Summer 2010  

“Violence and the Law in German Cultures of Modernity”

Germany's violent modern history has elicited much scholarship focussing directly on violence, but considerably less on how legal culture reacted to, curbed, enacted, legitimated, or (after regime change) judged it. This seminar explores the relationship between German legal culture,violence, dictatorship, and democracy along two axes: the „external legalculture" of the society, and the „internal legal culture" of the professionals who perform technical legal tasks.

Concerning external legal culture, the seminar examines basic assumptions about justice, order, legitimacy, security, individual freedom, the neutrality of the law, and other foundational ideas held in the general culture or by important sub-groups within it. Was there a specifically German conception of the rule of law? How did it relate to state authority? In what ways was 1933 a continuity or break in a longer legal tradition? These and other questions might be examined in sessions focussing on specific cultural artifacts such as: famous trials; legal causes célèbres; the representation of law in literature, stage, and film; media coverage; and political mobilization around legal controversies. Internal legal culture raises questions about the corporative nature of the legal establishment, and of course about its resistance to or encouragement of legally questionable state actions. Focal themes might include topics such as: Wilhelminian „class justice;” the campaign to defend Imperial Germany’s alleged war crimes in World War I; the „blind eye” of Weimar judges; Carl Schmitt and the exception; the deformation of law in the Third Reich and the DDR; the break or continuity after 1945; the „emergency laws” of 1968, etc. These explorations will permit an extended reconsideration of law’s relation to violence, state coercion, and democracy in Germany. Though the seminar focuses on modern Germany since 1871, participants with research projects concerning violence and law in earlier German cultures will also be welcome, as their insights and perspectives will provide useful points of comparison for group discussion.

The seminar will take place June 14 – July 30, 2010, at Cornell University.

Seminar Director: Isabel V. Hull, John Stambaugh Professor of History, Cornell University, and Elected Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

For application instructions, go to http://www.daad.org/?p=48512