Judging the Past in Unified Germany (review)

Published within a dozen years of the collapse of the German Democratic Republic ( GDR ), McAdams' assessment of Germany's moral, political, and legal Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or reckoning with the past, of its second dictatorship is doubly remarkable: Within such a relatively short timespan, not only has Germany, as McAdams convincingly argues, brought this painful and painstaking process surprisingly close to a successful resolution, but McAdams has found the necessary scholarly distance to assess Germany's judgment of its past.

Based largely on primary and secondary German documents, including numerous court decisions and commentaries, as well as on interviews with political, legal, and administrative personnel involved in the process, McAdams' book untangles the legal, philosophical, and political pitfalls plaguing a pursuit of retrospective justice. Indeed, only a multidisciplinary perspective allows McAdams to evaluate a process that must respond to the moral claims of a fallen dictatorship's victims while respecting the norms of the rule of law and contributing to the reconstruction of the political community. Whereas other postcommunist societies resisted or avoided confronting their compromised immediate pasts, Germany, because of the particular dynamics of unification and because of its not entirely resolved eastern and western reckonings with the Nazi past, plunged immediately into a multifaceted Vergangenheits- bewältigung, launching criminal prosecutions against human-rights violators, disqualification procedures for secret-police collaborators, parliamentary investigations into the depths of dictatorship, and mechanisms for restitution or compensation for confiscated property.

McAdams devotes a chapter to each of these processes, carefully dissecting the political dividing lines, the competing legal arguments and references, and the often incommensurable moral claims particular to each form of retrospective justice. In each case, McAdams shows that German judges, politicians, officials, and—unfortunately, to a lesser extent—media and public opinion rapidly came to a differentiated understanding of how to judge, punish, and compensate the past. For example, in criminal prosecutions of both border guards and politburo members for shooting GDR citizens fleeing at the Berlin Wall, judges and prosecutors quickly abandoned appeals to higher moral principle. Instead, they judged perpetrators on the basis of existing GDR statutes, as well as on more complex moral evaluations of how far ordinary citizens, soldiers, or higher party officials had to compromise themselves in the face of the unjust demands of an imposed dictatorship. In the case of property restitutions, which in the early 1990s seemed insurmountable but have since been largely resolved, the task of setting legal standards was complicated by confiscations or contested property transfers that occurred arbitrarily or under Nazi law, Soviet military authority, GDR policies of varying legality, or even lawfully with compensation but under duress.

McAdams addresses such complex issues with the precision of a legal scholar, the sensitivity of a moral philosopher, and the realism of a political scientist. As a brilliant overview and synthesis of the past decade's debates about the communist past in Germany, his book will be of interest to any scholar interested in issues of postauthoritarian justice, of reconstructing democratic societies after communist dictatorship, and ofcontemporary German history.