Thema

Louise du Toit: Feminismus und die Ethik der Versöhnung

(Summary: The failure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to do justice to women rape victims was not a simple oversight but is constitutive of the patriarchal political and symbolic order dominating the South African political landscape. Through its failure to create the vocabulary and space within which rape could be addressed as a political issue in its own right, the TRC entrenched a single-sex model of politics in which masculine agency and victimhood still pose as the universal. In South Africa, as in other societies that model themselves on the idea of a »liberal democracy«, there seems to be no space for truly sexually differentiated politics and symbolic order.)

Fatima Kastner: Weder Wahrheit noch Recht. Zur Funktion von Wahrheitskommissionen in der Weltgesellschaft

(Summary: Sixty years after the Nuremberg Military Tribunal handed down its decisions, the creation of the International Criminal Court has institutionalized the legal and procedural foundation for a global criminal order and with it the prerequisite for bringing individual perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity to trial. This contribution examines why a fundamentally different model for dealing with the impacts of such crimes - that of the truth commission - has developed parallel to national and international criminal jurisdictions. Drawing on systems theory’s concept of communication, the text argues that, instead of perceiving truth and reconciliation commissions as alternatives to judicial forms of dealing with a violent past or interpreting them with the categories of reconciliation as a social process, they can best be comprehended as instruments that create identity in societies in transition.)

Literaturbeilage
Bernd Greiner: Zwischenbilanzen zum Kalten Krieg

Aufsätze

Christian Schneider: Trauma und Zeugenschaft. Probleme des erinnernden Umgangs mit Gewaltgeschichte

(Summary: Given the advanced age of those Holocaust survivors still alive today, the significance of »first-person« testimony about the traumatic violence perpetrated by Nazi Germany’s apparatus of extermination is an issue that warrants reconsideration. Beginning with a discussion of the term »witness«, this contribution demonstrates that concepts such as that of the »secondary witness« are problematic in so far as they attempt to conjure away the unavoidable transition from communicative memory to cultural memory. In keeping with the logic of initiation processes prevalent in »cold cultures«, members of subsequent generations become secondary witnesses and, as »insiders«,are expected to perpetuate the victims’ moral message. Historicization of Nazi Germany’s violent regime is replaced by a process in which testimony and witnessing are mysticized as a genealogy of the victims; this tendency threatens the future of remembrance.)

Klaus Naumann: Was sind wir dem Staat schuldig? Staatsbürgerlichkeit und das Problem militärischer Obligationen

(Summary: This contribution discusses the problem of compulsory military service from the perspective of desirable or inappropriate obligations for citizens. Starting point is a reconstruction of the rather ambitious demands implied in the idea of citizenship that was inherent in the original concept of West Germany’s post-1945 draft army. In the face of the Bundeswehr’s transition to an »expeditionary army«, these guidelines must be re-scrutinized. This assessment reveals that abandoning compulsory military service is by no means a logical or necessary implication of this ongoing shift. Any continuation, modification, or even a conceivable extension of obligatory »social« service in the civil and/or military realm, however, must be justified with fundamentally new arguments. The proposal outlined here suggests replacing the current liberal model of socio-moral integration with a republican concept of civil obligations.)

Aus der Protest-Chronik von Wolfgang Kraushaar