Tells the story of the struggle to imagine new forms of justice after Nuremberg.
-
Front Matter Front Matter (pp. i-iv) -
Table of Contents Table of Contents (pp. v-vi) -
Acknowledgements Acknowledgements (pp. vii-viii) -
Illustrations Illustrations (pp. ix-xii) -
Introduction Gathering Ashes: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of Trauma Introduction Gathering Ashes: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of Trauma (pp. 1-20)Witness to the first convulsions of the Nazi occupation of Europe in Czechoslovakia, journalist Mary Douglas, in Martha Gellhorn’s extraordinarily prescient 1940 novel, A Stricken Field, imagines a future justice: a terrible justice, she thinks it will have to be, to avenge all this senseless, needless suffering. But even as the demand for justice lies everywhere around her – in the arbitrary arrests, capricious violence, lines of desperate refugees, and lost and starving children that the novel describes with such immediacy – Mary has doubts. What if we take so long to understand the nature of this crime that it simply keeps...
-
Part I: Writing After Nuremberg -
Chapter 1 ‘An event that did not become an experience’: Rebecca West’s Nuremberg Chapter 1 ‘An event that did not become an experience’: Rebecca West’s Nuremberg (pp. 23-46)Madeleine Jacob races down the corridors of the villa in the gardens of the Schloss, her black and white hair flying, tatty espadrilles flapping on the marble floor. She should not be here, this clever, haggard, Jewish woman correspondent, any more than the other women writers crowded into the villa’s rooms. The women who once lived there, wrote Rebecca West, also staying in the villa while she covered the Nuremberg trial for the London Telegraph and the New Yorker, ‘would have refused to believe that these ink-stained gipsies had earned the right to camp in their stronghold because they had...
-
Chapter 2 The Man in the Glass Booth: Hannah Arendt’s Irony Chapter 2 The Man in the Glass Booth: Hannah Arendt’s Irony (pp. 47-72)In one of the opening sequences of Rony Brauman and Eyal Sivan’s film, The Specialist (1999), cut from original documentary footage from his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann can be seen diligently cleaning his glasses. Finished, he brings them to his nose and then pauses; he has forgotten that he is already wearing a pair. If Eichmann cannot see out of his booth for multiple planes of glass, neither can the viewer get a clear look at him. Throughout the film, reflected back at us from the glass are the faces of the trial’s audience in Jerusalem, many of...
-
Chapter 3 Fiction in Jerusalem: Muriel Spark’s Idiom of Judgement Chapter 3 Fiction in Jerusalem: Muriel Spark’s Idiom of Judgement (pp. 73-98)Hannah Arendt and Muriel Spark missed each other by just one day in Jerusalem in the June of 1961. Spark attended the Eichmann trial between 26 and 28 June for the Observer newspaper. No reports for the paper seem to have appeared. Instead, Spark was to place the trial at the ‘desperate heart’ of her most historically ambitious and aesthetically awkward novel, The Mandelbaum Gate (1965). The first four chapters of the novel were published in instalments in the New Yorker in 1965. Codas to Arendt’s reports on the trial published in the magazine four years earlier, like Eichmann in...
-
-
Part II: Territorial Rights -
Chapter 4 ‘We Refugees’: Hannah Arendt and the Perplexities of Human Rights Chapter 4 ‘We Refugees’: Hannah Arendt and the Perplexities of Human Rights (pp. 101-117)Even as Virginia Woolf controversially declared herself detached from her country on the grounds of her sex, a cosmopolitanism that, since Kant, had dreamt of a universal humanity framed by a global understanding of rights was confronted with the calamity of the radically stateless. Barely three years after the publication of Woolf’s polemic, Arthur Koestler published his memoir of his wartime internment and eventual escape to Britain, The Scum of the Earth (1941). Koestler had been in the South of France writing his classic novel on the Soviet show trials of the 1930s, Darkness at Noon (1940). When he moved...
-
Chapter 5 ‘Creatures of an Impossible Time’: Late Modernism, Human Rights and Elizabeth Bowen Chapter 5 ‘Creatures of an Impossible Time’: Late Modernism, Human Rights and Elizabeth Bowen (pp. 118-140)At almost the exact same time as Rebecca West attended the Nuremberg trial, Elizabeth Bowen travelled from Ireland to France to report on the Paris Peace Conference for the Cork Examiner. The conference took place amid the tired splendour of the Luxembourg Palace between 29 July and 15 October 1946, and like Nuremberg, was intended to restore some kind of lawfulness to postwar Europe. Borders between Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and France were redefined; Italy, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland resumed sovereign state status; reparations were agreed and, after a late amendment, the signatories of the five...
-
Chapter 6 The ‘Dark Background of Difference’: Love and the Refugee in Iris Murdoch Chapter 6 The ‘Dark Background of Difference’: Love and the Refugee in Iris Murdoch (pp. 141-165)I want to start with two experiences that came out of working in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) camps in the aftermath of the war.³ The first is from Gitta Sereny’s account of the trauma of repatriating children who had been stolen by the Nazis as part of the ‘Germanisation’ programme. Sereny had discovered Polish twins living with a German farming family. She later runs into them in a transit camp, awaiting their return to Poland. The boy flies at Sereny in a rage: ‘Du, Du, Du,’ he cries and hits out at her. The girl is...
-
-
Bibliography Bibliography (pp. 166-172) -
Index Index (pp. 173-180)