Lora Wildenthal

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

Human rights are formulated as universal, abstract principles. Those who wish to wield those principles, however, must fill them with specific content while preserving the power of that universalism. The history of putting human rights ideas into practice is therefore not universal at all, but rather a set of specific, contextual stories. This article analyzes how some Germans—returned emigres as well as those who remained in Nazi Germany—used the language of human rights in the years immediately after the defeat of Nazism. While Nazi Germany usually appears in human rights histories as a spur to the creation of postwar human rights regimes, the story of how Nazi Germany’s heirs themselves participated in that process is just beginning to be told.1 How human rights principles are mobilized is a controversial matter, and indeed in the years after 1945 controversy and intrigue enveloped the German League for Human Rights (Deutsche Liga fur Menschenrechte, now known as the International League for Human Rights, Internationale Liga fur Menschenrechte). Unlike other human rights organizations in West Germany’s early years, which focused on domestic issues and were often inspired and funded by the U.S. Military Government (1945–49) or the civilian High

’When Men Are Weak‘: The Imperial Feminism of Frieda von Bülow

Frieda von Bulow was a colonialist woman author and activist who also engaged the bourgeois womens movement of pre-First World War Germany. She is of interest to scholars of German colonialism, racial thought, feminism, and womens literature. This article interprets her life experiences, including travel to German East Africa (mainland Tanzania) and her affair with Carl Peters, together with her feminist non-fiction and anti-feminist fiction, to argue that she developed an imperial feminism in which German womens emancipation was predicated on the subordination of racialised ‘others’.

Imagining Threatened Peoples: The Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker) in 1970s West Germany

The creation of Biafra in 1967 and the ensuing Nigerian Civil War sparked a remarkable movement in West Germany for solidarity with Biafra. In 1970, however, the Nigerian Civil War ended with the defeat of secessionist Biafra. At that point, some of those West German activists reorganized. They changed the name of their group from Biafra Aid Campaign (Aktion Biafrahilfe) to the Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker). Over the 1970s, they developed into one of Germany’s most innovative and important human rights nongovernmental organizations. While still concerned about Biafrans in and out of Nigeria, they widened their focus to a range of cases they identified as “threatened peoples.” As part of that process, they brought about several shifts in how human rights were imagined in 1970s West Germany: toward group rights, toward a critique of the West German Left, and toward imagining German and nonGerman victims of human rights violations in the same framework. This last shift was highly unusual in the context of West German human rights activism, and has remained controversial.

The Perception of Suffering: On Patricia Skinner's "The Gendered Nose"

P Skinner pursues multiple threads of argument in her article on “The Gendered Nose.” Can the medieval era inform us about our own era? What does it mean to say that a phenomenon taking place in the present day is a “medieval” one? What did mutilation of the nose signify in the medieval era, and has that signification persisted up to the present day? Does it carry gender-specific meaning, and to what extent have its victims been women? Skinner’s main conclusion is that there is a connection between the nose and honor: “patriarchal values of honor and authority...have persisted across centuries and rely upon recognizable signifiers. Most visible of these, and the most permanent, is the damaged face.” Speaking of her folktale material, she notes: “women who transgressed deserved a permanent and disfiguring sign on their faces, and it seems that this sign transcended geographical and temporal boundaries.” She concludes that “It may seem that the gulf between ‘medieval,’ ‘traditional,’ and ‘modern’ is too wide to bridge, but the rhetoric of patriarchal control implied and expressed in extreme violence targeted at women’s faces, whether threatened in laws of the past or carried out in practice of the present, has an all-too-depressing continuity.” It is interesting that the information Skinner has assembled about the history of nose mutilation in Europe and Asia indicates that it does not have a consistent linkage to women, or even sexuality, even as we do see the linkage to honor and loyalty. As she summarizes:

The Surplus Woman. Unmarried in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918

food store and distributing the loot to immigrant suburbs are compared with Robin Hood. To be sure, Wolin is quick to denounce arguments for violence, especially. His esteem for social mobilization and political protest, though, seems new. The book’s two voices – vintage Wolin criticism and new-found regard for social action – do justice to the ambiguity of ‘the ’68 years’ and the phenomenon of Maoism in particular, but they also reflect a certain ambivalence. It is true that the ‘spirit of ’68’ was in part a spirit of associational democracy. But the centrality of Maoist cultural revolution is less sure. The more general anti-authoritarian and antinomian ethos of the moment may have had priority because that ethos turned French Maoism in the directions it took. Perhaps Maoism was more incidental and occasional than integral and causal. Wolin is right that 1968-era cultural politics did lead to real institutional and legal reforms, and they helped to enlarge the scope of autonomy for certain people in the West. But they also helped to replace the project of social democracy with depoliticized searches for cultural meaning that are highly individualistic. Rights-bearing subjects of the marketplace also now speak the 1968 language of ‘authenticity and self-realization’ (358). The differences between associational democracy and liberalism thus might be more difficult to draw than one would like. Associational democracy is not always progressive (witness the Tea Parties in the United States), and cultural politics minus solidaristic social action can indeed lead to bowling alone.

Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (review)

and survivors. The subsequent section on human rights trials succinctly, but comprehensively, introduces different types of trials (domestic, foreign, and international) and the interconnections between them. Specifically, Cardenas shows how domestic barriers to human rights trials, like amnesty laws, trigger foreign and international trials creating a transnational, interactive politics of justice. Cardenas ends this chapter on accountability by complicating the desire for accountability. She highlights the high political stakes involved in domestic and international debates about order and justice and the priority between them. Using the English translation of the title of the Argentine truth commission report, Nunca Mas (Never Again), for her final chapter, Cardenas reminds her reader that while there have been advancements in the realization of human rights in Latin America, there also have been setbacks including repetitions of abuse. Cardenas argues that “Never Again” remains a partially fulfilled, yet partially unfulfilled, hope for Latin American societies. Many states in the region have achieved remarkable human rights reform but remain vulnerable to complex domestic sources of instability and weak democratic and legal institutions that permit impunity. Cardenas writes that “the history of human rights in Latin America is one of alternating terror and hope.”7 The region has been characterized by horrific abuses and “has been a model of human rights activism and progress.”8 Like the experience of human rights in Latin America which it details, Cardenas’ text is rich and complex. Human Rights in Latin America: A Politics of Terror and Hope is a unique and engaging approach to the study of human rights in Latin America. It is a text that demands serious attention.

Review of Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic

Freedom Is Not Enough wants to put the ‘Jobs’ back into the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. According to MacLean, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned employment discrimination, deserves a place next to Brown in terms of its political and social significance. Just as Brown legitimated black demands to eliminate separate, unequal, and inferior schools, Title VII emboldened blacks and others to challenge employment discrimination that relegated them to separate, unequal, and inferior jobs. But Brown’s progress was stalled as schools remained almost as segregated as before the landmark Supreme Court decision, while Title VII’s impact has opened up the American workplace in ways that were unimaginable fifty years ago. Prior to that, there were precious few black police officers or female professors. Today, their presence is familiar and normal to us. And, like Brown, Title VII produced a backlash. But this went much deeper, giving rise to a resurgent conservatism according to MacLean, because Title VII’s success was that much greater. Freedom Is Not Enough is grounded in archival work. But, unlike some historical work that is deeply sourced, MacLean is not content to tell a small story. To the contrary, she is ambitious and far-reaching, describing the origins of affirmative action, how women and other groups took advantage of the legal opening that civil rights groups had created, and how conservatives appropriated the