübingen: Terre des Femmes, 2002), 160-61; “Wer ist Terre des Femmes? Eine Selbstdarstellung: Stand Februar 1991,” Rundbrief 2 (1991): 2-3; and “Die Geschichte (Chronik) des Vereins,” www.frauenrechte.de, via the links “Über uns,” “Der Verein,” then “Vereinsgeschichte” (accessed 7 January 2010). 14. See, e.g., Tom Buchanan, “‘The Truth Will Set You Free’: The Making of Amnesty International,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 4 (2002): 576-77.

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15. Her own terms were “the problem of circumcision” and “the princesses mortes.” Hübel, “Ingrid Stähle—Gründerin,” 5 (on honor violence and feminism); and Staehle and Hübener, “Wie ein Schnitt ins eigene Fleisch,” 16-17 (on female genital cutting and feminism). The phrase “princesses mortes” referred to women killed by honor violence and apparently stems from the honor killing in 1977 of Misha’al bint Fahd al Saud, a great-niece of the Saudi Arabian king, Khalid bin Abdul Aziz. In 1980 her murder was the subject of a British television drama, Death of a Princess. 16. Susanne von Paczensky, “Fatima entkam aus dem offenen Grab,” Brigitte 6 (11 March 1981): 106-13. Susanne von Paczensky edited Women Current (frauen aktuell), a feminist book series for the publishing house Rowohlt. Like Rowohlt’s influential current affairs series Rororo Current (rororo aktuell), edited by Freimut Duve, frauen aktuell had a strong international focus. Some of her journalism and a brief account of her life is in Susanne von Paczensky, Bescheidene Luftschlösser: Journalistische Randnotizen aus einem halben Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997). In 2004, Susanne Paczensky received the Humanist Union’s Fritz Bauer Prize. The article in Brigitte was one of numerous items in the West German press of those years on either honor violence, female genital cutting, or both. 17. Of course, Staehle was far from the only person suggesting this approach. Today, gender-specific grounds for political asylum are the subject of extensive debate and legal innovation. The most recent German account is Frank Moll, Das Asylgrundrecht bei staatlicher und frauenspezifischer Verfolgung (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2007). An older account, partly sponsored by Terre des Femmes, is Barbara Laubenthal, Vergewaltigung von Frauen als Asylgrund: Die gegenwärtige Praxis in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Campus, 1999). A recent English-language discussion is Jane Freedman, Gendering the International Asylum and Refugee Debate (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 18. See “Talkrunde,” 161. Benoîte Groult, Ainsi soit-elle (Paris: B. Grasset, 1975). It was translated into German in 1985: Ödipus’ Schwester: Zorniges zur Macht der Männer über Frauen, trans. Marita Heinz with assistance from Jeanne Anger (Munich: Droemersche Verlagsanstalt Th. Knaur Nachf., 1985). The meaning of the title will be discussed later in this chapter. 19. See Sentinelles, ed., Les mutilations sexuelles féminines: Mariage précoce (Lausanne: Sentinelles, 1980), 3-4; and TdF Archive, file “TdF—Gründung 1981,” notes by Christa Stolle on a meeting with Edmond Kaiser, 11 October 1996. The United Nations issued its first “statement of concern” about female genital cutting in 1978. The WHO conference in Khartoum, Sudan in 1979 and the U.N. declaration of 1979 as the Year of the Child generated some press coverage of female genital cutting. See, e.g., Margrit Gerste, “Pharaonische Beschneidung,” Die Zeit (4 May 1979). On the United Nations and women’s rights, see generally Jean H. Quataert, Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 149-81. The first court case in Europe concerning female genital cutting took place in France in 1979. Bronwyn Winter, “Women, the Law, and Cultural Relativism in France: The Case of Excision,” Signs 19, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 944.

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20. Terre des Hommes, ed., Les mutilations sexuelles féminines infligée aux enfants (Geneva: Terre des Hommes, 1977). For a West German example of coverage of their press conference, see “Sache des Bluts,” Der Spiegel (6 June 1977). Kaiser founded Sent­ inelles to give that press conference of 1977 some ongoing, organizational form. The WHO later did hold a conference to discuss the issue. See World Health Organization— Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children: Female Circumcision, Childhood Marriage, Nutritional Taboos, etc.: Report of a Seminar, Khartoum, 10-15 February 1979 (Alexandria: WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, 1979). 21. Staehle, who studied philosophy in Fribourg, Switzerland, read Groult’s book in the 1970s, in the original French. On Staehle and Kaiser reading Groult, see Staehle and Hübener, “Wie ein Schnitt ins eigene Fleisch,” 16-17. On Staehle’s awareness of the press conference, see “Talkrunde,” 161. In 2002, Terre des Femmes revived and affirmed its connection to Groult with a symposium in her honor. See Terre des Femmes, ed., Leben heisst frei sein. 22. Staehle and Hübener, “Wie ein Schnitt ins eigene Fleisch,” 17. 23. See Herta Haas, “Warum ich mich gegen weibliche Genitalverstümmelung engagiere,” in Weibliche Genitalverstümmelung: Eine fundamentale Menschenrechtsverletz­ ung. Textsammlung, ed. Petra Schnüll (Tübingen: Terre des Femmes, 1999), 113. The article was Peter Meyer-Ranke, “‘Schöne Reden—aber an die eigenen Töchter denken sie nicht,’” Die Welt (13 September 1979). Meyer-Ranke was a Middle East correspondent known for his books on Egypt and Israel. On Haas and Ainsi soit-elle, see TdF Archive, Haas papers, Haas to Hosken, 25 November 1979. 24. Rundbrief 2 (1991): 6. 25. See Amtsgericht Hamburg, Vereinsregister VR 9626;  and Hübel, “Ingrid Stähle—Gründerin,” 6. Bönninghausen was known for her programming on women at the WDR in Cologne. 26. Emma ran articles on female genital cutting in its very first year, in its second and fifth issues: Pauline Caravello, “Klitoris-Beschneidung,” Emma (March 1977): 5253, and “Klitoris-Beschneidung,” Emma (June 1977): 10-11. Courage ran an article on female genital cutting in 1978: Fran Hosken, “Klitorisbeschneidung: Genitale Verstümmelung von Frauen in Nordafrika,” Courage 3, no. 9 (9 September 1978): 20-28. 27. Tobe Levin, “Preface,” in Empathy and Rage: Female Genital Mutilation in African Literature, ed. Tobe Levin and Augustine H. Asaah (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2009), xiv. 28. Ingrid Braun, Tobe Levin, and A. Schwarzbauer, eds., Materialien zur Unterstütz­ ung von Aktionsgruppen gegen Klitorisbeschneidung (Munich: Frauenoffensive, 1979). Their Munich group petitioned the United Nations and WHO and channeled funds to Dr. Asma El Dareer, a Sudanese activist opposed to female genital cutting, as Terre des Femmes was later to do as well. More recently, Levin has been a leading member of Forward—Germany, a chapter of Efua Dorkenoo’s British organization and founded in 1998. See Tobe Levin, “Female Genital Mutilation: Campaigns in Germany,” in Engen-

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dering Human Rights: Cultural and Socioeconomic Realities in Africa, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka and Joy Ngozi Ezeilo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 286-91; and Levin, “Preface,” xiv-xv. Some autobiographical information on Levin is in Tobe Levin and Susanna Keval, “Jewish Life and Jewish Women in Germany Today,” in Jewish Women 2000, Working Paper 6, ed. Helen Epstein (Waltham, Mass.: Hadassah Research Institute on Jewish Women, November 1999), 203-32, esp. 203-4. 29. TdF Archive, file “TdF—Gründung 1981.” The articles, archived here, appeared between May and August 1981. The earliest that I have located is Ingrid Staehle, “Million­en Hausfrauen leben schlimmer als Haustiere,” Frankfurter Rundschau (22 May 1981). 30. TdF Archive, file “TdF—Gründung 1981.” Staehle pursued this correspondence through 1983. She garnered support from several politicians, including Hildegard Hamm-Brücher of the Free Democratic Party. However, their effort ran aground because any alteration to the convention’s text would require countries to sign it anew, and it was likely that several would not do so. They therefore turned their efforts to the tactic of reinterpretation of the existing convention within the European Union. In 1984 the European Parliament did pass a resolution to interpret women as a “social group.” 31. The packet included an article on honor violence and female genital cutting, Staehle’s response to Benard and Schlaffer (see below), a donation form, and a flier. TdF Archive, file “TdF—Gründung 1981.” See also Hübel, “Ingrid Stähle—Gründerin,” 6. 32. See Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss, eds., Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008); and Richard A. Wilson and Richard D. Brown, eds., Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On German-speaking humanitarians, see Nina Berman, Impossible Missions? German Economic, Military, and Humanitarian Efforts in Africa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 33. See Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 158-69. She discusses Kouchner as well as these works: Samir Amin et al., eds., Le tiers monde und la gauche (Paris: Seuil, 1979); and Pascal Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt, trans. and with an introduction by William R. Beer (New York: Free Press, 1986), originally published in French in 1983. See also Michal Givoni, “Humanitarian Governance and Ethical Cultivation: Médecins sans Frontières and the Advent of the Expert-Witness,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40, no. 1 (2011): 43-63. For vital French political context, see Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Anti-Totalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn, 2003). See also Bernard Taithe, “Reinventing (French) Universalism: Religion, Humanitarianism and the ‘French Doctors,’” Modern and Contemporary France 12 (2004): 147-58. 34. Lora Wildenthal, “Humanitarianism in Postcolonial Contexts: Some West European Examples from the 1960s to the 1980s,” in Colonialism and Beyond: Race and Migration from a Postcolonial Perspective, ed. Elisabeth Engel and Eva Bischoff (Mün-

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ster: LIT, forthcoming 2012). Or better, Neudeck’s writings themselves, such as Rupert Neudeck, Abenteuer Menschlichkeit: Erinnerungen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2007); and Rupert Neudeck, Die Menschenretter von Cap Anamur (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2002). 35. This biographical information is drawn from Christophe Gallaz, Entretiens avec Edmond Kaiser: Fondateur de Terre des Hommes: Cofondateur de Sentinelles (Lausanne: Editions Favre, 1998); Kaiser’s obituary in the New York Times (8 March 2000); and Edmond Kaiser, La Marche aux enfants (Lausanne: P.-M. Favre, 1979). Kaiser wrote a fictionalized account of his son’s death: Edmond Kaiser, Mémorial d’une poupée (Lausanne: Editions de l’Aire, 1985). 36. Terre des Hommes was named after St. Exupéry’s memoir of 1939, Terre des Hommes, translated into English as Wind, Sand, and Stars, trans. Lewis Galantière (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939). The name Sentinelles was drawn from a passage in that book about the importance of taking care of other people. See St. Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, 295; or St. Exupéry, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1: 280. 37. Gallaz, Entretiens avec Edmond Kaiser, 33. See the website of that organization in its current form, www.emmaus-international.org (accessed 1 March 2010). 38. On these camps, see Michel Cornaton, Les camps de regroupement de la guerre d’Algerie, rpt. ed. (Paris: Harmattan, 1998). It was originally published in 1967. 39. Kaiser wrote about his years with Terre des Hommes in Kaiser, La Marche aux enfants, 227-576. 40. Kaiser describes his technique for confronting state leaders in Gallaz, Entretiens avec Edmond Kaiser, 57-58. 41. Terre des Femmes, ed., Tod als Ehrensache, 20. 42. Kaiser, “Avant-propos,” in Sentinelles, Les mutilations sexuelles féminines, 4. The French version is on 3, and I have used it to improve the English version here. 43. Gallaz, Entretiens avec Edmond Kaiser, 35-39, 43. 44. Ibid., 38. Kaiser founded yet other initiatives and organizations over his long life. One of them was La petite Espérance, founded in 1990 for “girls and women or other sufferers who fall outside the ‘criteria’ of ordinary organizations.” Gallaz, Entretiens avec Edmond Kaiser, 145. 45. Sentinelles has aided women and children facing genital cutting, honor violence, sexual violence, child marriage, and noma, a disfiguring disease affecting young children. In addition to its publications already cited, see its website, www.sentinelles.org (accessed 28 July 2009). 46. The following paragraphs draw upon Kristina Schulz, Der lange Atem der Provok­ation: Die Frauenbewegung in der Bundesrepublik und in Frankreich, 1968-1976 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2002); Ilse Lenz, ed., Die neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland: Abschied vom kleinen Unterschied: Eine Quellensammlung (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008); Bascha Mika, Alice Schwarzer: Eine kritische Biographie (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1998); and Anna Dünnebier and Gert von Paczensky, Das bewegte Leben von Alice Schwarzer: Eine Biographie (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1998).

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47. Lenz, ed., Die neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 52. 48. Ibid., 283-91. Their reception of the American Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will, published in 1975 and translated into German in 1978, propelled the women’s shelter (Frauenhaus) movement for victims of rape and domestic violence. Brownmiller interpreted rape as part of a wider pattern of subordinating women, over against an older notion of rape as an act of individual sociopathic men. Lenz, ed., Die neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 286-87. 49. West Germany became a leading consumer of commodified sex in the 1960s, and in 1975 it liberalized the law on pornography, leading to greater availability of hardcore porn. See Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in TwentiethCentury Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 145-46; Lenz, ed., Die neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 766; and Elizabeth Heineman, Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 50. See Diana E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven, eds., Crimes against Women: Proceedings of the International Tribunal (Millbrae, Calif.: Les Femmes, 1976). See also the collection of testimonies and evidence assembled in preparation for the tribunal, in Frauenzentrum Berlin, ed., Gewalt gegen Frauen in Ehe, Psychiatrie, Gynäkologie, Vergewaltigung, Beruf, Film und was Frauen dagegen tun: Beiträge zum Internationalen Tribunal über Gewalt gegen Frauen, Brüssel 1976 (Berlin: Frauenzentrum Berlin, 1976). On the number of West Germans attending, see Russell and Van de Ven, eds., Crimes against Women, xiii, 2, and also xv, 219-21, 281-82, 285. 51. The United Nations held three conferences for its Decade for Women: in Mexico City (1975), in Copenhagen (1980), and in Nairobi (1985). 52. On female genital cutting: the proceedings mentioned an unnamed French feminist study group, probably connected to Groult. Also, European women read out a letter from Guinean women. See Russell and Van de Ven, eds., Crimes against Women, 150-52, 194-95. In the West German collection cited above, female genital cutting was mentioned once, without sensationalism, before passing over to an extended discussion of gynecological practices in West Germany. Frauenzentrum Berlin, ed., Gewalt gegen Frauen, 20. On honor violence: European women read out a letter from women in Lebanon, and a Yemeni woman living in Britain spoke. The women whom participants referenced as victims of honor violence were described in general terms as Arab women in the Middle East. See Russell and Van de Ven, eds., Crimes against Women, 100-102, 150. 53. See Herzog, Sex after Fascism, esp. chaps. 4 and 6. On sexual libertarianism on the left, see Lenz, ed., Die neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 288-90. One woman who belonged to the Humanist Union sought to arrange close cooperation between the two organizations. Christa Stolle, personal communication, 28 May 2009. Yet the issue of sexual libertarianism revealed a divide between the two civil-liberties-oriented organizations. While the Humanist Union has opposed state regulation of sexual behavior and censorship of pornography, Terre des Femmes has held that sexuality contains the potential for victimization and that state regulation is necessary to protect women and

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girls, who share certain vulnerabilities in a male-dominated society. Specifically the question of criminalization of sexual relations between adults and children reveals a divergence between the organizations. While the Humanist Union has struggled over this issue internally for years (as has the Green Party) with significant internal advocacy of decriminalization of sexual relations between adults and minors, Terre des Femmes has always advocated criminalization of such sexual relations, whether those relations take place in Germany, or outside of it, as sex tourism. See, e.g., on the Humanist Union, “Erklärung des Bundesvorstandes der Humanistischen Union,” Mitteilungen der Humanistischen Union 186 (2004): 4; Ursula Tjaden, “Klares Agieren in Sachen Pädophilie und Zusammenarbeit mit der AHS [Arbeitsgemeinschaft Humane Sexualität] gefordert,” Mitteilungen der Humanistischen Union 186 (2004): 4; and Sven Lüders, “Bürgerrechte und Verantwortung,” Mitteilungen der Humanistischen Union 208 (2010): 28-32. On the Green Party in North Rhine-Westphalia, see Rundbrief 2 (1985). 54. Lenz, ed., Die neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 28. 55. Ibid., 102. Discussions of erotic pleasure often referenced the sex researchers Masters and Johnson as well as Alfred Kinsey, all of whom were received in West Germany over the 1950s and 1960s. 56. Lenz, ed., Die neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 102-3 (quotation on 102). This paragraph is based on the analysis of Lenz and her colleagues there. 57. The following anecdote indicates how automatic such synecdoche between “clitoris” and “woman” had become: when members of Terre des Femmes decided in 1986 to change the statutes so that only women could join the organization (previously men were able to become members), the woman reporting the discussion jokingly suggested that members now be called “Mitklits” rather than “Mitglieder.” Like the English word “member,” the German “Glied” can also mean “penis.” Rundbrief 4 (1986). 58. See Rita Götze, “Die Klitoris aus feministischer Sicht,” in Weibliche Genitalverstümmelung: Eine fundamentale Menschenrechtsverletzung: Textsammlung, ed. Petra Schnüll and Terre des Femmes (Tübingen: Terre des Femmes, 1999), 257-67. The word belongs to the anthropologist and historian Harriet Lyons. See Harriet Lyons, “Genital Cutting: The Past and Present of a Polythetic Category,” Africa Today 53, no. 4 (2007): 3-17; Harriet Lyons, “Anthropologists, Moralities, and Relativities: The Problem of Genital Mutilations,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 18, no. 4 (1981): 499-518; and Andrew P. Lyons and Harriet D. Lyons, Irregular Connections: A History of Anthropology and Sexuality (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 59. See the brief but valuable account in Anika Rahman and Nahid Toubia, Female Genital Mutilation: A Guide to Laws and Policies Worldwide (London: Zed, 2000), 9-13. Partial histories of media coverage and feminist mobilization in the United States are in Melani McAlister, “Suffering Sisters? American Feminists and the Problem of Female Genital Surgeries,” in Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal, ed. Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 242-62; and Claire C. Robertson, “Getting Beyond the Ew! Factor: Rethinking U.S. Approaches to African Female Genital Cutting,” in Genital Cutting and

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Transnational Sisterhood: Disputing U.S. Polemics, ed. Stanlie M. James and Claire C. Robertson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 56-71. On France, see Françoise Lionnet, “Women’s Rights, Bodies, and Identities: The Limits of Universalism and the Legal Debate around Excision in France,” in Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge, ed. Nnaemeka, 97-110. On Germany, see the participant’s account in Levin, “Female Genital Mutilation: Campaigns in Germany,” 285-301. 60. On Moi, see Lynn M. Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 183; Groult mentioned Bourguiba as an opponent of female genital cutting in Groult, Ainsi soit-elle, 96. Mounira Charrad’s States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) offers a comparative analysis of family law, but it does not discuss female genital cutting or honor violence. 61. See Lilian Passmore Sanderson, Against the Mutilation of Women: The Struggle to End Unnecessary Suffering (London: Ithaca Press, 1981), 67, 100-110, 114-16; and Obioma Nnaemeka, “African Women, Colonial Discourses, and Imperialist Interventions: Female Circumcision as Impetus,” in Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge, ed. Nnaemeka, 27-45, esp. 39-41. For one contemporary example of seeking media coverage, citing a Sudanese activist, see Caravello, “Klitoris-Beschneidung,” 53 (in the first of the two Emma articles). See also Robertson, “Getting Beyond the Ew! Factor,” 60. The story of how and why certain of these indigenous critics of female genital cutting came to be received as experts by Europeans and Americans is only beginning to be elucidated. See Amal Amireh, “Framing Nawal El Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World,” Signs 26, no. 1 (Autumn 2000): 215-49; and Hamid El Bashir, “The Sudanese National Committee on the Eradication of Harmful Traditional Practices and the Campaign against Female Genital Mutilation,” in Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives, ed. Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 142-70. For Herta Haas, a founding member of Terre des Femmes, the existence of African male and female critics of cutting showed that the concern about imposing Western values was misplaced. See TdF Archive, Haas papers, Haas, “Im Namen der Tradition” (unpub. MS), 17. 62. See Terre des Femmes, ed., Tod als Ehrensache, 21-85, which cites the words of indigenous critics while mostly avoiding naming them. More recently, however, Terre des Femmes has intensified its work in this area and a newer publication names several indigenous activists: Terre des Femmes, ed., Tatmotiv Ehre: Eine Ausstellung zu Gewalt an Frauen und Mädchen im Namen der Ehre (Tübingen: Terre des Femmes, 2005), 32-41. 63. See, e.g., Germaine Aziz, Geschlossene Häuser: Lebensgeschichte einer Prostituierten (Frankfurt: Neue Kritik, 1980); or Youssef El Masry, Le drame sexuel de la femme dans l’Orient arabe (Paris: Laffont, 1962), translated into German as Die Tragödie der Frau im arabischen Orient, trans. Brigitte Kahr (Munich: Rütten und Loening, 1963). In recent years, this has changed: activists are very vocal about their specific work, the crime of honor violence appears in isolation from other aspects of women’s lives in the media, and victims are identified by name. One example is the much-publicized case of

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Hatun Sürücü, a Kurdish German woman who was killed in 2005 in Germany and was made the focal point of several campaigns against honor violence. See Ewing, Stolen Honor, 151-79. 64. This pattern was finally reversed when Fadumo Korn’s memoir, originally published in German in 2004, appeared in English as Fadumo Korn, with Sabine Eichhorst, Born in the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival, trans. Tobe Levin (New York: Feminist Press, 2006). 65. Nawal El Saadawi’s best-known book in the West was originally published in 1977 in Egypt. Its Arabic title is translatable as The Naked Faces of the Arab Woman. The book was translated into English in 1980 with the very different title The Hidden Face of Eve (London: Zed, 1980), and with extensive changes in the content. See Amireh, “Framing Nawal El Saadawi,” 216. That English text was translated into German later the same year, again with a title highlighting the veil: Tschador: Frauen im Islam, trans. Edgar Peinelt with the assistance of Suleman Taufiq (Bremen: Con, 1980). 66. See Asma El Dareer, Woman, Why Do You Weep? Circumcision and Its Consequences (London: Zed Press, 1982). 67. Often cited or reprinted was Shandall’s article of 1967, “Circumcision and Infibulation of Females: A General Consideration of the Problem and a Clinical Study of the Complications in Sudanese Women.” See Terre des Hommes, Les mutilations sexuelles féminines, 41-54. 68. See Awa Thiam, La parole aux négresses (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1978). This book was translated into German as part of Paczensky’s series frauen aktuell: Awa Thiam, Die Stimme der schwarzen Frau: Vom Leid der Afrikanerinnen, trans. Chantal Doussain and Anneliese Strauss (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981). Only later was it translated from French into English, as Black Sisters, Speak Out: Feminism and Oppression in Black Africa, trans. Dorothy Blair (London: Pluto, 1986). Thiam led the Senegalese section of the international organization Commission de l’Abolition des Mutilations Sexuelles (CAMS). 69. El Masry, Le drame sexuel de la femme. 70. Olayinka Koso-Thomas, The Circumcision of Women: A Strategy for Eradication (London: Zed, 1987). Her activism dated to the early 1980s. 71. See Efua Dorkenoo, Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation: The Practice and Its Prevention (London: Minority Rights Group, 1994). Like Koso-Thomas, her activism dated to the early 1980s. She founded Forward, a British organization opposed to female genital cutting, in 1983. See Claudie Gosselin, “Feminism, Anthropology and the Politics of Excision in Mali: Global and Local Debates in a Postcolonial World,” Anthropologica 42, no. 1 (2000): 43-60, esp. 44 on Dorkenoo and the U.N. Copenhagen conference. 72. Aziz, Geschlossene Häuser; Kay-Michael Schreiner, ed., Frauen in der Dritten Welt: Reportagen—Erzählungen—Gedichte (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1980); and Thiam, Die Stimme der schwarzen Frau were recommended in a press item on Terre des Femmes: Heide Mundzeck, “‘Niemand freut sich, wenn ein Mädchen geboren wird’: Die neugegründete Organisation ‘Terre des Femmes’ hat sich grosse Ziele gesteckt,”

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Frankfurter Rundschau (17 April 1982). Another example from almost a decade later was Bouthaina Shaaban, Both Left and Right Handed: Arab Women Talk about Their Lives (London: The Women’s Press, 1991), recommended in Rundbrief 1 (1991): 38-40. Nawal El Saadawi’s writings were also frequently recommended. Groult relied on Rachid Boudjedra, La Répudiation (Paris: Denoël, 1969). 73. See, e.g., “Das Sittengemälde und der Ölsegen,” Die Zeit (18 April 1980). 74. See Fran P. Hosken, “Women and Health: Circumcision and Infibulation of Females,” WIN News 1, no. 3 (June 1975): 39-42. WIN stands for Women’s International Network. See also Fran P. Hosken, The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females, 4th rev. ed. (Lexington, Mass.: Women’s International Network News, 1993), 6. 75. Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD), “A Statement on Genital Mutilation” (1980), in Third World, Second Sex, ed. Miranda Davies (London: Zed Press, 1983), 217-20. 76. She drew upon Hosken and, to a limited extent, Benoîte Groult. She also mentioned the Brussels tribunal. See Mary Daly, “African Genital Mutilation: The Unspeakable Atrocities,” Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 153-77. 77. Lightfoot-Klein, like Hosken a Jewish emigrée from German-speaking central Europe, traveled to Sudan in 1979 and began publishing about female genital cutting in 1983. She learned of Hosken’s work only after she had begun her own investigations. Anyone researching Lightfoot-Klein’s career should examine her extensive correspondence with Haas held in the Terre des Femmes archive. The American feminist magazine Ms. published its first article on female genital cutting in 1980: Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem, “The International Crime of Female Genital Mutilation,” Ms. 7, no. 9 (1980): 65-67, 98, 100. This article did not appear in 1979, as Steinem mistakenly cites in her anthology Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 2nd ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), where, however, the text is conveniently located at 317-27. Morgan and Steinem cite Groult and Terre des Hommes as sources for further reading there. Alice Walker first published about female genital cutting in 1992, in her novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), and then in 1993 in her film Warrior Marks. 78. Groult, Ainsi soit-elle. Groult’s erotic novel Salz auf unserer Haut, trans. Irène Kuhn (Munich: Knaur, 2004) was made into a successful film in 1992; that is what many Germans associate with her name today. 79. I thank the translator Susan Nicholls for this suggestion, on www.ProZ.com (accessed 29 November 2011). 80. The only exceptions I have found are Eloïse A. Brière, “Confronting the Western Gaze,” in Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge, ed. Nnaemeka, 165-80 (see 168); and Winter, “Women, the Law, and Cultural Relativism in France,” 961. While Groult was not the only French critic of female genital cutting in those years, others such as Renée Saurel do not arise in my Terre des Femmes sources. 81. Thiam, Die Stimme der schwarzen Frau, 53 n. 25. See also, e.g., 70-71.

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82. Benoîte Groult, “Préface,” in Fran Hosken, Les mutilations sexuelles féminines, trans. Danièle Neumann (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1983), 5-8. 83. Benoîte Groult, Mon evasion: Autobiographie (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2008), 177. 84. Ibid., 176-77. 85. Ibid., 178. 86. El Masry, Le drame sexuel de la femme; Jacques Lantier, La Cité magique et magie en Afrique noire (Paris: Fayard, 1972); Gérard Zwang, La Fonction érotique (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1972). Zwang and Alain de Benoist, two noted members of France’s New Right, also contributed to the press conference held by Groult and Kaiser in 1977. See Terre des Hommes, Les mutilations sexuelles féminines, 21-22, 26-28. Groult also mentions having found Asma El Dareer’s Woman, Why Do You Weep?, yet this book did not appear until 1982; perhaps she saw a medical article by El Dareer. 87. Groult, Mon évasion, 178. 88. Ibid., 179. 89. Florence Hervé, “Salz der Freiheit”: Benoîte Groult: Biographie (Munich: Econ und List Taschenbuch, 1999), 57. 90. Groult, Ödipus’ Schwester, 117. 91. Ibid., 88. 92. Ibid., 93. 93. Staehle and Hübener, “Wie ein Schnitt ins eigene Fleisch.” 94. On such disidentification, see Vicki Kirby, “Out of Africa: ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’?” in Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge, ed. Nnaemeka, esp. 81-88. 95. Groult, Ödipus’ Schwester, 96. 96. Staehle in “Talkrunde,” 161. 97. Groult, Ödipus’ Schwester, 101. In a similar passage in her contribution to the press conference in 1977, she refers to “excision” as “only one of the forms, one of the most spectacular ones, of oppression women undergo in patriarchal societies.” Groult, “Excision: The Scandal Nobody Wants to Discuss,” in Terre des Hommes, Les mutilations sexuelles féminines, 20. 98. Groult, Ödipus’ Schwester, 96. 99. Ibid., 95. 100. Ibid., 96 (quote), 110. 101. Of course, that is not a full response to the feminist concept of patriarchy, which certainly can account for what actual women and men do. Groult discussed women’s cooperation in their own oppression. Ibid., 106. 102. Ibid., 107. 103. See, e.g., Narayan, Dislocating Cultures; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” repr. in Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 51-80; and Rogaia Mustafa Abusha­raf, “Introduction: The Custom in Question,” in Female Circumcision: Multicul-

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tural Perspectives, ed. Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 1-24. 104. African activists sometimes also claimed to be the first. Nawal El Saadawi claimed to be the first Arab woman to criticize female genital cutting in print, in a book she published in 1969 in Arabic whose title is translatable as Woman and Sex. See El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve, xiv. Such claims of first-ness may well be accurate, but investigation usually shows that they are narrow. There is a long history of concern about female genital cutting before, during, and after the colonial era, and on all sides of the colonial encounter. See, e.g., Thomas, Politics of the Womb; and Janice Boddy, Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). 105. For example, anthropologists sought to avoid racism in their research, and to professionalize their discipline by offering dispassionate rather than voyeuristic or prurient descriptions of sexual matters. Lyons and Lyons, Irregular Connections offers a rich discussion of these issues. 106. Hübel, “Ingrid Stähle—Gründerin,” 6. 107. This paragraph draws on Lenz, ed., Die neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 710-11; the current IAF website, www.verband-binationaler.de; and Wolf-Almanasreh’s own website, www.almanasreh.de (both accessed 10 July 2009). The Humanist Union cooperated with her and awarded her its Fritz Bauer Prize in 1985. 108. See, e.g., Rundbrief 2 (1983) on the Deutsch-Ausländische Fraueninitiative Frankfurt and Iranische Frauengruppe Berlin, and Rundbrief 3 (1984) on protesting the Law on Foreigners for unequal legal treatment of spouses. In 1986 Terre des Femmes held its own seminar on immigrant, refugee, and foreign women in West Germany, to which the IAF sent a representative. Rundbrief 3 (1986). Wendy Pojmann has written a study of migrant women’s feminist activism in Italy; I am unaware of a counterpart for the case of West Germany. See Wendy Pojmann, Immigrant Women and Feminism in Italy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 109. Günter Wallraff, Ganz unten (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1985). See generally Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 110. Key publications were Arbeitsgruppe Frauenkongress, ed., Sind wir uns denn so fremd? Ausländische und deutsche Frauen im Gespräch (Berlin: sub rosa Frauenverlag, 1985); and Katharina Oguntoye, May Opitz, and Dagmar Schultz, eds., Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1986). The latter appeared in English as Showing Our Colors: AfroGerman Women Speak Out, trans. Anne V. Adams (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). Two important books from that time concerning women’s capacity to oppress others were Martha Mamozai, Herrenmenschen: Frauen im deutschen Kolonialismus (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1982); and Christina Thürmer-Rohr, Vagabundinnen: Feministische Essays (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1987). The essays in the latter span several years.

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111. Cheryl Benard and Edit Schlaffer, “Sie müssen ihr Haupt beugen: Ein Plädoyer für die Menschenrechte,” Die Zeit (30 October 1981). It was republished in their book Die Grenzen des Geschlechts: Anleitungen zum Sturz des Internationalen Patriarchats: Amnesty for Women (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984), 9-12. 112. Benard and Schlaffer, “Sie müssen ihr Haupt beugen.” 113. Hübel, “Ingrid Stähle—Gründerin,” 6; Rundbrief 2 (1983); and “Ziel und Zweck von Terre des Femmes,” in TdF Archive, file “TdF—Gründung 1981.” Amnesty for Women’s program was perhaps even more ambitious than that of Terre des Femmes: its goals were “to counsel individual cases, build up a network of regional offices that will facilitate cooperation between women in the West and women in the Third World, [and] initiate pilot projects such as a girls’ school in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan.” Each local Amnesty for Women group was to register itself as a nonprofit independently, sharing only the name with the Viennese office. 114. Benard and Schlaffer, Die Grenzen des Geschlechts, 125. 115. Benard and Schlaffer, “Sie müssen ihr Haupt beugen.” They may have been inspired by some French leftists’ contemporary critique of tiersmondisme. See Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 158-69; Amin et al., Le tiers monde und la gauche; and Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man. As other passages reveal, Benard and Schlaffer were not in fact referring to the entire “Third World,” but rather to the extreme conditions in the location where Amnesty for Women had taken up work: the refugee camps in Pakistan for Afghans fleeing the Soviet invasion. 116. Benard and Schlaffer, “Sie müssen ihr Haupt beugen.” 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid. 119. E.g., Rundbrief 2 (1984) and Rundbrief 3 (1987). One chapter exists today in Hamburg, in an unclear relationship to the original organization. See www.amnestyforwomen.de (accessed 7 January 2010). 120. Cheryl Benard and Edit Schlaffer, “Austria: Benevolent Despotism versus the Contemporary Feminist Movement,” in Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology, ed. Robin Morgan (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), 72-76. 121. The early book on domestic violence was Cheryl Benard and Edit Schlaffer, Die ganz gewöhnliche Gewalt in der Ehe: Texte zu einer Soziologie von Macht und Liebe (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978). 122. The institute was the Ludwig Boltzmann Research Institute for Policy and Interpersonal Relations (Ludwig-Boltzmann-Forschungsstelle für Politik und zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen). On Women without Borders, see www.frauen-ohnegrenzen.org (accessed 7 January 2010). 123. Cheryl Benard, Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 2003). 124. On Khalilzad, see Jon Lee Anderson, “American Viceroy,” New Yorker (19 December 2005). They met as students at the American University of Beirut in the 1970s.

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125. Ingrid Staehle, “Täter und Opfer sind Komplizen,” Die Zeit (18 December 1981). 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid. 130. Haas, “Im Namen der Tradition,” 11. 131. For example, it supported rural women’s health and literacy centers in Peru and Ecuador. Rundbrief 2 (1982). These relationships presumably emerged from individual members’ contacts. 132. Ibid. 133. Buchanan, “‘The Truth Will Set You Free.’” 134. Hübel, “Ingrid Stähle—Gründerin,” 6. 135. It should also be noted that European feminists could treat each other quite brusquely and rudely; see the final chapter of Russell and Van de Ven, eds., Crimes against Women. 136. Hübel, “Ingrid Stähle—Gründerin,” 6. 137. Nnaemeka, “African Women, Colonial Discourses, and Imperialist Interventions.” 138. Hübel, “Ingrid Stähle—Gründerin,” 6. 139. Ibid., 7. 140. Tobe Levin, “Solidarische Rassistinnen,” Emma (February 1983): 63. The film was Le secret de leurs corps, dir. Etienne Verhaegen and Patricia Verhaegen (Belgium, 1981). 141. Nnaemeka, “African Women, Colonial Discourses, and Imperialist Interventions, 30-33. 142. Levin, “Solidarische Rassistinnen,” 63. 143. Rundbrief 1 (1983). For example, two student members in Hanover, Friederike Teegen and Sigrid Seelmann, gave a well-attended presentation with film footage on female genital cutting at a women’s festival, the Hamburg Women’s Week (Frauenwoche). 144. Rundbrief 1 (1983). 145. Levin, “Female Genital Mutilation: Campaigns in Germany,” 291. However, to judge by Terre des Femmes’s internal newsletter, there was in fact some activity regarding female genital cutting. See Rundbrief 2 and 3 (1984), 2, 3, and 4 (1985), and 3 (1986). 146. Ines Laufer left Terre des Femmes and founded a new organization in 2007, the Task Force for the Effective Prevention of Genital Mutilation (Task Force zur effektiven Prävention von Genitalverstümmelung). See its website, www.taskforcefgm.de (accessed 2 April 2010) and Terre des Femmes’s statement, “Terre des Femmes und Ines Laufer (Task Force FGM),” at www.frauenrechte.de, via the links “Themen/Aktionen,” then “Genitalverstümmelung,” then “Das TdF-Engagement” (accessed 2 April 2010). 147. Rundbrief 1 (1984). “Sinn und Zweck.” The students were Teegen and Seelmann.

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Notes to Pages 161–163

148. Rundbrief 3 (1984). 149. Ibid. 150. Ibid. 151. Ibid. 152. The areas of work agreed upon in 1984 show this blend between the domestic and the international. They were psychiatry, gynecology, prostitution, porn, sex tourism, trafficking in girls, sexual abuse of children, rape, food and nutrition for women, child marriage, female genital mutilation, widow burning, dowry murders, polygamy, European and West German asylum law, West Germany’s population policy in the Third World, women’s work in the Third World, women and religion (“Islam, etc.”), the economic role of women in the Third World, and development aid. Ibid. 153. Rundbrief 2 (1986). 154. “Wer ist Terre des Femmes?,” 2. Emphasis in original. 155. During these years, approximately 20 members attended the annual meetings and the total membership was perhaps 140. Rundbrief 1 and 2 (1984), 4 (1985). 156. The most important source on the West German Third World solidarity movement remains Balsen and Rössel, Hoch die internationale Solidarität. 157. Ibid., 496-97. 158. In so doing, the Third World solidarity movement was returning to its early focus of the 1960s. See Quinn Slobodian, “Dissident Guests: Afro-Asian Students and Transnational Activism in the West German Protest Movement,” in Migration and Activism in Europe Since 1945, ed. Wendy Pojmann (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 33-56. A critical account of West and unified German Third World solidarity work by two prominent specialists on Namibia that displays this use of human rights is Reinhart Kössler and Henning Melber, Globale Solidarität? Eine Streitschrift (Frankfurt: Brandes und Apsel, 2002). 159. See Rundbrief 3 (1989): 49; Rundbrief 1 (1990): 46-52; and Rundbrief 1 (1991): 5 on the efforts with BUKO of Juliane von Krause, a member of Terre des Femmes. 160. See, e.g., Rundbrief 1 (1986) and 1 (1987). The development sociologist and ecofeminist Maria Mies has published numerous influential books since the 1970s. Most relevant to the present context are Indian Women and Patriarchy: Conflicts and Dilemmas of Students and Working Women, trans. Saral K. Sarkar (New Delhi: Concept, 1980), originally published in German in 1973; and Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed, 1986), which came out in a new edition in 1998. The sociologist Ilse Lenz has focused on Japan, Korea, and international feminism, while Christa Wichterich worked on India and international feminism. All three have turned more recently to the impact of globalization on women. Tobe Levin outlined the feminist critique of development work in her presentation on Terre des Femmes and Amnesty for Women at Thiam’s conference in Dakar in 1982. See the reprint in Rundbrief 2 (1991): 14. 161. The new board consisted of Agnes Hümbs, Antje Pähler, and Martina Gerl. Gerl and another member, Cristina Albertin, were charged with forging the organiza-

Notes to Pages 163–164

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tional link to BUKO. Rundbrief 2 and 4 (1985). Cristina Albertin is now the regional representative for South Asia of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. 162. Reichinger had already worked for Amnesty International, as had Agnes Hümbs, who also joined the Terre des Femmes board. See Rundbrief 4 (1987) and Susanne Reichinger, “Menschenrechtsverletzungen an Frauen—Eine Herausforderung für die Arbeit der Menschenrechtsorganisation amnesty international,” in Demokratie und Entwicklung: Theorie und Praxis der Demokratisierung in der Dritten Welt, ed. Wilfried von Bredow and Thomas Jäger (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1997), 227-34. 163. Action for World Solidarity’s website is: www.aswnet.de. Third World Action’s website is: www.aktion-dritte-welt.pcom.de. On the Third World Information Center and its periodical, see www.iz3w.org (all sites accessed 26 February 2012). 164. Some are cited below in discussions of individual campaigns. A later example is “Seit zehn Jahren: Terre des Femmes. Porträt,” epd-Entwicklungspolitik 17-18 (1991): 17. 165. Rundbrief 1 (1985) and 1 (1987). 166. Balsen and Rössel, Hoch die internationale Solidarität, 258. 167. Rundbrief 1 (1991): 2. This realization spurred the first effort to compile an organizational history, which led to inviting Staehle and other early members to speak. 168. Rundbrief 3 (1986). Among the Rundbriefe in the TdF Archive is also a document entitled “Tätigkeitsbericht Januar-Oktober 1987” that mentions this contact. Terre des Femmes’s efforts were covered in the Third World solidarity movement press: Christa Stolle, “Kein Pardon für den Adlerhorst: Ein Bericht über die Aktivitäten zum Bekleidungsunternehmen Adler,” Blätter des iz3w 144 (1987): 3-5; “Made in Korea: Adler-Textilarbeiterinnen wehren sich gegen deutsche Ausbeutung,” BRD + Dritte Welt 35 (1989): 3-48; Ute Koczy, “‘Wir fordern unser Recht’: TextilarbeiterInnen in Südkorea stellen Bedingungen an die Firma Adler,” BUKO-Agrar-Studien (1990): 54-58. 169. Christa Stolle, Hier ist ewig Ausland: Lebensbedingungen und Perspektiven koreanischer Frauen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Berlin: VWB Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 1990). 170. Like West German Amnesty, however, Terre des Femmes was hampered by terrorist acts and the harsh state response to them. A revolutionary group called Red Zora (Rote Zora) began its own campaign of setting fire to Adler stores. On Red Zora, see ID-Archiv im Internationalen Institut für Sozialgeschichte/Amsterdam, ed., Die Früchte des Zorns: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der Revolutionären Zellen und der Roten Zora, 2 vols. (Berlin: Edition ID-Archiv, 1993), 2: 628-31. Terre des Femmes reported Red Zora’s fliers to the police and distanced itself publicly from Red Zora. Nevertheless, Terre des Femmes was itself subjected to police searches. See, e.g., Rundbrief 3 (1987) and “Terre des Femmes gegen Rote Zora,” tageszeitung (19 August 1987). Another episode related to terrorism caused controversy inside Terre des Femmes: in 1987 a journalist at Emma, Ingrid Strobl, was arrested on the charge of aiding in the bombing in 1986 of the Lufthansa headquarters in Cologne. (The bombing itself was a protest against the deportation of asylum seekers whose applications were denied. See ID-Archiv, ed., Die Früchte des Zorns, 2: 549-50.) Susanne Reichinger

258

Notes to Pages 164–165

and Christa Stolle, among others, considered it obvious that Terre des Femmes would protest her arrest. Reichinger wrote a letter expressing her solidarity with Strobl, who was being held in investigative custody, and the police responded by searching Reichinger’s home. Rundbrief 1 (1988) and Rundbrief 3 (1988): 28. Stolle’s open letter in the name of Terre des Femmes appeared in March 1989, when Strobl was on trial. Christa Stolle, “Offener Brief von Terre des Femmes zum Prozess gegen Ingrid Strobl,” tageszeitung (22 March 1989). See also Rundbrief 2 (1989): 28-32. It expressed feminist solidarity with Strobl as well as outrage at the anti-terrorist law under which Strobl had been arrested. Under Paragraph 129a it was sufficient to be thought to have supported a “terrorist organization” to be charged; evidence of actual membership was not necessary. Paragraph 129a was part of a larger paragraph on the “formation of a criminal organization” that had been invoked against pacifists and student protesters in the 1950s and 1960s, and against feminists who organized trips to the Netherlands for women seeking abortions in 1975. It was Paragraph 129a, in fact, that had led to police searches of Terre des Femmes’s office, because its Adler campaign was considered a “theme relevant to a terrorist attack” since the Red Zora fires. Terre des Femmes did not advocate political violence, but many members did think, as did Reichinger and Stolle, that the state was using anti-terrorist laws to stifle legitimate protest. At the same time, Stolle’s open letter was controversial among the members and even within the board of Terre des Femmes, and at least one member left in protest against the open letter having been written in the name of the whole organization. Rundbrief 3 (1988): 22, 28, 30. 171. See Rundbrief 2 (1990): 15 and, from the Third World solidarity movement press, “Heiratshändler zeigt Frauenorganisation an. Terre des Femmes macht gegen die Geschäfte eines Gündlinger Heiratshändlers mobil,” Lateinamerika Nachrichten 190 (1990): 52-53. 172. Rundbrief 1 (1991): 35-36. 173. Rundbrief 2 (1991): 3. From the Third World solidarity movement press, see “Selbstverwaltet: Ein Internationales Frauenkultur- und Frauenflüchtlingshaus entsteht,” Frauensolidarität 33 (1990): 5-7. 174. Rundbrief 4 (1987) and “Tätigkeitsbericht Januar-Oktober 1987.” 175. Rundbrief 3 (1990): 10. Agisra, which had more women of color as members, was undergoing a similar discussion, which Terre des Femmes followed in its own newsletter. See Rundbrief 3 (1990): 69. Terminology was shifting at this time, and also reflected American usage; common terms in these circles for non-European women included “black” (schwarz), “foreigner” (Ausländerin, which had the unfortunate implication that even long-standing residents were permanently “foreign”) and “women of color” (used in English). On West German feminists’ discussions of racism in the 1980s, see Sara Lennox, “Divided Feminism: Women, Racism, and German National Identity,” German Studies Review 18, no. 3 (October 1995): 481-502. 176. Rundbrief 3 (1990): 10-23 and Rundbrief 4 (1990): 2. 177. Rundbrief 1 (1991): 7. A Berlin organization purchased the building and rented

Notes to Pages 165–173

259

it to the Freiburg group. Rundbrief 1 (1991): 17. It operated until 2002 and then apparently had to close down. 178. Rundbrief 2 (1985). See also Rundbrief 2 (1988) on renewed attention to female genital cutting. 179. Rundbrief 3 (1986) and Rundbrief 4 (1987). The book was Terre des Femmes, ed., Tod als Ehrensache. The member was probably Ute Deichmann; the archival sources I used did not permit certainty. 180. Rundbrief 3 (1988): 20. 181. Rundbrief 3 (1987) and Rundbrief 3 (1988): 27. See also Silke Voss, Parlamentarische Menschenrechtspolitik: Die Behandlung internationaler Menschenrechtsfragen im Deutschen Bundestag unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Unterausschusses für Menschenrechte und humanitäre Hilfe (1972-1998) (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2000), 223. 182. Rundbrief 1 (1989): 29, 31. Emphasis in original. 183. Rundbrief 4 (1989): 7. 184. Rundbrief 2 (1991): 3. 185. Christa Stolle, personal communication, 28 May 2009. 186. “Wer ist Terre des Femmes?,” 2-3. 187. See www.frauenrechte.de, then “Themen und Aktionen,” then “30 Jahre Terre des Femmes” (accessed 30 November 2011). Conclusion 1. Tilman Zülch and Klaus Guercke, eds., Soll Biafra überleben? Dokumente— Berichte—Analysen—Kommentare, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Lettner-Verlag, 1969), 12. An important thread not fully traced out in the present book is the interaction between politics of the left in West Germany and the uses of the language of human rights. Samuel Moyn suggests viewing human rights as a replacement for the idealism of the left in The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2010); see esp. 120-75. 2. BstU MfS HA IX Nr. 16191, Bl. 6-84. The Stasi devoted a surprising amount of energy to this man; more material is in MfS HA IX Nr. 2930 and MfS HA IX Nr. 17194. See also “Solche Pannen,” Der Spiegel (23 September 1968): 68-69. 3. Jürgen Wüst, Menschenrechtsarbeit im Zwielicht: Zwischen Staatssicherheit und Antifaschismus (Bonn: Bouvier, 1999). 4. Historians of humanitarianism and human rights are currently analyzing that moment. See Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, eds., Moral für die Welt? Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er Jahren (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, forthcoming 2012). 5. In his study of the organizational culture of Amnesty International’s main office in London, Stephen Hopgood discusses the difficulty Amnesty International has had in sustaining chapters in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, in part due to its now-discarded “work on own country” (WOOC) rule. The rule steered those who considered human rights a domestic matter away from Amnesty work. Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the

260

Notes to Pages 173–174

Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 98-99. 6. To connect that power to the duty of responsible action toward the people of other countries was a mainstay of, for instance, the Society for Threatened Peoples and Terre des Femmes. See Zülch and Guercke, Soll Biafra überleben?, 12-13; and Terre des Femmes’s campaign against the Adler clothing chain, discussed in Chapter 5. 7. The role of disillusionment with France is an important theme in Claus Leggewie’s exploration of West Germans involved with aiding the Algerian cause. See Claus Leggewie, Kofferträger: Das Algerien-Projekt der Linken im Adenauer-Deutschland (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1984). 8. Susanne Omran, Frauenbewegung und “Judenfrage”: Diskurse um Rasse und Geschlecht nach 1900 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2000); Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). 9. Leila Ahmed, “The Active Social Life of Muslim Women’s Rights,” in Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights, ed. Dorothy L. Hodgson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 101-19. In this essay, Ahmed asks, “What work do the practices organized in its terms do in various places, for various women?” (102). 10. Stern cited the German expellee and refugee experience as a reason for West Germany’s commitment to international human rights instruments, and to West Germans’ sympathies for the Vietnamese, Cambodian, Afghan, and other refugees they saw on television in the 1970s and 1980s. Carola Stern, Strategien für die Menschenrechte, exp. ed. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1983), 55, 61. She noted that the exclusion of the German expellees from refugee status was a “condition formulated with defeated Nazi Germany in mind,” and pointed out that it set a precedent that was harsh for other refugees such as Finns from Karelia, Indians and Pakistanis, and Tamils in India and Sri Lanka.

Index

Abbé Pierre, 140 Abendroth, Wolfgang, 209 n.83 Abu El Futuh-Shandall, Ahmed, 144 Academy for German Law (Akademie für Deutsches Recht), 106 Ackermann Congregation (AckermannGemeinde), 107 Action for World Solidarity (Aktion Solidarische Welt), 163 Action Reconciliation Service (Aktion Sühnezeichen), 215 n.45 Adenauer, Konrad, 208 nn. 59, 62, 65, 68–70, 73, 77, 79, 80, 84, 85, 89, 90, 91, 168, 172 Adler clothing chain, 257 n.170; boycott of, 163–64, 258 n.170 aerial bombardment, 8, 22, 45 Agisra (Working Group Against Sexual and Racist Exploitation, Arbeitsgemeinschaft gegen sexuelle und rassistische Ausbeutung), 163, 241 n.3, 258 n.175 Ahmed, Leila, 173, 260 n.9 Ainsi soit-elle, 136, 137, 145–49 Albertin, Cristina, 256 n.161 Albrecht, Ulrich, 71

Algerian War, 11, 73, 173, 211 n.8, 260 n.10 Alliance of German Women Married to Foreigners (Interessengemeinschaft der mit Ausländern verheirateten deutschen Frauen, IAF), 150–51, 165, 228 n.178, 253 n.108 Allies, 7–11, 13, 21–22, 24, 25, 27–30, 45, 51–54, 56, 74, 103, 109, 168, 171, 174. See also zones of occupation American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 19, 32, 197 n.90 Amnesty for Women, 137, 152–56, 254 n.113 Amnesty International, 11, 14, 21, 62, 67, 76, 88, 97, 125, 126, 141, 152, 155, 158, 171, 213 n.32, 220 n.91, 227 n.171. See also West German Amnesty; “work on own country” (WOOC) rule anthropology and female genital cutting, 150, 253 n.105 anti-anti-communism, 75, 172, 173 anti-communism, 29–31, 33–35, 64–66, 77, 79, 83–85, 87–90, 167, 170, 197 n.90, 198 n.106 anti-communist organizations, 37, 38, 41 anti-Semitism, 19, 20, 37, 67, 72, 73, 75, 85, 193 nn. 52, 123–24

262

Index

anti-totalitarianism, 75, 76, 139, 170 Arendt, Hannah, 104 Argument-Klub, 72 Arndt, Adolf, 209 n.83 asylum, right of, 76, 95, 102, 109–12, 115, 116, 120, 125–27, 129, 130, 151, 172, 216 n.60, 238 n.131, 240 n.161, 256 n.152; gender-based, 136, 138, 157, 165, 245 n.30 Ateş, Seyran, 133, 241 n.5 Auschwitz Trial, 74, 94 Austria and Austrians, 47, 50–52, 55, 57, 107, 108, 124, 230 n.5. See also Habsburg Empire Austro-Marxism, 49, 58 autonomy of law, 47, 50–52, 204 n.11 Aziz, Germaine, 144 Aziz, Namo, 126 Bach, Otto, 37 Bade, Klaus J., 127 Bahro, Rudolf, 216 n.59 Baker, Eric, 76, 78, 79 Baldwin, Roger Nash, 32–34 Balledore Pallieri, Giorgio, 120 Basic Law (Grundgesetz), 5, 6, 64, 67, 89, 98, 103, 111, 112, 116, 133, 212 n.15, 229 n.5 Bauer, Fritz, 81, 92, 94, 95, 220 n.90; Fritz Bauer Institute, 225 n.155; Fritz Bauer Prize, 95, 243 n.16, 253 n.107 Bauer, Otto, 118, 205 n.23 Beauvoir, Simone de, 146, 148 Benard, Cheryl, 152–56, 245 n.31 Bender, Peter, 218 n.72 Benenson, Peter, 76–78 Benoist, Alain de, 252 n.86 Berlin Wall, 66, 67, 69, 73, 89, 196 n.80, 222 n.127 Bernatzik, Edmund, 58 Biafra Aid Campaign (Aktion Biafra-

Hilfe), 11, 130. See also Society for Threatened Peoples binational families, rights of, 134, 138, 150–51 Blom-Cooper, Louis, 81 Blumenwitz, Dieter, 229 n.2 Boehm, Max Hildebert, 106, 118, 121 Böll, Heinrich, 220 n.92 Bönninghausen, Inge von, 137, 244 n.25 Boven, Theo van, 140 Boudjedra, Rachid, 144 Bourdet, Claude, 81 Bourguiba, Habib, 144, 249 n.60 Brandt, Heinz, 78 Brandt, Willy, 68, 69, 88 Braun, Ingrid, 137 Bread for the World (Brot für die Welt), 129, 240 n.154 Brentano, Heinrich von, 92, 224 n.142 Brentano, Margherita von, 72, 75 Brigitte, 136, 137, 243 n.16 Brill, Hermann, 197 n.93 Brownmiller, Susan, 247 n.48 Bruegel, Johann Wolfgang, 238 n.128 Buro, Andreas, 214 n.35 Bütefisch, Heinrich, 73 Camus, Albert, 139 Cap Anamur, 112, 130, 139, 188 n.31, 234 n.63 Cardinal, Marie, 146 Carlbergh, Ernst, 200 n.131 censorship, 85, 92, 93 Center against Forced Migration (Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen), 10, 12, 128 Christian Democratic Union (ChristlichDemokratische Union, CDU), 65, 90, 92, 96 Christian Social Union (Christlich-Soziale Union, CSU), 69, 90 churches, 65, 84, 89–91, 93, 95, 129; Catholic, 15, 106; Protestant, 15

Index civil liberties, 6, 7, 13, 32, 33, 64, 88, 99, 170, 197 n.90, 247 n.53; vs. human rights, 63 Cmiel, Kenneth, 4 Cold War, 8, 10, 13, 17, 18, 28, 32, 34, 35, 37, 39, 56, 62, 77, 81, 116, 139, 168, 171 Collegium Carolinum, 106 Collette-Kahn, Suzanne, 199 n.118, 200 n.124, 203 n.155 Commission de l’Abolition des Mutilations Sexuelles, 250 n.68 Committee for an Indivisible Germany (Kuratorium Unteilbares Deutschland), 199 n.120, 202 n.152 Committee for Basic Rights and Democracy (Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie), 214 n.35 communism and communists, 18, 65, 68, 82, 91, 111. See also German Communist Party Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), 77, 79 conscience publique, 47–53, 56, 57, 238 n.120 Constitutional Court, Federal (Bundesverfassungsgericht), 66–68, 80, 93, 95, 112, 226 n.159 Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, 1979), 135 Council of Europe, 71, 118, 232 n.21 Courage, 137 credibility, 3, 10, 15, 17, 169, 170, 173, 174 cultural relativism, 135, 148–50, 160, 166, 249 n.61 Daly, Mary, 145 Dareer, Asma El, 144, 157 Decree on Radicals (Radikalenerlass), 88 Deichmann, Ute, 259 n.179 Denninger, Erhard, 126 détente, 79, 101–2, 168, 218 n.72, 228 n.1. See also Ostpolitik

263

Deutsch-Ausländische Fraueninitiative Frankfurt, 253 n.108 Dietz, Heinrich, 24–25, 27, 28, 30, 66 Doctors without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières), 139 Doehring, Karl, 229 n.2, 239 n.143 domestic context of human rights activism, 4, 6, 11, 14–16, 168–70 domestic violence, 121, 154, 241 n.5, 254 n.121 Dorkenoo, Efua, 144, 244 n.28, 250 n.71 Duve, Freimut, 131, 243 n.16 East Germany and East Germans, 5, 6, 9, 10, 16, 17, 22, 35–37, 39, 64–66, 73, 75, 77, 79, 82, 94, 99–101, 115, 196 n.80, 229 n.5 Easter March movement (Ostermarschbewegung), 68, 74 Eastern Bureau (Ostbüro): of the CDU, 202 n.143; of the FDP, 202 n.143; of the SPD, 42 Ebert, Theodor, 71 Eggebrecht, Axel, 89 Einsele, Helga, 95 émigrés and rémigrés, 17, 20, 24, 27, 32, 98, 170, 191 n.20, 196 n.80, 199 n.113, 216 n.60 Emma, 137, 144, 244 n.26, 257 n.170 Emmaus movement, 140 Erhard, Ludwig, 84 Ermacora, Felix, 121, 128, 231 n.8, 239 n.143 espionage, 38, 39, 42, 43, 81, 83, 86, 201 n.139, 220 n.92, 221 n.101; by French Second Bureau (Deuxième Bureau), 39; by U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, 37. See also Stasi European Charter of Regional or Minority Languages (Europäische Charta der Regional- oder Minderheitensprachen [1992]), 118, 130

264

Index

European Commission for Human Rights, 227 n.176 European Community, 138, 157. See also European Union European Convention on Human Rights (European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, 1950), 5, 9, 54, 111, 116, 120 European Court of Human Rights, 116 European Parliament, 138, 245 n.30 European Union, 122, 245 n.30. See also European Community Events (Vorgänge), 71, 90, 93, 94 expellee lobby, 8, 9, 17, 45, 55, 61, 85, 90, 101, 115, 121, 124, 125, 127, 228 n.1; vs. expellees 187 n.23. See also expellees; League of Expellees expellees (Vertriebene) and refugees (Flüchtlinge), postwar German, 9–10, 13, 14, 22, 24–26, 36, 45, 51, 52, 54, 60, 61, 90, 101, 109–10, 117, 119, 120, 123, 129, 130, 167, 171, 192 n.43, 260 n.10; differences between expellees and refugees, 55, 109–10; Eastern Territories (Ostgebiete), 101, 115, 230 n.5; role in West German international law of human rights, 104; statistics on, 42, 55. See also expellee lobby; refugees Extraparliamentary Opposition (Ausserparlamentarische Opposition, APO), 11, 174 Fabian, Walter, 92 Fahd al Saud, Misha’al, 145, 243 n.15 Federal Congress of Development Policy Action Groups (Bundeskongress entwicklungspolitischer Aktionsgruppen, BUKO), 162, 163, 188 n.34 Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees, and War-Damaged

(Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte), 61, 232 n.18 Federal Union of European Nationalities (Föderalistischer Verein Europäischer Volksgruppen, FUEV), 236 n.103 Federation of Binational Partnerships “IAF” (Verband binationaler Partnerschaften “IAF”). See Alliance of German Women Married to Foreigners female genital cutting, 12, 131–38, 140–43, 154, 157, 158–60, 165, 166, 173, 174, 241 n.6, 243 nn. 16, 19, 247 n.52, 255 n.145, 256 n.152; as source for feminism, 146–48; “female genital mutilation,” 145 feminism, 11, 136, 152, 155, 226 n.160, 258 n.175; French, 141, 146, 173; and human rights scholarship, 4; nonviolence in, 142, 148; second-wave, 134, 138, 141–43, 153, 158, 162, 168, 173 Fest, Joachim, 224 n.142 Fetscher, Iring, 113 Fight Nuclear Death (Kampf dem Atomtod), 68, 73 Fighting Group Against Inhumanity (Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit), 10, 37, 199 n.116 Fink, Heinrich, 75 Fischer, Joschka, 96 Flechtheim, Ossip K., 70–72, 81–83, 92, 96, 227 n.171 Flechtheim-Faktor, Lili, 71, 72, 83 Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN), 167–68 forced marriage, 132, 148 foreigners, rights of, 97–98, 137, 150–51, 227 n.178. See also binational families, rights of Framework Agreement on the Protection of National Minorities

Index (Rahmenübereinkommen zum Schutz nationaler Minderheiten, 1995), 118, 130 Franco, Francisco, 90 Frank, Karl, 106 Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei, FDP), 67, 69, 165, 212 n.17, 227 n.168, 245 n.30 Free Jurists’ Investigative Committee (Untersuchungsausschuss freiheitlicher Juristen), 10, 37, 170 Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ), 107, 232 n.26 Freikorps, 39, 42 Frowein, Jochen, 229 n.2, 239 n.143 Furth, Peter, 72 Fuss, Alisa, 216 n.60 Galtung, Johan, 113 Geneva Convention (1949), 114 genocide, 51, 59, 130, 209 n.79 Genocide Convention (1948), 120, 121 Gerl, Martina, 256 n.161 Gerlach, Hellmut von, 19 German American Clubs, 33 German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD), 19, 29, 68–71; ban on, 68–69, 80, 95 German-Czech Declaration on Mutual Relations and Their Future Development (Deutsch-Tschechische Erklärung über die gegenseitigen Beziehungen und deren künftige Entwicklung, 1997), 239 n.151 German Democratic Republic (GDR). See East Germany German Institute for Human Rights (Deutsches Institut für Menschenrechte), 71, 167, 213 n.32 German League for Human Rights (Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte),

265

7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17–44, 113, 170; Berlin League, 28–32, 35–43; Bielefeld League, 23, 26–28; Frankfurt League, 22–23, 28, 32–34, 36, 38, 42, 196 n.89; Hamburg League, 23, 28; Hanover League, 25; hostels, 36–39; Wuppertal League, 22–26. See also International League for Human Rights; New Fatherland League German Peace Society (Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft), 19, 22, 23, 29–30, 194 n.64 German Society for International Law (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerrecht), 51, 60, 127 German Society for the United Nations (Deutsche Gesellschaft für die Vereinten Nationen), 5 German Trade Union Confederation (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB), 34 Globke, Hans, 73 Goldschmidt, Dietrich, 74, 216 n.51 Goppel, Alfons, 85 Götze, Alfred, 37–42, 83, 195 n.71 Götze, Anneliese, 39–41, 200 n.132 Grass, Günter, 220 n.92 Green Party, 71, 129, 134–35, 248 n.53 Greer, Germaine, 148 Grossmann, Kurt R., 20, 24, 26–28, 32, 42, 170, 174, 202 n.151, 212 n.21 Groult, Benoîte, 136–37, 141, 145, 173, 244 n.21, 251 nn.76–77, 252 nn. 86, 101 groups, rights of, 62, 102, 130–31, 237 n.117 Gumbel, Emil, 212 n.21 Gustav-Heinemann-Initiative, 219 n.85 Haas, Herta, 137, 145, 156, 249 n.61, 251 n.77 Habsburg Empire, 46, 55, 57, 107, 108, 171. See also Austria Hague Convention (1907), 53, 54

266

Index

Hamaidia, Barbara, 137, 138, 150, 158 Hamm-Brücher, Hildegard, 165, 245 n.30 Hannover, Heinrich, 95 Hanstein, Wolfram von, 42, 43 Harich, Wolfgang, 78 Harlan, Veit, 67 Haug, Frigga, 72 Haug, Wolfgang Fritz, 72 Haugg, Friedrich, 203 n.155 Heim, Max, 43 Heinemann, Gustav, 80, 219 n.85, 222 n.118 Heintze, Hans-Joachim, 239 n.143 Heinz, Wolfgang S., 71, 97 Hellpach, Willy, 121 Henlein, Konrad, 106, 238 n.122 Herrmann, Rudolf, 23, 28 Hildebrandt, Rainer, 199 n.116 Hirschauer, Gerd, 89, 92 Hitler, Adolf, 49, 52, 94, 205 n.21 Hobe, Stephan, 239 n.143 Hofmann, Rainer, 239 n.143 homeland, right to, 8, 50, 52, 55–57, 60, 62, 101, 102, 117–22, 124, 125, 127, 128 homophobia, 80, 83–84, 86. See also Paragraph 175 honor violence, 12, 132, 133–36, 138, 141– 45, 154, 157, 165, 166, 241 n.5, 242 n.8, 243 n.16, 247 n.52, 256 n.152 Hosken, Fran, 145, 147, 251 n.76 House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Education Site, 73 human rights as political language, 2, 16, 46, 104, 168, 169 Human Rights Forum (Forum Menschenrechte), 15, 166, 227 n.171 Humanist Students’ Union (Humanistische Studentenunion, HSU), 98, 99, 227 n.168 Humanist Union (Humanistische Union), 7, 13–15, 62, 64, 65, 70–72, 76, 83, 86, 88–96, 97–100, 124–26, 133, 135, 143, 166, 172–74, 219 n.85, 221 n.101, 232

n.18, 247 n.53, 248 n.53, 253 n.107 Hümbs, Agnes, 256 n.161 Hundhammer, Alois, 85, 93 impostors, 34, 168, 190 n.13 indigenous peoples, rights of, 12 individual petition, right of, 53–54, 57 individual’s status in international law, 8, 46, 50, 52, 53, 62, 102, 103, 109–11, 116, 120 Institute of International Law (Institut de droit internationale), 47, 120 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 116, 120, 128, 206 n.42 International Federation for the Rights of Man (Fédération Internationale des Droits de l’Homme, FIDH, Paris), 38, 191 n.20, 199 nn. 118, 121, 213 n.21 International Institute for Nationalities Law and Regionalism (Internationales Institut für Nationalitätenrecht und Regionalismus, INTEREG), 106, 232 n.21, 236 n.103 international law, 5, 8, 9, 13–15, 25, 46–50, 52, 53, 56, 57, 59, 101–31, 169, 188 n.35; progressive international law movement, 47, 48, 54, 60. See also space International Law Commission, 239 n.145 International League for Human Rights (ILHR, New York City), 213 n.21. See also International League for the Rights of Man International League for Human Rights (Internationale Liga für Menschenrechte), 7, 11, 15, 43, 62, 64, 65, 70–76, 94, 96–100, 124, 166, 168, 171, 172, 232 n.18. See also German League for Human Rights International League for the Rights of Man (ILRM, New York City), 38, 191 n.20,

Index 196 n.85 International Society for Human Rights (Internationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte), 100, 170 International Tribunal on Crimes against Women, 142, 146 Ipsen, Hans-Peter, 209 n.83 Iranische Frauengruppe Berlin, 253 n.108 Islam and Muslims, 12, 130, 132, 133, 148, 149, 241 n.5, 256 n.152 Jacob, Berthold, 202 n.144 Jäger, Richard, 85 Jahrreiss, Hermann, 209 n.83 Jardin, Pascal, 146 Jaspers, Karl, 104 Jews, 33, 59, 72, 74, 104, 112, 123–24, 139, 145, 215 n.45; German, 17, 24, 216 n.60 journalists and journalism, 19, 20, 24, 62, 67, 76, 79–83, 89, 91, 92, 126, 131, 135, 137, 139, 144, 146, 151, 165, 199 nn. 113, 122, 212 n.20, 215 n.45, 218 n.72– 73, 224 n.142, 243 n.16, 257 n.170 Johnson, William, 143 June 17th Committee (Komitee 17. Juni), 37, 199 n.120, 200 n.123, 201 n.139 Kahn, Émile, 200 n.124 Kahn, Paul, 1 Kaiser, Edmond, 136, 138–41, 146, 158, 165, 252 n.86 Kantorowicz, Alfred, 31 Kaufmann, Erich, 209 n.83 Kenyatta, Jomo, 144 Kesten, Hermann, 92, 224 n.145 Khalid, Abdul Aziz, 243 n.15 Khalilzad, Zalmay, 155 Kiendl, Theodor, 28–31, 39, 197 n.98 Kimminich, Otto, 10, 14, 101–31, 172–74 Kinsey, Alfred, 248 n.55 Klein, Eckart, 229 n.2, 239 n.143

267

Kny, Karl, 26 Kogon, Eugen, 27 Kolakowski, Leszek, 91 König, René, 92 Korn, Fadumo, 250 n.64 Koso-Thomas, Olayinka, 144 Kouchner, Bernard, 139 Kraschutzki, Heinz, 194 n.64 Krause, Juliane von, 165, 256 n.159 Kressmann, Willy, 31, 212 n.20 Kudrnofsky, Josef, 22, 28, 30–35 Külz, Wilhelm, 29 Kupsch, Katharina, 20, 27–28 Lasky, Melvin, 77–78, 212 n.20 Lantier, Jacques, 146 Laubenthal, Barbara, 127 Laufer, Ines, 160, 255 n.146 Laun, Rudolf, 10, 13, 25, 45–62, 66, 90, 101, 102, 104–9, 114–19, 127, 171, 174, 238 n.120 Lauterpacht, Hersch, 110 Law on Foreigners, 111–12, 253 n.108 League for Civil Liberties (Bund für Bürgerrechte), 34, 197 n.92 League for the Rights of Man (Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, LDH), 19, 38 League of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen), 74, 75, 128. See also expellee lobby Leber, Annedore, 196 n.89 Leclerc, Annie, 146 left, the, 16, 68, 84, 97, 131, 139, 142–43, 162, 167, 168, 172, 173, 259 n.1 legal positivism, 48, 52 Lehmann, Ingeborg, 31, 39, 194 n.62 Lehmann-Russbueldt, Otto, 20, 28, 30–35, 38, 39, 42, 113, 174, 212 n.21 Leibholz, Gerhard, 209 n.83 Leithäuser, Joachim G., 212 n.20 Lenz, Ilse, 143, 163, 256 n.160 Lenz, Reimar, 73, 212 n.15, 216 n.50

268

Index

Leonhard, Wolfgang, 77, 78, 80, 81, 92, 218 n.72, 219 n.39 Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, Sabine, 227 n.168 Levin, Tobe, 137, 156, 159, 160, 244 n.28, 245 n.28, 256 n.160 Lex Oradour, 200 n.127 Lightfoot-Klein, Hanny, 145, 251 n.77 Loesch, Christian von, 106 Ludin, Hanns, 106 Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Policy and Interpersonal Relations (LudwigBoltzmann-Forschungsstelle für Politik und zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen), 154, 254 n.122 Lüth, Erich, 67, 134 Lüth v. Harlan, 67 Luther, Martin, 52, 115 Maack, Charlotte, 227 n.171 Magna Charta Gentium et Regionum, 188 n.33 Mahler, Horst, 98, 228 n.182 Mancini, Pasquale, 57, 204 n.12 Marcuse, Ludwig, 92, 93 Marsh, Norman, 81 Marx, Reinhard, 126 Masry, Youssef El, 144, 146 Masters, Virginia, 143 Matthäus-Maier, Ingrid, 227 n.168 Maunz, Theodor, 227 n.168 Meins, Holger, 97 Meissner, Boris, 229 n.2, 233 n.27 membership of human rights organizations, 92, 99, 228 n.182; women in Humanist Union, 96; women in West German Amnesty, 96; women members, 226 n.168 Menschenrechte, Die, 34–36. See also German League for Human Rights Menzel, Eberhard, 209 n.83 Meyer-Ranke, Peter, 244 n.23

Mies, Maria, 163, 256 n.160 Millett, Kate, 146 minorities, rights of, 12, 49, 102, 127, 130, 237 n.120. See also groups, rights of Misereor, 129 Mitscherlich, Alexander, 92 Moi, Daniel arap, 144 Möllendorf, Günther, 98 Morgan, Robin, 154 Mosler, Hermann, 61 Moyn, Samuel, 1, 99, 259 n.1 Ms., 251 n.77 Münch, Fritz, 121, 128, 238 n.127 multiculturalism, 12, 133 Munich Agreement, 56, 102, 120, 208 n.58, 230 n.5 Murswiek, Dietrich, 229 n.2, 239 n.143 Nabokov, Vladimir, 93 Narr, Wolf-Dieter, 214 n.35 National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, NPD), 238 n.127 National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP): and Nazism, 10, 13, 19, 20, 27, 31, 106, 121, 134, 151, 241 n.3; Austrian Nazi Party, 106; crimes of, 26; former members of, 22–25, 33–35, 38, 62, 65, 70, 74, 85, 89, 90, 93, 94, 121, 189 n.1, 216 n.49; Schutzstaffel (SS), 38, 39 natural law, 42, 48, 234 n. 42 “Nazi Justice Not Atoned For” (“Ungesühnte Nazijustiz”), 73 neocolonialism, 135, 153–57, 161, 162, 166 Neudeck, Rupert, 130, 139, 188 n.31 Neumann, Franz, 30, 196 n.80 New Fatherland League (Bund Neues Vaterland), 19, 196 n.82. See also German League for Human Rights Nottbeck, Berend von, 218 n.72, 219 n.79

Index Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals, 120, 233 n.34, 234 n.41; Nuremberg Charter, 54; Nuremberg trials, 27, 35, 70, 109. Oberländer, Theodor, 106, 232 n.18 Oehlschläger, Ernst, 29, 30 Oestreich, Paul, 29, 31 Oeter, Stefan, 239 n.143 Ohnesorg, Benno, 72 Ossietzky, Carl von, 20, 81; Carl von Ossietzky Medal, 67, 70, 81, 216 nn. 51, 59 Ostpolitik, 101, 228 n.1, 103; Eastern Treaties (Ostverträge), 102. See also détente Otto Suhr Institute, 70–71, 82 over-alienization (Überfremdung), 112, 118, 123 pacifism, 11, 18, 19, 23–25, 33, 35, 47, 64, 68, 142, 162, 168, 170 Paczensky, Gert von, 224 n.142 Paczensky, Susanne von, 243 n.16, 250 n.68 Pahlavi, Shah Reza, 72, 92 Pahlavi, Soraya, 92 Pähler, Antje, 165, 256 n.161 Panorama, 91, 224 n.142 Paragraph 129a, 258 n.170. See also terrorism Paragraph 175, 83, 86, 95. See also homophobia “The Past Admonishes Us” (“Die Vergangenheit mahnt”), 73, 215 n.44 patriarchy, 142, 147–51, 156, 159, 162, 252 nn. 97, 101; as anti-racist, 152 peace studies, 109, 113 PEN, West German, 220 n.92 Persicaner, Walter, 29, 31 Petite Espérance, La, 246 n.44 Poliakov, Léon, 72 Pölnitz, Götz von, 94

269

pornography, 93, 247 nn. 49, 53 Posser, Diether, 212 n.15 postcolonial humanitarianism, 134, 138–41, 152 Potsdam Agreement, 55, 120; Potsdam Conference, 26 Prantl, Heribert, 126 Preuss, Ulrich K., 74 prisoners, political: in East Germany, 78; women as, 153, 155 prisoners, rights of, 95 prisoners of war, 237 n.117; German, 8, 25, 36, 38, 45, 53, 54, 60 Rabl, Kurt, 121, 229 n.2, 238 n.122 racism, 135, 147, 148, 151, 158–62, 164, 258 n.175; ethnocentrism, 133, 135, 146–48, 154, 157, 160 RAND Corporation, 154 Raschhofer, Hermann, 105–6, 118, 121, 231 nn.15–16, 232 nn. 18, 24, 236 n.100 Red Army Faction, 88, 97, 226 nn.166–67, 227 n.176. See also terrorism Redslob, Edwin, 194 n.63 Red Zora (Rote Zora), 257 n.170. See also terrorism Refugee Convention (1951), 111, 120, 136, 138, 245 n.30 refugees, 76, 111, 117, 129, 172; East German, 35–37, 39–41, 171; rights of, 102, 105, 109–11, 120, 125; women, 163–64. See also German League for Human Rights Reger, Erik, 29, 196 n.89 Reichinger, Susanne, 163–65, 257 nn. 162, 170 Remer, Otto Ernst, 94, 225 n.156 Renan, Ernst, 149 Renner, Karl, 118, 205 n.23, 208 n.70 Research Council for Reunification Matters (Forschungsbeirat für Fragen der Wiedervereinigung), 202 n.143.

270

Index

resistance, right of, 94 Retzlaw, Karl, 36, 38 Reuter, Ernst, 32 Rexhausen, Felix, 76, 79, 80, 83–87, 92, 218 n.72 Rexin, Manfred, 73, 215 n.45 RIAS (Broadcasting in the American Sector, Rundfunk im Amerikanischen Sektor), 202 n.143 Ridder, Helmut, 81 Riedel, Eibe, 239 n.143 Roth, Claudia, 227 n.168 Roth, Roland, 214 n.35 Ruge, Gerd, 76, 78–81, 218 n.72 Rühle, Jürgen, 218 n.72, 219 n.79 Rühle, Sabine, 78, 218 n.72, 219 n.79 Russell Tribunal (1978), 214 n.35 Saadawi, Nawal El, 144, 250 n.65, 253 n.104 Saenger, Otto Maria, 24 St. Exupéry, Antoine de, 140 St. Paul’s Church Movement (Paulskirchenbewegung), 68 Salazar, António, 85, 90, 223 n.129 Salzborn, Samuel, 103, 230 n.6 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 139 Saurel, Renée, 251 n.80 Save Freedom Committee (Komitee “Rettet die Freiheit”), 202 n.152 Scelle, Georges, 120, 237 n.120 Schaefer, Jochen Klaus, 31–32, 37, 38, 41, 42, 202 n.144, 203 n.155 Scheel, Walter, 226 n.166 Scherhorn, Gerhard, 218 n.72 Schily, Otto, 96, 226 n.167 Schlaffer, Edit, 152–56, 245 n.31 Schlageter, Leo, 201 n.135 Schleyer, Hanns Martin, 97, 226 n.166 Schmidt, Linda, 87 Schmitt, Carl, 121 Schoenberner, Gerhard, 73, 74, 89 Schoeps, Hans-Joachim, 95, 226 n.158

Schönwälder, Karen, 103, 230 n.6 Schröder, Gerhard, 96 Schücking, Walther, 46, 51 Secret de leurs corps, Le, 159, 255 n.140 Seeliger, Rolf, 94 Seelman, Sigrid, 255 nn. 143, 147 Seifert, Jürgen, 92, 96 self-determination, right of, 8, 14, 46, 47, 49–50, 52, 55, 57, 60, 103, 116, 118, 122, 124, 128, 129, 210 n.86, 229 n.5 Sender, Toni, 196 n.89 Senghaas, Dieter, 113, 114 Sentinelles, 136, 137, 165, 241 n.3, 244 n.20, 246 nn. 36, 45 Senzig, Guido, 42 sex, 86; clitoris, 143, 147, 248 n.57; sex tourism, 132, 161, 163, 241 n.3, 248 n.53, 256 n.152; sexual autonomy, 142; sexual pleasure, 142–43; sexual rights, 19, 83–84, 86, 95; sexual self-determination, 142, 147; sexual violence, 142, 143, 161. See also Paragraph 175 Silgradt, Wolfgang, 41 Skriver, Ansgar, 73, 215 n.45 Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratisches Partei Deutschlands, SPD), 18, 19, 22, 23, 29–32, 34, 39, 47, 50, 62, 66, 68–70, 79, 82, 84–86, 89, 96, 196 n.80, 199 n.122, 215 nn. 45, 47, 227 n.168, 240 n.161; Bad Godesberg Program, 68–70; Berlin SPD, 29–31, 34, 195 n.69; Grand Coalition (Grosse Koalition), 86, 96 Socialist German Students’ Union (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, SDS), 69, 74, 211 n.8 Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED), 29, 30, 31, 68, 78, 82, 83, 170

Index Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation (Gesellschaften für christlich-jüdische Zusammenarbeit), 193 n.52, 197 n.92 Society for the Protection of Civil Liberty and Human Dignity (Gesellschaft zum Schutz von Bürgerrecht und Menschenwürde), 15 Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker), 11–15, 130, 131, 139, 165–67, 188 n.34, 240 n.156, 260 n.6 Sommer, Theo, 81 space (Raum), 106, 118–19, 121, 232 n.21, 236 n.103 Spiegel Affair, 80–81, 92, 97, 217 n.63 Staehle, Ingrid, 135–38, 147, 148, 151, 157–60, 173, 242 n.8, 243 n.17, 245 n.30, 257 n.167 Stasi (Ministry of State Security, Ministerium für Staatssicherheit), 15, 40–43, 75, 82, 83, 86, 221 n.101, 259 n.2. See also espionage state of emergency legislation (Notstandsgesetzgebung), 95–96, 224 n.142 state sovereignty, 6, 14, 47, 49, 52, 55, 56, 109, 113, 139 Stauffenberg, Claus, 94 Stepun, Fedor, 237 n.113 Stern, Carola, 62, 66, 67, 70, 71, 76, 78–83, 96, 174, 218 n.72, 222 n.118 Stöcker, Jakob, 24 Stödter, Rolf, 209 n.83 Stolle, Christa, 164, 165, 257 n.170 Strauss, Franz Josef, 69, 80 Strecker, Reinhard, 73, 94, 215 n.47 Strobl, Ingrid, 257 n.170 student movement, 71, 72, 75, 88, 98–99 Sudeten German Academy of Arts and Sciences (Sudetendeutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste), 106–7

271

Sudeten German Homeland Society (Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft), 107, 130 Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei), 106, 238 n.122 Sudetenland and Sudeten Germans, 47, 50, 55–58, 104, 105, 110, 119, 123, 124, 207 n.57, 230 n.5, 237 nn. 107, 113; vs. Bohemian Germans, 207 n.57 Sürücü, Hatun, 249 n.63 Survival International, 240 n.156 Szczesny, Gerhard, 88–92, 212 n.17, 224 n.142 tageszeitung, 134 Task Force for the Effective Prevention of Genital Mutilation (Task Force zur effektiven Prävention von Genitalverstümmelung), 255 n.145 Teegen, Friederike, 255 nn. 143, 147 Tekin, Ayşe, 126 Terre des Femmes, 12, 14–15, 125, 127, 132–66, 172–74, 260 n.6 Terre des Hommes, 137, 140, 141, 246 n.36, 251 n.77 terrorism, 96, 172, 226 n.166, 257 n.170. See also Paragraph 129a; Red Army Faction; Red Zora Thiam, Awa, 144, 158–59, 259 n.160 Third World, 11, 152, 153, 155, 156, 256 n.152; solidarity movement, 134, 135, 138, 153, 157, 161–64, 256 nn. 156, 158; tiersmondisme, 153, 254 n.115; women in, 153, 155, 158, 160–63 Third World Action (Aktion Dritte Welt), 163, 257 n.163 Third World Information Center (Informationszentrum Dritte Welt), 163, 257 n.163 Tibi, Bassam, 126 Tomuschat, Christian, 127–29

272

Index

Übelacker, Horst Rudolf, 232 n.24 Ulbricht, Walter, 220 n.97 Ulm Special Task Force Commando (Einsatzkommando) Trial, 74 unconditional surrender, 8 Union of Victims of Stalinism (Verein der Opfer des Stalinismus), 199 n.120, 202 n.152 United Nations, 5, 6, 71, 74, 108, 111, 114, 115, 120, 128, 129, 136, 137, 140, 141, 155, 167, 191 n.20, 213 n.22, 229 n.5, 243 n.19, 244 n.28; Charter, 23, 54, 208 n.59, 210 n.86; Conference for Women (1975, Mexico City), 142; Conference for Women (1980, Copenhagen), 145; Conference for Women (1985, Nairobi), 145; Conference on Human Rights (Vienna), 166; Decade for Women (1975–85), 142; Division of Human Rights, 140; High Commissioner for Refugees, 136; Human Rights Commission, 127, 239 n.145; Human Rights Committee, 128, 239 n.145; Office on Drugs and Crime, 256 n.161; Year of the Child (1979), 243 n.19; Year of the Woman (1975), 146 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), 9, 36, 57, 58, 74, 110, 116, 118, 169, 190 n.20, 213 n.22 usages of the language of human rights, four, 7–13, 15, 17, 35, 45–46, 102, 167, 171, 194; anti-communist, 10–11, 14, 35–43, 170–71; critical examination of the Nazi past, 7, 9, 17–44, 63–100, 121, 124, 171, 172, 216 n.60; on behalf of expellees, 8–10, 12, 45–62, 101–31, 171; on behalf of foreigners, 11, 13, 14, 16, 102, 125–26, 129–31, 132–66, 172 Vack, Klaus, 214 n.35 veiling, 148, 153, 154

Veiter, Theodor, 118, 121, 122, 128, 229 n.2 Vietnam War, 11, 98, 173 Villa Courage, 164 völkisch, 103, 105, 117, 118, 121, 124, 230 n.6 Volksgruppe, 117–18, 122–23, 237 n.106 Volksgruppenrecht, 8, 14, 101, 103, 106, 117, 118, 121–23, 125, 127, 128, 130, 188 n.33, 230 n.6, 238 n.122, 240 n.161 Walker, Alice, 145, 251 n.77 Wallraff, Günter, 151 Walser, Martin, 89 Wandschneider, Hajo, 217 n.63 Wandschneider, Helga, 217 n.63 Wedel, Emil von, 23, 34, 38, 42 Wehberg, Hans, 46, 51 Welter, Friedrich, 23, 28 West German Amnesty, 11, 14, 15, 62, 64–66, 70, 72, 76–89, 96–100, 102, 124–26, 139, 166, 167, 172, 173, 212 n.15, 213 n.32, 227 n.171, 257 n.170. See also Amnesty International West German Broadcasting (Westdeutscher Rundfunk, WDR), 79, 81, 83, 85, 215 n.45 Wichterich, Christa, 163, 256 n.160 Witiko League (Witikobund), 107, 123, 232 n.24, 237 n.106 Witsch, Joseph Caspar, 79, 82 Wolf, Markus, 42 Wolf-Almanasreh, Rosi, 150–51, 228 n.178, 253 n.107 Wolff, Jeanette, 31 women, 14, 72, 131, 132; human rights of, 95, 131, 135, 243 n.19; human rights violations against, 132; KurdishGerman, 249 n.63; in Middle East, 136; trafficking of, 132, 163, 164, 256 n.152; workers, exploitation of, 132, 142, 163–64. See also membership of human rights organizations; United Nations

Index Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Internationale Frauenliga für Frieden und Freiheit), 19 Women’s International Network (WIN), 145, 251 n.74 Women’s Week (Frauenwoche): in Bremen, 165; in Hamburg, 255 n.143 Women without Borders, 154, 254 n.122 “work on own country” (WOOC) rule, 97, 218 n.75, 259 n.5. See also Amnesty International World Health Organization (WHO), 136, 140–41, 145, 243 n.19, 244 nn. 20, 28 World Refugee Year, 109 Wulf, Joseph, 72

273

Zöger, Heinz, 82, 220 n.95 zones of occupation, Allied: British Military Government, 51; British zone of occupation, 28; French zone of occupation, 190 n.16; Soviet zone of occupation, 22, 29, 31, 65, 82, 190 n.16; U.S. High Commissioner for Occupied Germany (HICOG), 18, 34; U.S. Military Government (OMGUS), 18, 23, 28, 30, 32–34, 39; U.S. zone of occupation, 193 n.52. See also Allies Zülch, Tilman, 12, 139, 240 n.156 Zwang, Gérard, 146, 252 n.86

Acknowledgments

Why not say the most important thing first: I owe the most to my family. Thanks for putting up with me! I began thinking about this project in the late 1990s, while completing a book on pro-colonial women in imperial Germany. I wanted to research the West German era, the Germany I had personally encountered in the 1970s and 1980s. I also wanted to shift my attention to people with whom I could happily spend some years: articulate intellectuals who would not be as politically distant from me as those colonialists were. I have been richly rewarded with a project that has taught me much more than could be contained in this book and also supported a seminar, “The History of Human Rights,” that has drawn some of my very best students. I have also been fortunate to receive generous institutional support. The German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, DAAD) supported a semester of research in Germany at the outset. Texas A&M University’s Center for Humanities Research and Rice University’s Humanities Research Center each gave me a semester free of teaching duties to immerse myself in drafting portions of this book. I was able to complete the first chapter after a visit to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland that was supported by the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. Finally, the German Historical Institute together with Cologne University allowed me put it all together in 2009 with the generous Thyssen-Heideking Fellowship. I could not have had a host with more grace and humor than Finzsch, and I am glad to be able to show him the results of his hospitality.

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Acknowledgments

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Jan Eckel, Samuel Moyn, Eva Bischoff, Elisabeth Engel, Anna Holian, my colleague Daniel Cohen at Rice, and the German Studies Association were instrumental in helping me bring my research to the public with their conferences and publications. Anke Finger, Johannes Altgeld, Karen Engle, and the Department of History at the University of Kentucky also arranged talks that moved me forward. Bob Moeller and Ute Poiger have helped me with grant applications, and Isabel Hull and Jean Quataert have each come to Rice University and offered incisive comments. I am grateful for their time and even more grateful for their own scholarly work. Carl Caldwell has read and commented on texts from this project so many times over the years, and I always learn from him. After twenty years of living together, our scholarly paths are starting to converge! While I was carrying out research in Germany, some individuals were generous with their deep knowledge and spoke to me about this project: Carola Stern, Wolfgang S. Heinz, Michael Stolleis, Hans Baade, Christa Stolle and Irene Jung at Terre des Femmes, Mathias Beer, Harriet Lyons, Werner Renz of the Fritz Bauer Institute, and Tobias Baur, Ingeborg Rürup, and Norbert Reichling at the Humanist Union. The Terre des Femmes archivist Ute Binder went above and beyond, as did Herr Frank at the Stasi archive (Behörde für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik). It was a special pleasure to become acquainted with Marion and Detlev Thimm in Berlin. I owe a special debt to Gerd Goetze, without whom I never could have figured out the complicated story of his father. I am so grateful that he was brave and generous enough to allow me to keep digging. Kenneth Cmiel offered great encouragement to me in 2001, when I was carrying out my first archival research. During my stay in Berlin that year, at a Humanist Union event, I met Werner (Tom) Angress and enjoyed conversations with him. Soon after, I corresponded with Hermann-Josef Rupieper, who generously offered me a hard-to-find source. All three of these historian colleagues have since died, and I just want to note here that yet another person misses their wisdom. Linda Schmidt, Rainer Biskup, and Stephan Alexander Glienke gave me copies of their own scholarly work that would otherwise have been inaccessible to me right when I needed it. Rande Kostal sent me primary sources. My colleagues Martin Wiener and Daniel Cohen at Rice have helped me in various ways, as has the Feminist Research Group at Rice’s Center for the Study

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of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. I thank Andrew Deas for his research assistance. None of these people are responsible in any way for my arguments in this book; most of them had no idea what I was up to, but were nevertheless patient and generous with me. I thank the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, for permission to quote from the Kurt R. Grossmann Collection, AR 25032. I thank the University of Chicago Press for permission to use in Chapter 1 material that appeared, in slightly different form, as “Human Rights Activism in Occupied and Early West Germany: The Case of the German League for Human Rights,” Journal of Modern History 80, no. 3 (September 2008): 515-56, © by The University of Chicago, all rights reserved. I thank Wallstein Verlag and Cambridge University Press for permission to use material for Chapter 2 that appeared, in slightly different form, in their publications. This material appeared as an essay published simultaneously in German and English. The German version is “Rudolf Laun und die Menschenrechte der Deutschen im besetzten Deutschland und in der frühen Bundesrepublik,” in Moralpolitik: Geschichte der Menschenrechte im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010), vol. 1 of the series Geschichte der Gegenwart, ed. Martin Sabrow, 11541, copyright © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2010, reprinted with permission. The English version is “Rudolf Laun and the Human Rights of Germans in Occupied and Early West Germany,” in A History of Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 125-44, copyright © 2011 Cambridge University Press, reprinted with permission.