Human Rights and Memory

5. From Minority to Human: The Changing Face of Rights

5 from minority to human: the changing face of rights cosmopolitanism and the spirit of europe This chapter addresses the complex relationship between human rights, cosmopolitanism, and sovereignty through three portals: seminal historical events and concomitant memories, related articulations in intellectual controversies, and their respective implementation in the context of legal debates. With memories of the atrocities of World War II and Nazi extermination camps omnipresent, the postwar period constitutes a crucial historical juncture for a renewed articulation of human rights principles and, at least in theory, a more conditional approach to sovereignty derived from a partial discrediting of nationalism in the European context. While emerging geopolitical realities and the nascent cold war would eventually forestall the implementation of human rights, the programmatic statements that emanated from war crime trials and universal declarations in the aftermath of the war nevertheless became the institutional and mnemonic reference points for the subsequent formation of the human rights regime. The postwar period was marked by strong universalism and as espoused by the victors in the war, a liberal rather than a socialist form of universalism, as is evidenced in numerous debates and official declarations on human rights. By privileging a language of human rights, the framers of the post–World War II order 70 human rights and memory essentially agreed to marginalize minority rights conceptions that had dominated the interwar period. The postwar statements of the German philosopher Karl Jaspers are emblematic of the Eurocentric universalism that also characterizes much of the core European postnational discourse of recent years.1 Relying on a single voice is always problematic, but Jaspers’s position would come to stand for a Germany aligned with the victorious western Allies and embody the new Europeanized German. The American occupying forces considered him the moral voice of the “other Germany.” Married to a Jewish woman he refused to divorce, Jaspers lost his academic position in 1937. As the Americans attempted to reform the political culture of Germany, they needed thinkers and academics like Jaspers to assist them in rebuilding the university system. In the aftermath of World War II, Europeanization primarily implied the rebuilding of western Europe with a pacified Germany in its midst, and the image of the United States as a counterweight to Soviet influence in the East. Germany had to be westernized through its integration into a newly formed interdependent system of western European states. Intellectual debates in Germany dealing with guilt and responsibility spearheaded by Jaspers, and issues framed around the realization of Nazi atrocities before and during the war, would four decades later become paradigmatic European debates about the guilt of nations in general (Barkan 2000). Between 1945 and 1948 Jaspers became a symbol for the American occupying forces. He was German, he did not emigrate, but he was not a Nazi. He could become the symbol of another Germany. The Allies trusted him (Kirkbright 2004). His book on German guilt became a founding document of the new West Germany (see Diner 1997). He saw the postwar era and the Nuremberg trials as a world that needed to be based upon a universal Kantian cosmopolitanism, a world without Others and without borders. Early in 1946 he published a study that would subsequently become a seminal document for the nascent Federal Republic and attempts to come to terms with its past. Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt) sought to refute the notion that Germans were collectively guilty for the crimes committed by the Nazis. Distinguishing between criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical from minority to human 71 guilt, Jaspers established his view that to condemn a people as a whole violates the claim of being human. It should be noted that Jaspers was not the only voice to address the question of guilt in Germany, but since it seemed to absolve so many Germans from their collusion with the Nazi regime, the distinctions Jaspers put forward became the dominant trope then and is the one remembered today (Olick 2005). At the same time, his book was an appeal to Germans to accept the legitimacy of the Nuremberg trials and to see them as contributing to the construction of a new and cosmopolitan Europe. Cosmopolitan Europe was consciously created and launched by Jaspers’s intervention as the political antithesis to a nationalistic Europe and the physical and moral devastation it had wrought. Jaspers saw cosmopolitan Europe as a reaction to the traumatic experience of...