Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann

Human Rights in the Twentieth Century

Has there always been an inalienable “right to have rights” as part of the human condition, as Hannah Arendt famously argued? The contributions to this volume examine how human rights came to define the bounds of universal morality in the course of the political crises and conflicts of the twentieth century. Although human rights are often viewed as a selfevident outcome of this history, the essays collected here make clear that human rights are a relatively recent invention that emerged in contingent and contradictory ways. Focusing on specific instances of their assertion or violation during the past century, this volume analyzes the place of human rights in various arenas of global politics, providing an alternative framework for understanding the political and legal dilemmas that these conflicts presented. In doing so, this volume captures the state of the art in a field that historians have only recently begun to explore.

Democracy and Associations in the Long Nineteenth Century: Toward a Transnational Perspective*

It is ironic that a French aristocrat wrote one of the canonical texts of American democracy. Even today, American liberals and conservatives rely on Alexis de Tocqueville’s travelogue, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, to support their arguments. Sociologists and political scientists also assume that Tocqueville’s insights, including his conviction that voluntary associations are the bedrock of American democracy, are still relevant today. Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans participated in countless associations, thereby breathing life into their democracy. This kind of civic activity was fundamentally different from what he observed in continental Europe. Echoing the connection Tocqueville made between associations and democracy, the political scientist Robert Putnam was alarmed by the initial findings of the empirical research he published in his 1995 Journal of Democracy article “Bowling Alone.” He found that although there were more American bowlers than ever before, fewer and fewer belonged to bowling leagues. Membership in associations as varied as the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, and the Freemasons had also sunk dramatically in the previous forty years, as had participation in local civic life. Only national organizations like the American Association of Retired Persons, which merely promote special interests and offer no sociability, continued to flourish.1 Americans no longer go bowling together: they watch television, surf the Internet, and are represented by or-

Civility, Male Friendship, and Masonic Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Largely neglected by historians who assume that its heyday passed in Europe with the demise of the Old Regime, Freemasonry in fact became a mass phenomenon among German (and French as well as American) middle-class men in the nineteenth century. Masonic secrecy made possible a form of sociability which allowed men to experience intimate relations with each other. Within the lodge, men could experience the emotional drama of the rituals while, both in public and in the family, men increasingly sought to comply with the ideal of a man ruled by reason. Masonic rituals entailed the implicit message that the most important presupposition for civility, moral improvement and a ‘brotherhood of all men’ was male friendship.

Gazing at Ruins: German Defeat as Visual Experience

Gazing at Ruins: German Defeat as Visual Experience This essay explores documentary photography and, by way of comparison, diarywriting as the most common social practices for registering experiences of German defeat in 1945. Berlin witnessed one of the last gruesome battles of the war in Europe and the only one – with the exceptions of Stalingrad and Warsaw – where a major city became a battle-field. Soviet and German troops suffered more than 240.000 casualties in the space of only three weeks. More German civilians died during these last weeks of the war than during the entire bombing campaign against the city. The shattered capital of the Nazi empire was a war trophy for the Allies and subsequently became the social laboratory for the post-war international order. By moving beyond an exploration of visual propaganda, the main claim is that visual experiences in the wake of war constituted distinctive ways of making sense of defeat, destruction, and desolation. Finally, the paper will investigate how different modes of the photographic gaze at ruins shaped the «politics of pity» in the early cold-war years.

Seeking Peace in the Wake of War

The Editors[-]Introduction: Seeking Peace in the Wake of War. Europe 1943-1947[-][-][-]Section 1: In the Wake of War[-][-]Marcin Zaremba [-]The War Syndrome: World War II and Polish Society[-][-]Stefan Ludwig Hoffmann[-]Germans into Allies. Writing a Diary in 1945[-][-]Olivier Wieviorka, Gabriella Gribaudi, Julie le Gac [-]Two Paths to the Same End? The Challenges of the Liberation in France and Italy[-][-]Peter Romijn[-]Liberators and Patriots: Military Interim Rule and the Politics of Transition in the Netherlands, 1944-1945[-][-][-]Section 2: Reordering communities[-][-]Juliette Denis[-]The Latvian Orphans Released from the Siberian Special Settlements (1946-1947): The Story of an Unusual Rescue in the Post-War USSR[-][-]Matej Spurny[-]Migration and Cleansing: Building a New Society in the Czech Borderlands after 1945[-][-]Audrey Kichelewski [-]To Stay or to Go? Reconfigurations of Jewish Life in Post-War Poland, 1944-1947[-][-]Masha Cerovic [-]Fighters Like No Others: The Soviet Partisans in the Wake of War[-][-][-]Section 3: Organizing the Peace [-][-]Sabine Dullin [-]How the Soviet Empire Relied on Diversity: Territorial Expansion and National Borders at the End of World War II in Ruthenia [-][-]Dirk Luyten[-]Social Security and the end of the Second World War in France, the Netherlands and Belgium: Social Peace, Organizational Power and the State[-][-]Polymeris Voglis [-]The Politics of Reconstruction: Foreign Aid and State Authority in Greece, 1945-1947[-][-]Sandrine Kott[-]Organizing World Peace: The ILO from the Second World War to the Cold War[-][-]Philip Nord [-]Conclusion [-]

Geschichte der Menschenrechte

Die Suche nach einem Aquivalent neuzeitlicher Menschenrechte in der griechisch-romischen Antike wirkt zunachst wie ein Anachronismus. Weder existierte im Altertum ein prazises Aquivalent fur den Ausdruck ›Menschenrechte‹, noch gibt es einschlagige theoretische Reflexionen bei einem der Philosophen, noch finden wir eine politisch-soziale Bewegung, die sich der Idee der Menschenrechte verschrieben hatte. So wurde etwa ein Abolitionismus, also die Forderung nach grundsatzlicher Abschaffung der Sklaverei, in der Antike weder philosophisch noch politisch je vertreten, nicht einmal von aufstandischen Sklaven (Welwei 2005, 81). Menschenrechtskataloge liegen uns aus dem Altertum weder im Sinn von Abwehrrechten gegen den Staat vor noch von politischen Teilnahmerechten noch von Sozialrechten. Immerhin lasst sich eine Belegstelle bei Marcus Tullius Cicero angeben, die unserem Ausdruck ›Menschenrechte‹ bemerkenswert nahe zu kommen scheint.